Thanksgiving Break

As I sit here and type in this blog that I have been ignoring for the past three weeks I started to re-call all the past Thanksgiving Breaks. Actually I started thinking about that on Monday. It wasn't because I was going to have a five-day weekend off from work - yet I still find myself doing SID stuff - it was something much more than that.

When we were younger the day before Thanksgiving was always something special. It was different. We got out of school at 11:45 and in high school it was always the day of the pep rally to fire up our boys to kick Belmont's ass the next day. In college it was a tad bit different. Instead of going home on Wednesday, dorms closed Tuesday night at 7pm and didn't re-open until Sunday at 12pm. We had a five day week. Sort of like what I have now - except I don't have to worry about turning in 15 page papers or studying for finals when I get go back to work on Monday. My biggest worry right now is sending and receiving basketball rosters from New England College, Albertus Magnus and MIT as well as making sure everything runs smoothly, from an SID standpoint, at our basketball double-header on Tuesday.

My priorities and responsibilities may have changed but not my schedule. I'm very fortunate to be at a job I love where I get time off like this because I know half the world is going to have to wake up tomorrow morning and go to work. I'm lucky I don't have too. (Yet probably will anyway because I love what I do and I'm weird like that.)

All this got me thinking about why I am where I am today. And you know what? It all comes down to Thanksgiving Break.

It was the Tuesday of Thanksgiving Break my senior year at McDaniel. I was just about ready to head to BWI to board a plane home for the holiday week. I stopped off at the golf course and decided to shoot the shit with Coach. At some point the conversion diverged to what my plans were after graduation. At that point in time I really didn't know what I wanted to do with my life. I always envisioned myself as a sports reporter writing about the Red Sox but never really thought about post-college life. It was at that point in time Coach planted the seeds of becoming a Sports Information Director.

He knew my passion for sports was endless and I was always at any Green Terror sporting event - not just your basics: football, basketball, baseball or softball. Heck when we hosted the Centennial Conference Outdoor Track & Field Championship my junior year I was at that. To many that would be boring and like watching paint dry but I was intrigued by it. It energized me.

So Coach planted the seeds and from there the idea flourished.

Now I knew what I wanted to do but the toughest part was yet to come: pursuing it. How do I get my foot in the door? Normally SIDs worked in the sports information office when they were undergraduates but I jumped aboard late so all of my experience had to come post-graduation.

Once I graduated I was going to back at the summer camp I had worked at for the past six years for the summer months but before then a friend of the family put me in touch with an Asst. A.D. (Steph) at BC. So now I partially had my foot in the door. At the end of the summer, I was sitting in Fitzy's with Tim one Friday night when we ran into Mr. Sullivan (the, then, Recreation Director - our big boss for the past seven years at camp). He asked us what we were planning on doing during the school year. After Tim told him that he was going to be work at Kids In Common while still going to school, I told him what I wanted to do. That is when he gave me the name of Peter Centola (the, then, A.D. at Newbury).

In addition to the game day work I was going to be doing at BC, I dashed off a quick email to Pete. Of course he didn't respond to me right away so Maureen emailed him and that afternoon I got a phone call asking when I could come in and meet. My first trip to East Hall was August 28th. I worked for a bout a year and half unpaid before I got compensation. I knew my time was going to come so I bided my time.

When Pete left to become the Recreation Director in Watertown, I really didn't know what that would mean for me. At that point in time, he was my connection to Newbury. But then again like everything else, everything seemed to work out and fall into place.

Steph always kept in contact with me (and still does) and when I told her Jess was our new A.D. she sent back a quick reply with "oh Jess is a good friend of mine." Wow how weird is that. I started to think about it even more so I talked to Dawn, a fellow Oakley member and golfer, and she said she played basketball with Jess and knew her really well. Ok now this was starting to scare me. My world just got smaller.

Sometime after that Jess brought me back to Newbury and haven't left since. My mind is constantly thinking about Newbury and ways I can make things better. And to think it all started with Thanksgiving Break 2006.