Once I got in my office the first priority was coffee....and then working on the schedule. LOL, this statement may be a little self serving,.....but the truth is many coaches are not that smart, or maybe they just are not willing to put in all the work to clean up the little details. I was working on little details......while listening to news out of New York City.
The little detail I wanted to clean up was researching the teams we were to play. My secret was this: when you start the spring trip every player is fresh, but by the last day every team is running on fumes when it comes to pitching...... so, I tried to only schedule teams that would be on their last day in Florida (thus out of pitching) the day we played them....... My strategy was sort of like playing the card game Spades.....you want to play your best top to bottom hoping to face your opponents at their weakest.
The internet was a lot less help in 2001.... basically burning up the phone lines when the radio suddenly announced a 2nd plane had hit the other tower. It just so happens my lovely wife was on the other end of the phone when the 2nd plane hit, and she instantly said, "....OMG it's terrorist!!!"
It was almost as if my wife's words signaled the world to stop turning and life as we knew it was over. World War II (1939-1945) changed everything, and then the Cold War ensured the world lived in fear. I remember being a kid and hearing the television sound off a test of the emergency broadcasting service....each time we would freeze in place expecting to hear the U.S.S.R. had nuclear weapons headed our way. American school children would practice duck and cover drills..... Hell the whole world was scared the end of world was near.....
Then came 1991, as fate would have it I was taking a college class studying the political system of the U.S.S.R, taught by a PhD from abroad. That poor man, he was not built to handle the political change we saw in such a short period of time. I will give him credit, he wanted to make sure we received a quality education.......
I will never forget when cracks first hit the U.S.S.R., our PhD walked into class, then instructed the students to rip out all the notes we had written on the Soviet's government. LOL, it's actually pretty funny looking back, the changes came hard, fast and often. It seems every other day Dr. Choudre was living in the movie Groundhog's Day, class starts, he walks in, tells us to rip out our notes....and we start again.
By Christmas the Cold War was over...... fear had left our lives and it seems good times were here. After more than half of a century living under the constant fear of attack seemingly we had no enemies.......
That all changed 25 years ago today, when men that so hated the United States they were willing to lay down their lives just to kill a few of us........
Here is what I don't understand...... have we forgotten there are people and nations that want to kill us? It seems to me far to many Americans are more concerned with fighting their neighbors than our common enemies. How did we get here?
How did we become a nation in which half the country cannot define what it means to be a woman.......
How did we become a nation that is okay with killing a child in it's own mother's womb......
How did we become a nation that seemingly no longer can recognize what it means to sin against God.......
How did we become a nation that has voted into office the very people we spent the last half of the 1900's fighting against.........
1945 through the year 2000 Democrats and Republicans held thousands of healthy debates.... (Hell, 1860 through 2000) with family and friends being able to hold different beliefs and still remain family and friends....
But something began to change 25 years ago..... The war for America may have started with planes and terrorist, and then somehow it became a war of common sense............or maybe the lack of it!
