Why I hate that I love college sports

A few weekends ago I spent 2 nights and one really long day in a parking lot. You see, the men's basketball team at the school I attend is really good. So good, in fact, that it is nearly impossible to get tickets for home games in the unusually tiny stadium without paying exorbitant amounts of money. Unless, of course, you are a graduate student at this university, which, for one year, I am.

This university affords its graduate students the opportunity to campout for a weekend in order to enter a lottery to win the opportunity to buy a season ticket for men's basketball. That's right, your prize at the end of this wicked weekend is a lottery, and the possible outcome of this lottery is that I could purchase season tickets. I think the people who came up with this were students of the Tom Sawyer school of marketing (second prize: painting a fence).

In order to complete the 36-hour campout with its alluring ending, you must check in every time they blow the whistle. They did this about 20 times throughout the weekend, with anywhere from 3 hours to 10 minutes in between whistles. It was an interesting psychological experiment - whenever a whistle blew, 2000 people came running to stand in line. (I still twitch whenever I hear a whistle - looking for a line to stand in, I suppose.)

The best part, though, was Sunday morning. Not just because the campout was over, but because of the way that it ended. At 5:30a, while it was still dark, we were awakened by stadium lights and someone playing "Amazing Grace" on the bagpipes. I truly thought that Jesus had come to call us all home. As I stumbled out of my tent, crying, "I'm a-coming, Lord!" I realized that I had made it. I almost cried.

Our group of 8 people who entered the lottery together got 4 tickets. That's a pretty good ratio, considering there was one group of 16 that only got 2 tickets among them.

Thursday, November 2, is our first game, and I was assured throughout the weekend by veteran campers that at that first basketball game, all the campout-anguish would be worth it. Well, I'll be the judge of that. And, because I do love college sports, it probably will be worth it...just maybe not enough to ever do it again!

Why I love college sports...

This weekend marks the beginning of college football season, and while I actually live in the heart of college basketball country, there's just something about this opening weekend that is so exhilarating.

First of all, there's "College Gameday" - an ESPN original broadcast from a different college campus each week. The announcers face the cameras with hundreds of college students behind them, holding up signs that taunt their opponents. This is what I love: the signs. Sometimes they simply say, "Hi Mom," or "We're gonna win," but every now and then there is a real thinking-person's jewel to be found.

For example, today, College Gameday was broadcast from the campus of Georgia Tech, who will be playing Notre Dame tonight. One of the signs displayed by a rabid Yellowjackets fan read: "Calvin: defeating Catholics since 1509." Now, in order to understand this sign, you should know that GT has a great player named Calvin Johnson, and that Notre Dame is a Catholic school, and that John Calvin (born in 1509) was one of the major leaders of the Protestant Reformation, which broke from the traditional (and state-mandated) church for the first time, ever. It's funny, really. And I love that you have to know church history to get it (very rarely do I get to utilize my seminary training in the sports world, so I jumped at this chance).

Anyway, it's fun, to me, to see people who are devoted to a sport for the love of the game - for the competition and camaraderie.