I have a friend who often reminds
me that when I speak of my high school and college sports activities that I
should always begin by explaining that I played in a very small pool. His point
is that when one is in a small pool one can be a tiny fish and still seems to
have volume. He has made his point ever since he discovered that my high school
had about 100 students and my college some 600.
When I arrived at Concordia I
had never played legal tackle football. (I say “legal” because we had an
unauthorized little team which played without uniforms and which snuck onto the wonderful
turf of Memorial Stadium of the University of Texas and played against a
similar unauthorized team made up of local black young men from the
neighborhood). I was eager to play college football. I was assigned the
position of right end and played both offence and defense. I had a couple
things going for me: 1. I had spent the summer in San Antonio heat digging
foundation trenches at construction sites using only pick and shovel. So,
my body was rock hard and 2. I had played lots of “take away” where we competed
to grab fly balls snatching them away from other pursuers. Thus I did pretty
well at catching passes, grabbing five of them in the first quarter of an early
game. The bad news is that I was a very slow runner and the coach reminded me
on the sidelines “Kieschnick, if you could run we would have a bunch of touchdowns!”
Then I broke my ankle - but I did play all four years.
Probably the biggest surprise of my days
as a footballer is that I was elected team captain. It was in my junior year. I
had returned after a year of being a teaching intern. The coach assembled
the team and asked then to use a secret ballot to elect their captain. I won – getting
almost all the votes. It had been entirely kept from me by my teammates that
they were planning this.
I was on the varsity basketball
team for a year, but other players, especially those from basketball- crazy Ft.
Wayne Indiana were all better that I was. So after my freshman year I settled
for intramural basketball, did a few things on the track team like throwing
the discuss and shot putt, but you will certainly not find my name in an record
books.
I did play four years of varsity
baseball. In high school I always played shortstop, but that position was sewed
up by an upper classman and I took to the outfield. My arm was not bad, but
after college I played some under a very experienced coach. He always (correctly)
insisted that my throws from the outfield had too high an arc and therefore
took too long to reach their destination. He was right. My baseball colleague
Rudy Block (who died way too young) really monitored batting averages and he
assured me that my batting average was number two on the team, second only
to his
One other memory: Once I was
removed for a pinch hitter even though the coach knew that I had the second
highest batting average. And Coach Waldschmidt had seen my two previous
plate appearances against this very small but canny left-hander who struck me
out in both my previous two trips to the plate. I simply could not connect with
his curve which broke toward my body. I guess some moralist will tell me that
it was a good learning experience for me to have to sit on the bench.
An interesting intra-mural fun
game was badminton. By some coincidence my roommate and fellow Texan Roland
Trinkklein and I battled it out for the school championship.
All in all I am very grateful for my college sports
activities. It kept me in good physical shape. Being part of a team is a very
rewarding and learning experience. Learning to lose (which we did often) taught
me that life often has bitter losses and I have experienced and survived my
share of them in the many years since I last played college sports-and being on
losing teams prepared me well to be a fan of the San Diego Padres and Chargers.
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