Great Potential



Here's the Link

This article is from today's Purdue Exponent (That's the school paper. I don't think it's award winning...but I could be wrong).   Reading it, there were a few things I remembered about how my dad got his job that didn't make the article. I'm going to share those things here.
Quick frame of reference: I was a junior at Ball State so obviously very busy doing super cool things and not living at home, but my parents were still in Muncie so I saw them regularly. Also, you should know that I have a very sporadic memory. There are years of my life that I don't have any memory of living. Back to my dad. I don't really remember learning that he was interested in the job or even hearing that he got an interview or the story about Roger being late. I do remember him preparing for an interview, but I'm thinking that could be the interview with the committee that he references. I really just remember three things.
1) Power Point Presentation - He put together a power point presentation and I remember proof-reading it. It was full of exceedingly optimistic charts and graphs demonstrating exactly how he was going to turn the program around, and, personally, I thought it was a little bit over the top, but Dad did not. Go big or go home, I guess, and turns out that it worked.
2) Networking - In the article he said he went overboard soliciting phone calls, which I think is probably the one factor (if I had to pick one) that got him the job: The glowing recommendations. He had every volleyball coach who might matter call, of course, and then just anybody else who might have any influence. I remember him standing in the narthex during (maybe after, but probably during) soliciting a call from a John Purdue Club heavy hitter, whom I should probably know because I should know the names of all of the elders I went to church with at that time, but I do not.
3) I Quit - This one could be an old wives tale because I was not there to witness it, but it's one of my favorite parts of the story. Dad was teaching middle school PE and health at this time, but once he got the call that he got the job, he quit. From what I'm told, Kyle, the middle-schooler, had to clean out his office, and as the article reports, he was on Purdue's campus the next day.
Now what the article doesn't say is that he lived in student housing for months before they could buy a house and was driving back and forth to Muncie a couple times a week. He immediately started building a program.

So I just found this, the highlight video from 2003, while looking for their record that first year. Their record wasn't impressive enough to share although I believe they finished around 8th in the Big Ten, which was a great improvement from 11th. The video's a little long, but watch a little bit of it. If you've been to a game recently, you can see how far we've come and some great potential for the future. Plus my dad looks a lot younger.