4.27.07 On the road to Georgetown
This entry was posted on 4/26/2007 5:13 PM and is filed under uncategorized.
Here's a rough log of the Rhodes baseball team's journey to Georgetown, Texas. It ain't glamorous but it was fun.
Wednesday, April 25
6:30-6:55 PM: After a long last day of classes , the team boards the bus behind the Bryan Campus Life Center--three coaches, thirty players, and one faculty associate. Everyone heads to the seats to which they have staked claims during the course of the season. It's a fifty-four seat bus, which means that most players get a full bench but some--namely, the freshmen--have to share. Freshman pitcher Max Gertz has custody of a special guest: Wally the Rally Beetle, who was captured in the dugout of Millington's USA Stadium just before last Sunday's big win against Trinity and who, thanks to Max, will be making his first trip to Texas.
6:55-11:20 PM: We ride straight through--no stops--to Texarkana, Arkansas, where we're spending the night en route to Georgetown. During the ride DVDs brought by the players (and screened, kinda, by the coaches) run continuously on the monitors sprinkled throughout the bus: Necessary Roughness, Major League, and 8 Seconds are tonight's sports-oriented featured attractions. For some, the trip is a time simply to recover from the crush of end-of-semester work: they either watch the movies or sleep, often with their own pillows and blankets. Others study or write on their laptops, getting a head start on the final exams that await them when they return to Rhodes.
11:20 PM: We check in at the Day's Inn in Texarkana. Players sleep four to a room. Yes, that's two to a bed.
Thursday, April 26
8:00 AM: Leg two of the trip to Georgetown--it's ten hours in all, and we'll do it in one stretch when we drive home to Memphis this weekend. Sleep, more movies, more guys with books and laptops.
11:30 AM: We stop for lunch just the other side of Dallas. The goal is to find an exit off the interstate with a cluster of fast food places so that we don't create a long slow line at any one of them. At this exit we hit paydirt: a McDonald's, a Wendy's, a Long John Silver's, and a KFC. Coach Cleanthes give each group of three players $20 and asks them to be back on the bus in half an hour.
12:00-4:00 PM: We're back on the road, on track to reach the Southwestern campus in time for a scheduled 2:45 practice. The team has the field for an hour, which means that practice consists of BP--standard for the day before a weekend series. The field and the weather are gorgeous.
4:30 PM: We check in at the Wingate Inn in Round Rock, seven miles from Georgetown. The main qualities of a good place to stay--in addition to reasonable price and accommodations--are easy access to the field, a hot breakfast, and close proximity to fast food places where guys can snack and gas stations where they can load up on Gatorade, beef jerky, and sunflower seeds.
6:00 PM: Dinner at the Georgetown home of Jeff and Chris Miller, parents of sophomore designated hitter Brett Miller. Rhodes parents are amazingly generous with events like this, as well as with lunches supplied all year between games of doubleheaders.
Comments
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4/28/2007 12:37 PM
John Cleanthes wrote:
My son Jeff informed me of this web site and I am glad he did. I have enjoyed the blogs that you have written. Its nice to see some good words about the amazing season the baseball team is having. I am avid baseball fan and have had many years of coaching myself, at a lower level than my son. I don't think anybody at Rhodes except for the players and the coaches nows how hard it has been to archived a national ranking in baseball. Good baseball players are usually played by athletics who do not look the higher education that Rhodes has to offer. I am not saying that baseball players are not intelligent, but how many Lawyers or Doctors have you seen playing major league baseball. Most of the Rhodes baseball players have inspirations of becoming a professional in a field other than baseball. I believe that there are about 300 division 111 baseball teams, and of these maybe 10 fall into the same higher education that you find at Rhodes. And that is why it has been such a amazing year. Rhodes is competing against baseball programs that are spending much more money and devoting more emphasis on playing winning baseball. Our players and coaches are playing up to the challenge of being #1. I have been to a few games this year and I noticed that this is a team. They pull for each other on every pitch and every play. What they are doing will be with them the rest of there lives. I hope they get to the level they are seeking. My son Jeff tells me every day how hard the players practice and how much time he puts into making this a successful program. So if anyone from Rhodes reads this please enjoy what is happening.
from a proud father.
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