Sunday, February 23, 2014
This is still Kirby
This is still Kirby...
We've never been the biggest school around.
We have never had the nicest, most state-of-the-art gym.
We have never had football.
We don't a huge population to pull from and the greatest part of us are in the lower side of the income bracket.
We don't win every single game every single year.
We are not usually big enough to drown a wet rat.
But here's what we do have.
We have heart.
We have tradition.
We have the love of a game that we all grew up playing, many of us from before we could walk. Same with our parents and grandparents before.
We have basketball goals in our yards that cost nothing to use.
We have access to our gym, and kids practicing there pretty much any and every night.
We have an expectation of 100% balls-to-the-wall effort.
I was curious where that phrase came from, especially since it's sounds so, ummm, colorful, so I looked it up.
It came from the Vietnam War, said during an air-raid. The throttle in the airplanes had a ballgrip and when you push the ball forward, close to the front wall of the cockpit, the fuel increases resulting in the highest possible speed. It was said, "You're in good hands... as long as you go in on those targets balls to the wall."
That sounds like us, right?!
We are also not all blessed with the same level of talent, but we are taught from the start, that effort matches talent ANY DAY.
Stephen King said, "Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work."
So how does a little old school, out in the sticks, continuously excel each and every year? What are we cooking up here?!
When I was in college, a friend and I were looking at my old basketball clippings from the state paper after we learned we graduated the same year. We looked at those little one or two sentence write-ups, most of which I still have. I showed him mine and we flipped over the papers and found several he was in. (He played ball at ASU on scholarship.) He said he remembered playing Kirby and that it was always a job. He said Kirby was always a bunch of small, corn fed country boys who would run you to death for 32 minutes. He said he remembered we never had much size, but that we were scrappy and you had a job ahead of you when you went there. And yes, if memory serves me, we DID beat them (Fouke) back in the mid-90s.
This year I was standing outside at halftime visiting with some folks from another school. They commented that our senior girls team didn't know they were little.
No, they don't! Because small in stature doesn't equal small in performance!
Now back up and look at our school with a wide angle lens.
This is still Kirby.
We may not be the biggest.
We may not have the newest, nicest facilities.
We may not have what a lot of others do....
but what we do have, is BIG.
HEART, TRY, TRADITION, and as it was pointed out to me the other night by my good friend, Lisa Wright, we have an old gym with years of heart, determination and intimidation and grit ingrained into that old wood floor, that's seen a lot of generations of basketball that didn't know the meaning of quit!!
We are small. And we are fierce!
This is still Kirby.
Monday, February 10, 2014
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