Outside Oberlin

Accident Prone: The Life of a Walking Injury

My life has been one of stupid injury after stupid injury. Thank God to this point none of them have been too serious. Most of them involve me playing some sort of sport, either in a competitive league or for fun. The list is too extensive to print so I will humor you with the more entertaining ones. Please remember, these are just the stupid things I have done while playing some sort of sport, so the many non-sports related injuries must be omitted. And believe me, that is one impressive list also.
I will start my pitiful saga with my first real injury, one that sent me to the hospital for the first time, but believe me it wasn’t the last. The nurses at Coshocton County Memorial Hospital have gotten to know me well over the years. So the story begins when I was about five years old. I was down the street at my friend Wyatt Miller’s house, a place I spent many a day at growing up. You will hear Wyatt’s name repeatedly throughout the first part of my story. As he was the source of the majority of my injuries growing up.

Anyway, getting back to the story. After a long day of playing in the yard and, well, doing a whole lot of nothing, Wyatt and I decided to play tag. As I was chasing him up his brick front steps, my legs got ahead of me and I missed a step. This resulted in a face full of brick and a whole lot of blood. All I really remember of my first trip to the emergency room is a whole lot of people trying to keep me quiet and a needle being inserted directly into my chin. The end result of my first major mishap was five stitches in my chin and me not being able to swim for the rest of the summer.
My second major injury also happened at Wyatt’s house when I was about eight years old. Since it was a nice day we decided to play baseball in his side yard. Me, being the spectacular pitcher that I am, I managed to groove one down the middle, which he proceeded to hit right back at me. The ball connected with my left eye and jolted me pretty good. The first thought that ran through my head was, “Oh man, I’m gonna be blind and have to wear a pirate patch… cool.” I opened my eye and realized I could still see and made sure I told him I could see. Wyatt just stood there, surprised that he hit the ball. His mom finally came out when she heard me screaming at him to go get someone because I was a bloody mess. When I went to the hospital this time, I was a little calmer than the time before. This wasn’t my second trip to the hospital though, only my second trip for a sports-related injury. Yet again the end result was five stitches, this time just above my left eye.
My last injury at Wyatt’s house was later that summer while we were playing basketball. As I drove past him to score, well, attempt to score for those of you who have seen me play, he bit me on the inside of my left arm. This wasn’t just a little bite that left indented tooth marks — it was a full-fledged, mouth-full-of skin bite that broke the skin and left me with a bloody purple bite mark on the inside of my arm for about two weeks. While this one didn’t need hospitalization, it was still pretty gross.

In fourth grade everything started going downhill. My first of many trips to the emergency room over the next six years occurred with just five days of school left. While playing football at recess, I was running across the middle of the playground along the goal line. Oh, it’s important to mention that the goal lines for the football games were the end of the parking lot at one end and an imaginary line that stretched both ways from a basketball hoop at the other end. If you can’t see where this story is going already, I was running along the imaginary line towards the basketball pole. The ball was thrown to me as I was going full speed directly at the pole. With eyes focused on the ball, I didn’t realized how close I was to the pole. Just after I caught the ball, I turned my head forward, just in time to hit the metal basketball pole head on. I did catch the ball and managed to knock the shot on the basketball hoop off the rim, but alas, it resulted in another trip to the emergency room. The funny thing was, though, that I hit the pole, fell down, got up and walked back to the rest of the guys before someone told me I had blood gushing out of my forehead. This resulted in five butterfly bandages that the doctors super-glued my forehead and yet another summer where I was sidelined from the swimming pool.
In fifth grade, again while at recess, with only two days of school left, again playing football, I got hurt, but this time it wasn’t my fault and there was nothing I could do. As I was chasing another student who had the ball, something that felt a lot like a rock hit me in my right eye, knocking me off my feet. As it turns out it was tennis ball thrown by a sixth grader who was mad at me for getting a ride home from school with the girl he liked. I mean the fact that her mom and my mom were friends and that her mom was watching me that day meant nothing to him obviously. So I get pelted in the eye with this tennis ball, big deal. At it turns out, it scratched something in my eye and bruised the back part of my eye, something that I have to live with for the rest of my life, the bruise that is. Occasionally my eye swells up and the pressure is unbearable. His parent’s and my insurance company weren’t too happy about the eye doctor bills from this one.

In sixth grade, a crazy gym teacher was the cause of my next visit to the emergency room. The injury happened while playing softball in gym class on a day we were supposed to play dodge ball. I didn’t have my glove at school with me and the gym teacher refused to provide us with gloves so we were left to play softball with a real softball and no gloves. Real smart idea, eh? Anyways, I was playing first base, seeing as how I was the only person on my team that could catch a ball. The injury occurred when I reached out to catch a ball. The ball hit the tip of my pointer finger on my right hand, breaking the bone down the middle. The break ran thorough one knuckle, stopping just before the middle one. That summer I realized just how hard it is to play baseball with a splint on your finger.
In seventh grade, I decided that all four-foot 10 inches and 70 pounds of me wanted to play football. Yet another smart idea on my part. For seventh grade competition I could hold my own, and was touted as the best open field tackler on the team by the coach. I found out the hard way in practice one day that if a play is going on around you and you are on the ground, you need to watch your hands. While lying on the ground, a teammate of mine stepped on my little finger of my right hand, breaking it diagonally in two different spots. I didn’t think anything of it until after practice when it was swollen and I couldn’t move it.
I shook it off and practiced for about a week more when, while playing out of position and rushing around the end in practice one day, I had a clean shot at the quarterback. As I sacked him from behind, his facemask was driven right into my finger, pinning it between the ground and the facemask. This time the two breaks were connected by a third break and my finger was royally screwed. After practice I made another trip to the emergency room, this time at the request of the athletic trainer. They x-rayed my finger and showed me the breaks. The emergency room told me all they could do was splint it and after the season I would have to rehab it if I wanted to move it again.

