Hitting The Road

Right about the same time Republican delegates will be leaving St. Paul and the Republican convention on Friday, the Hardin-Simmons University football team will be arriving in St. Paul. The Cowboys are flying into St. Paul for their game with Wisconsin La-Crosse on Saturday night. HSU has played several members of the Wisconsin Intercollegiate Athletic Conference over the years and perhaps we should be given a temporary membership into the WIAC. Like all of our athletic teams, our football program has to raise the money for any trip in which airline travel is required. We appreciate the support of many of our alumni, friends and football parents who help make the trip to Wisconsin possible. In 1999 after playing Wisconsin-Whitewater, the team flew out of Chicago’s O’Hare airport. As they waited in the terminal, Muhammad Ali made his way through the crowd and stopped to visit with members of our football team. The boxer who once proclaimed himself so mean “that he even makes medicine sick” signed every autograph and posed for numerous pictures with members of the team. It provided a great moment for our players and one that I am jealous that I missed. When we played Menlo in 2001 in California, the late Bill Walsh, who at the time lived near the campus, came and watched the game from the sidelines.

It is memories such as this that help make this trip such a unique event for our student-athletes. It’s funny, but when our football players from the era of the 1940’s to the 1960’s come back to campus, they hardly ever talk about the football games they played. Instead they spend most of the time talking about the way they went to the football games. At the time, the Cowboys, a member of the Border Conference, played schools in Arizona, New Mexico and California and travelled to all games by train. The stories they tell from the trips have aged well over the years. It is obvious that the camaraderie that was built from the travel have helped the friendships grow as the decades fly by. I hope that the students who have travelled in the Division III era of HSU athletics will also have some stories that can be told at future class reunions.

We did however lose one member of our travelling party recently when Glen Casselberry passed away after an extended battle with cancer. Glen travelled to numerous football games and was the official videographer of our football program. He also travelled to many Cowgirl basketball games just so he could help the officials see things from a different perspective. He was a devoted friend who loved his family, his faith and Hardin-Simmons. He left all of us with some examples of his loyalty to all three.

Cowboy Up.