A Break from the Piles at the End of a Semester

There seem to be multiple piles in my life at the moment...the thankfully still small piles of snow I can hear my neighbor making with his snow shovel, the pile of books I intend to read, the pile of laundry I need to get put away, the pile of papers that still need to be graded. I'm sure with enough time I could find a few more piles.

However, a few faculty and staff friends and I decided to see if we could still play basketball, so we entered a team in the intramural basketball Holiday Tournament. A couple of us are former varsity athletes, but now we're all over 30, and we have children to put to bed before our wives let us out of our houses to go play ball. One of our players, Mark Holcomb, is a grandpa. As we've advanced in the tournament, we've started to play some teams with current varsity athletes, and it's been interesting to see their reactions to seeing those they might see in the pulpit at College Church or on a visit to Student Development or in front of their English class guarding them.

After our game on Thursday night, one of the students who was just there watching the game said, "Hey, aren't you an English teacher?" as I was leaving. Other times there have been some cat-calls and hoots from other students I have had in class when I manage to throw up an airball or actually pull down a rebound. While I've enjoyed hanging out and playing with my fellow faculty and staff members (Matt, Corey, Paul, Craig, Dwayne, Mark, and Justin), I have also enjoyed seeing my students outside of the classroom.

Isn't part of being a member of a community being able to put aside the piles for a few moments (even if it's just for 2 20 minutes halves with a running clock when I'm normally headed for bed) to see each other in a new and different way?

By the way, we play Tuesday night for a chance to play in the championship game. The championship will be played in McHie Arena (home of Olivet's varsity teams). The students are excited to play in the arena, but all I can think about is dreading the extra probably 20 feet we'll have to run each time down the court.