CENTAUR SEASONS, the Junior Year Journal, entry one: "Tomorrow Is Our First Game"

ORIGINALLY WRITTEN THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 30, 1972

Tomorrow is our first game – Lehigh County Community College – first of 17. We’ve practiced for six weeks now, having started on October 16. We have never beaten this team. We will tomorrow.

Sounds like perfect jock talk, doesn’t it? Well, I think we will. We should. They’re a two-year school, we a four. I think we are too good a team to be playing them. We must beat them if for no other reason to prove to ourselves that we have improved since I was a freshman. I’m a junior now. Not yet a senior (as Chris Cashman keeps reminding me – he, of course, is a senior, and co-captain, as is Dennis Ramella, senior, too).

(“Tomorrow Is Our First Game ” continues below)

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WELCOME TO CENTAUR SEASONS. “Tomorrow Is Our First Game ” here on HoopsU.Com appeared originally on CENTAUR SEASONS, a “memory blog” of the basketball beginnings of the half-good, half-bad, all-new Allentown College of St. Francis de Sales Centaurs in Center Valley, Pennsylvana. Forty years ago this basketball season Steve kept a diary of his junior-year season. A blog before its time then, it is now an electronic diary at CENTAUR SEASONS and here on HoopsU.com.

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Last Monday Coach told us to dedicate this game & Monday’s game [Northampton Area Community College] to ourselves. I suppose we should. We deserve it. We have worked hard. We’ve scrimmaged Ursinus College and the Lehigh Freshman team, the Allentown Business School and Allentown-Penn State – 4-0 so far. We are ready.

I’m not yet really getting nervous. I was for awhile while coach was giving his pep talk – never beat them and so on. But I’m not nervous now. I should be able to sleep. Hope so.

Might as well get some preliminaries out of the way now. There’s 12 on our team: 2 seniors, 2 juniors, 5 sophomores and 2 freshman. (I hope that’s 12 – It isn’t! Son of a gun, I forgot Flem. He’s a senior.)

Tomorrow I should start, along with Bobby Stormes (soph) , Bobby Hoeffner (soph), Dave Glielmi (soph) and Dennis Ramella (senior).

Sitting down at the start of the game – which really doesn’t matter to Coach, he plays a lot of guys, all 12 if he can – are John Cooper (junior), Flem (senior), Gary Caccitorre (soph), Joe Thompson (soph), P.J. Brennan (frosh), Tom Shirley (frosh).

I forgot somebody. Oh, yeah: Cash (senior). Chris Cashman. The first practice, very first, Cash fell and sprained his ankle – bad, real bad. He just rejoined the team on Monday. You gotta respect somebody like him. I remember last year I sprained my ankle – before the season even started – and I was fit to be tied. Couldn’t control myself, my lack of activity. Cash did. Came to every practice, too. Kept it all inside him, too! Some kind of guy. I really respect him for that. He really is the leader.

Well, let’s see. Anything else worth mentioning? Probably not.

Tomorrow is the first game. #1. Will we win or lose …

Till tomorrow. Doo-dah.

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Steve McKee

Steve McKee is the author of CENTAUR SEASONS, a memory blog about his basketball-playing days at Allentown (Pa.) College of St. Francis de Sales in the early 1970s (a good excuse for using his college yearbook picture -- though there's NO excuse for that mustache and hair!).

CENTAUR SEASONS can also be found at www.centaurseasons.com. The centerpiece will be the posting in "real time" of the diary that Steve kept of his 1972-1973 junior-year season, beginning on November 30. Prior to that (and after), Steve will be posting regularly about his freshman, sophomore and senior seasons, as well as about what it was like to be there at the beginning to help get a struggling college basketball program off the ground.

Steve was the original writer of The Wall Street Journal's popular sports blog, "The Daily Fix" in 2001-2002, and was even dubbed "The Unwitting Father of the Sports Blog" by Gelf Magazine, the online publication of the "Varsity Letters Reading Series. Steve was the Journal's sports editor for its original Weekend sport section and was involved in all of the Journal's Olympics coverage, Winter and Summer, from 1996 through 2008.

He is the author of three books, most recently "My Father's Heart: A Son's Reckoning With the Legacy of Heart Disease," which he is adapting as a one-man show. For his first book, "The Call of the Game," Steve traveled the country in search of sports events -- including the famous N.C. State Wolfpack victory over "Phi Slamma Jamma" of the University of Houston. For his second book, COACH, among the 150+ coaches Steve interviewed are/were college basketball coaches John Wooden (UCLA), Pat Summitt (Tennessee), Frank Layden (Niagara), Bobby Cremins (Georgia Tech), P.J. Carlesimo (Seton Hall), Bill Guthridge (North Carolina), Abe Lemons (Texas), Stan Morrison (USC), Kathy Rush (Immaculata), Jim Satalin (Duquesne), Charlie Thomas (San Francisco State), Butch Van Bredda Koff (Princeton), Bill Whitmore (Vermont) and LaDonna Wilson (Austin Peay).

For more, you can click on www.steve-mckee.com, where you can find a TODAY show appearance and an NPR interview.