Saturday evening, our team came together and spent three hours talking, telling jokes, singing (well, kind of...), and opening up to each other as part of our pre season engagements before the season starts with our away game against Wheaton College on September 1.

The evening started with a couple of fierce Bowling games with teams of three players against another team of three.  Ben Esbaum, Jon Funston (Funstuff) , and I battled Cheech (Pat West), El Rubio (Allan Swan) and Canada (Tommy Pecar) in lane 26. I don't want to go into too many details but basically Ben carried our team on his shoulders and we won both games.

After returning to campus and eating our pizza dinner, the singing competition took place...and let me tell you, it was hilarious!  Some lads even hooked up an iPod speaker system so that they could follow the music of the chosen song. We had rappers (my personal best was Mike Scheitlin's), rockers (Andrew Pearcy's rendition of John Mellencamp's "Small Town" had everything - look, music, speakers, and attitude - but Andrew remembering the words of his favorite song!).  Junior Captain Mark Babcock's second song, a piece from the Backstreet Boys - the one he needed to break the tie for second - was a mix of pop and Chip&Dale act, with Mark taking his shirt off and splashing some water on his skin, a-la-Flashdance-mode! Needless to say, he got the second spot!  The winners of the singing competition were Dylan Andrew and Josh 'El Lobo Loco" Pedersen with a duet from the movie Aladdin. You could tell they had rehearsed it because their timing, singing, and choreography were definitely the best of the night. That was awesome lads!

Then, we had our jokes competition, where each player told two jokes while their teammates judged them with bad, decent, good, very funny, or awesome.  Amongst some bad and decent jokes, the three finalists were JP, Pat West, and Mike Scheitlin. The final vote went to Pat who cracked the house with his last joke and won the whole thing.

The last one and a half hour was very intense, at times absolutely heartbreaking, but also inspiring and rewarding. The session is called: "My saddest moment and my happiest moment," and is something in which no one is forced to participate but only encouraged, if he feels like it. I have done this type of session, on and off, with several of the teams I have coached in the last three decades, but the intensity, participation, and willingness to dig deep inside and find those sad and happy moments, the other night, literally blew me away.  

Each one of us, in some way or fashion, keeps up some sort of "guard," a safety screen that protects us from strangers, unwelcome circumstances, sad feelings, and sometimes ourselves. I don't believe in the "shield," as I commonly refer to it, because it is fake, artificial, and simply unhealthy. I believe that people, especially when coming together in a group, or a team, and have a communion of intents, must take off of their clothes - metaphorically speaking - and be naked.  Only then, one can  cover his/her body with truthful layers, garments that don't need to cover up anything or disguise anybody.

Saturday night, some 18, 19, 20, 21, and 22  year olds came in naked and showed their true self and the experience was, for a middle age man like myself, absolutely breathtaking. The level of personal grief and joy that was displayed during the evening was so sincere and genuine that made the majority of us share the feelings with teary eyes, both sad and happy tears.

We all want to go over a .500 record; we all want to compete for the NCAC title; we all want to go to the NCAA tournament; we all want to become NCAA National Champions; we all want to make Wabash history, and that's good. We work hard and we deserve recognition and rewards.  Nobody wants to compete and lose; it goes against the nature of any competition. We want to win and we work everyday towards that goal.  However, if only one good thing comes out of this year, or any year,  I surely hope that  all our young lads won't ever forget Saturday night. The night we showed ourselves who we really are. If that happens, we will have had a successful season, no matter what.

Thanks for the sharing and the feelings you gave me.

Coach G.