Inevitably, when we graduate college and move on to the real world, there are things we leave behind: sleeping until noon on weekdays, dining points and final exams to name a few. Some of these things we miss dearly, and some we’re glad to be done with.
Having graduated from Boston University in May and moved on to the high-paced life of New York City, there are certain things I miss, moments I wish I could relive and friends I wish I could see again. Foremost on that list are my Boston University Terriers. No, not the hockey team. Definitely not the cheerleaders. Not even the women’s lacrosse team. I miss the men’s basketball team.
Some of my fondest college memories are standing in the front row at Agganis Arena with my face painted, snacking on chicken finger boats and cheering on our basketball players. Yelling obscenities at the refs, telling UMass’s Luke Bonner how much better his sister is than him and admiring the dance team’s exquisite routines were some of my favorite pastimes.
The move to New York has relegated me to listening to games over an Internet radio feed. The Terriers’ performance so far this season has made that almost unbearable.
For some reason, the passion seems to have slowly been sucked out of BU basketball. It’s been happening over the past three seasons. Players have transferred at an appalling rate, and the players who have stayed have played well below their potential. It seems this season that we find ourselves down 15 points in the first few minutes of nearly every game, and 10-minute scoring droughts are commonplace. How can the BU basketball program get back on track?
A great college basketball program is not built by a coach or by players: it’s built by the fans. Get 20,000 screaming, rabid fans into an arena every night and the best players will want to play there and the best coaches will want to coach there. You don’t build a program with one great coach or one great player. You build it with generation after generation of passionate, enthusiastic students.
I desperately wish I could go back and be a part of the BU basketball experience all over again. I wish I could motivate more of my fellow students to attend games, to be a bigger part of making BU a competitive top-tier basketball program. If you’re lucky, you get maybe 60 home games during your college career. I can’t imagine missing one.
My message to those of you who are still at BU, those who grew up basketball fans is: appreciate the game and love to watch it. There is no better college in America to be a basketball fan than BU, and there is no better time to get on the bandwagon than right now.
During my senior year, coach Dennis Wolff told me how much better off I would have been at a major basketball program with thousands of serious fans just like me. With all due respect to Coach Wolff, he was wrong. If I had gone to Duke, Florida or even Boston College, I would have been one of thousands of insignificant fans going crazy for a program that didn’t need me there and didn’t even notice my presence.
At BU I was special, one of only a few serious fans. The coach knew my name, the players recognized me and I was a sports columnist for The Daily Free Press. These are things you can’t get at a major program. These are things that make you feel like more than a fan and a real part of the program. I was privileged to be a BU fan.
The same concepts hold true for our players. At major conference programs they would be nobodies, one of the many great players to come through a school and ultimately just another blip on the radar. The players who have transferred away from BU will spend just a few years at their new schools, and the fans will forget about them the second they leave.
At BU, our players have a chance to be special. You better believe they are privileged to have that opportunity. The prevailing mentality among the players seems to be that BU is fortunate to have them, and if they aren’t catered to, they’ll leave. We all know many of them have left. There are at least two or three guys on the team right now who have a chance to someday see their numbers retired at BU. That’s an amazing opportunity. That’s a chance to leave a legacy.
Over one year ago, I wrote a column touting then-freshman Corey Lowe as the greatest gift the BU basketball program had ever received – and this was before Corey had stepped on the court. What I neglected to mention was how lucky Lowe was to have been admitted to BU, how lucky he was to receive a full scholarship and how lucky he was to learn from a knowledgeable coach like Wolff.
Every minute a player is on the court is a unique opportunity, one thousands of fans can only dream about. How could they not play their heart out every minute?
Josh Lerner, a 2007 graduate from Boston University, was a former columnist for The Daily Free Press. He can be reached at [email protected].