Unless I am forgetting a minor injury I think my eighth grade year went by relatively harmlessly. Ninth grade more than made up for it though.
Ninth grade basketball, where do I begin? First off, what was I thinking ever playing basketball at five foot one inch in ninth grade? Granted I had started in seventh grade and was sixth man in eighth grade, but freshman basketball was a little different. My team went 19-1 and won the championship that year. I saw my fair share of playing time, but only because we were up by 30 points a lot of the time. Back to the injuries though. In ninth grade basketball I broke my nose twice, both times on elbows from teammates in practice and stabbed one of my lower teeth through my lower lip in practice because of yet another elbow to the face. The broken noses weren’t anything too serious, as the trainer set one and my coach set the other. Yeah it hurt and was bloody, but it was better than going to the emergency room yet again. The tooth through the lip though, that garnered a trip. They said stitches weren’t necessary, unless I wanted yet another scar on my face.
I think it’s safe to say that if CCMH was the bar Cheers, then I would be Norm, because everyone knew my name. That or maybe Tim the Tool Man Taylor, though I don’t know if that’s a fair comparison.

Duke Coach Receives Lifetime Contract Extension

When you hear the name “Duke University,” perhaps the first thing that you think of is the school’s prominent academic reputation as an undergraduate and graduate school. However, if not the first thing, at least the second thing that should pop into your head about Duke University is their tradition as one of the top basketball programs in the country. It wasn’t always this way, though. Duke has only reached its prominence because of the leadership of one man — Mike Krzyzewski (if there was a proper name version of Scrabble, that would be one hell of a triple word score).
I can remember watching Duke beat UNLV in the national championship game when I was only 10 years old, and although I knew nothing about Duke before that year’s March Madness, their team’s character and dominance on the court intrigued me — from that point on I became a die-hard Duke fan. Although that would technically make me a “front-runner,” since I was only 10 I would say that makes it less so — I have remained a huge Duke fan to this day.
Since becoming head coach of Duke after the conclusion of the 1981 season (I was approximately two months old then), Krzyzewski has led the Blue Devils to three national titles, six Atlantic Conference championships and well over 500 victories. For many people, though, it isn’t solely his success as a coach that earns him their respect. Rather, it is the professional way in which he has run the Duke program since inheriting it — intelligent and well-composed players have always been a trademark of Blue Devil teams.

The way Krzyzewski has led the Blue Devils in his career has been synonymous with that of a fine-tuned and successful corporation — Duke has been a contender for the national championship for over a decade and, despite losing two top seniors (Shane Battier and Nate James) from last year’s national championship team, is picked to once again win the illustrious title this year.
At the age of 54, Krzyzewski certainly isn’t too young, but he isn’t too old to add hundreds of wins to his already mammoth total of 533 at Duke. While many of the NCAA’s best coaches have jumped ship to the NBA in recent years, Kryzyewski and the university have made it clear that he has no intentions of venturing into a land where many college coaches wish they hadn’t gone.

Said Krzyzewski, “I wish they’d start asking a pro coach, ‘Are you going college?’ To me, I got the better job, at least for me.”
To ensure that he doesn’t change his mind, Duke University offered ‘Coach K’ a contract extension that goes through 2011 — an extension that also holds an option to stay longer if he wishes to at the age of 65.
While this extension offered by Duke is the first of its kind, it’s rumored that Michigan State might offer proven coach Tom Izzo the same contract soon.
So what is so significant about Krzyzewski’s extension? Well, first of all, it shows a committment by a prominent program to keep the right guy for the job, and to also keep him from leaving for the NBA — a place that Coach K would rather avoid anyway considering the recent adventures of former University of Kentucky rival Rick Pitino. However, the most important thing to consider in this extension is that this means that Duke is going to be a good team for a long time. Sure, every team has their rebuilding and down years, but the combination of Duke’s name and Krzyzewski’s name make an unbeatable option for the top high school prospects in the country.

Just as Bobby Knight’s name alone drew the best players (well, most of them) in the state of Indiana to Indiana University, the already famous name of Mike Krzyzewski will undoubtedly ensure that Duke remains a contender, probably until he’s done coaching — that is, until he chooses to be done coaching.
I’m betting that schools such as the University of Kentucky wish they would have offered the same type of contract to Pitino (I’m pretty sure they didn’t). Offering a life-time contract and special assistant position to the President might have kept him in the college coaching scene. Although he’s back now with Louisville, it may be awhile before he’s able to successfully build that program into a contender.
On the contrary, Duke’s legacy is here to stay for quite a while — don’t be suprised to see Coach K pick up close to a thousand victories before he decides to put his illustrious career to a halt.