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.

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.