Scholarship athletes

Tonight is the resumption of March Madness. I would have to say that Davidson remains as my favorite of the remaining teams. I always like to pull for the little colleges, particularly Southern colleges, particularly liberal arts schools like Davidson. Of course, those types of schools, if they want to continue to compete at a higher level, usually find a way to get the athletes to come to their schools.

I am pulling for Davidson, despite the fact that they whooped us twice in football when I was playing and really pulled one on us when they agreed to go non-scholarship like us, but then slowly evolved into non-scholarship football, while still getting the athletes they wanted. James Madison University did the same thing to us. They were not offering athletic scholarships. They were offering scholarships based on need. When you need a good football or basketball player, you give him a "need" scholarship. At least, that was the way it was at those schools back then.

In that regard, I heard an interesting story about a football player who was being recruited by W&L a couple of years ago. Apparently, this high school student was a very good football player, was very high on W&L and the coaches were very high on him too. Unfortunately, his grades were marginal and there was an issue as to whether he was going to make it in.

The football coach was pressuring the admissions office to admit the kid. The football staff was trying to get the kid to come. The Admissions Office was wringing their hands because the kid just didn't seem to measure up with the rest of the admitted class.

Finally, the Admissions staff worked it out to admit the student and the football staff was excited. Mission accomplished, the folks in Lexington sat back and waited to see if the kid was going to come to W&L to play football. And study, of course.

A week or so later, the Director of Admissions was sitting in his office when he recognized the voice of the student outside his office talking to his secretary. Apparently, the kid was so excited to have been accepted at W&L. And he couldn't wait to turn in his deposit and matriculate the following Fall. The Director smiled at what appeared to be a job well done.

But his smiled disappeared when he heard the student say that he was so excited to become a student at W&L and that he really didn't think he would play football. He couldn't really see taking up the time from his schedule and his studies to play football.

The best laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley.

Now I know that, as students, those superior basketball players at schools like Davidson are a cut above those superior basketball players at schools like Kansas and UCLA and Duke and UNC and Kentucky. Sure.

I also remember a story I heard from a friend of mine who went to Kentucky. I called him when we were playing Centre College in Danville Kentucky and staying overnight in a motel in Lexington. I was a Senior. He was a Freshman. I asked him how things were going in college. He told me that they had had their first midterms that day. He thought he did alright, but not nearly as well as the athletes, who had shown up for class for the first time that morning with the answers to the midterm in hand.

Interestingly, we had worked out on the practice field at UK that afternoon. When we were leaving, the football team for Kentucky came on the field in our place. Their uniforms and our uniforms were quite similar. Same royal blue and white. Same white pants with blue stripes. It really looked like two groups from the same team. The biggest difference was the size of the occupants of the uniforms.

You see, its not a matter of the haves and the have not's. Its a matter of degree. They are all given things. The difference between the athletes at schools like W&L and the athletes at Kentucky was the nature of the gift. And I suppose that is true all over the country.