Times They Are A Changing

Compared to the destruction that Hurricane Ike caused across the nation, the challenges that we faced as a school because of Ike were relatively small. Two soccer matches were canceled, our men’s golf team had a tournament postponed and we moved our football game time on Saturday. The reason for the change in game times was not because we thought that playing in the afternoon instead of the evening would cut down on our chances of playing in the rain. Instead we agreed with Linfield to move the game time because of concerns over lightning delays. If we had a lightning delay we would rather have the window of having all afternoon and evening to complete the game. Two years ago we attempted to play a night game at Louisiana College that had numerous delays because of lightning. After experiencing that situation, in which the game was not counted because we were not able to complete it, I would prefer not to revisit that scenario.

And before our game started on Saturday, I experienced something new at Shelton Stadium. For fifteen years the pregame agenda at Shelton has always included two hours of listening to the fight schools from various colleges around the nation. While it does get occasionally repetitive hearing the University of Iowa fight song, one can never tire of hearing the Notre Dame fight song. Yet on Saturday after one hour of fight songs, what did I hear over the PA, while the Cowboy football team was warming up? Rap music. I certainly will not pretend that I recognize what groups or individuals we were listening to, but it was unmistakably rap music. Much to my surprise this change in pregame tradition did not cause Abilene Hall to collapse or the swimming pool to turn blood red as if the plagues of Egypt had been visited upon our campus. I made a mental note to check with Coach Keeling about this recent change to our pregame agenda.

“The kids promised me that there would be no bad words on the warm up cd, so I agreed to let them make this change to our schedule” Keeling responded when I asked him about it on Monday. “They said that they wanted something different and I warned them that if there was any inappropriate language, we would go back to the fight song cd immediately”. I asked Coach if warm –up music was ever an issue when he first coached at Dublin, Texas, and he responded that the times have changed.

The times have indeed changed. Is it really that big a deal if the majority of our fans at our home games don’t know that Mos Def is a rapper and not a virus that could attack your house plants? While I cannot start to comprehend all of the musical trends that are currently available, there are numerous things about today’s youth that I don’t understand. And playing rap music before the home opener could very well be one of those things. We ask our kids to make a lot of sacrifices to compete at a Division III school, so perhaps listening to music that we don’t understand is a tradeoff we can make. Besides, I have a hunch, and it is only a hunch, that if we had not won the game on Saturday, that would have been the last time we would have made a change to our pre-game agenda.