December 22, 2010

NCDS: Bill Barton, Asst. Coach - Marshall

 

Hello Herd fans. I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to check in.  Of course, I have a litany of excuses but I don’t think College Chalktalk’s Chris DiSano, believes any of them.  I feel like a college kid who was late with a term paper and Professor D is going to give me an F.  I’ll take my punishment, but it is time to talk about Marshall Basketball!  Where to begin… 

How about our last road trip – a story every college team knows so well.  Travel is almost never easy, and only the promise of pulling down a “W” makes it worthwhile. Obviously there is the travel tedium, but beyond that everything is different.  Different bed, different gym, different schedule – you get the idea. 

Travel is, in fact, the biggest obstacle to success on the road, and our trip to Savannah, GA to play Savannah State started off worse than most. Our flight out of West Virginia was delayed.  This was a problem because we were on a 6 p.m. connecting flight out of Charlotte, NC.  We finally arrived for that flight at 5:50 p.m.  Then Coach Herrion told our SID, “Bullet” Bob Pristash, and me to run to the connection gate in another terminal, and ask them to hold the plane for us.  It had to be three-quarters of a mile.  On our sprint to the gate, we congratulated each other on being chosen for this important task because of our superior athletic prowess.   We made it, and the agent gave us an extra ten minutes to get the team there.  Who says there’s no holiday spirit!  

So, we made our flight, got to Georgia and beat a very resilient Savannah State team.  We got a great game from our senior Tirrell Baines, hit our free throws down the stretch, and found a way to win on the road – always a difficult task. 

We were a still-tired, but happy group as we boarded the bus for our trip back to the Savannah Airport at 7:30 a.m. the next morning to return the same way we came – through Charlotte, NC.  Our flight was delayed about two hours.  Then, when we finally got to Charlotte, you guessed it – delayed another 2 hours at least. 

We needed a diversion from all of this waiting, so we decided to eat lunch.  Luckily, the airport gods took pity on us and threw us a bone.  We got to have some fun with our team manager A.J. Hubbard.  It turned out our waitress went to his high school back in West Virginia and they graduated a year apart, yet quite surprisingly, she had never heard of our A.J.  We couldn’t believe it!  We tried to jog her memory – reminded her of some of the exploits relayed to us by young A.J.  We asked her to take a good long look at his ever-reddening face.  How is it possible, we asked, that she had never heard of this fantastic looking guy who, by all accounts (well, his…) was so smooth with the ladies?   Surely she must have suffered from some soap-operaesque amnesia episode?  After all, how many kids are there at WV’s Princeton High? 200?  Yes, amnesia… it’s the only possible explanation.

So, with that fun-filled lunch done, the time came to board our flight.  It was then we learned that the flight would only be able to take 5 of the 25 of us because of weather-related reasons.   So after all that, we ended up boarding a bus in Charlotte, and finally arrived back in Huntington at about 11:30 p.m.  Yes, it had been a long day, and it was about to get longer for me.  My car could not make it up a steep, icy hill about a mile from my house, so I had to park my car and walk home.  Mike Brown, our Director of Operations (and neighbor) was with me.  He recently had surgery to re-attach his Achilles tendon, so the unexpected midnight stroll was a real treat for him.  By the way, rumor has it that he got injured defending me in a pick-up game.  I’m not saying it’s true – it’s just a rumor (I started).  The trip home from Savannah finally ended at 12:15am – almost 15 hours later.  I went upstairs to collapse into bed, only to find my two daughters sprawled across the bed with my wife.  So, was the “W” worth it?  Absolutely! 

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