One More Time

Because I’m expected to do this kind of thing, I went to the last football game of the season for the Elmhurst Bluejays.  A win against unbeaten North Central College, and they’d have a very good season at 6-4.  Instead, Elmhurst ended up with a nice season at .500.  Oh, well.

It was football weather for the first time all season, cool, crisp and clear.  How nice of North Central to locate the visitors’ bleachers so that we had our backs to the wind the whole game.  Looking at the school’s sports’ complex, you could almost believe in that kind of attention to detail.  If you want to play NCAA D-III sports, it doesn’t get any better than North Central, with the campus smack dab in the middle of Naperville, where the smart and well-to-do go to live once they’ve gotten the city out of their system.

While Elmhurst has a larger enrollment, North Central has more land, 65 acres to 48; every bit of that difference must be devoted to sports.  The facilities form a chain: softball-track-baseball-football.  I was particularly impressed with the baseball field, where it’s 403 feet to dead center.  Nothing Mickey Mouse about that.  At Elmhurst, softball and baseball are off-campus, which means “out of sight, out of mind” for most of the student body.  If you want sports to matter to your school, North Central is how you do it.

Which makes beating North Central, a perennial power in football and softball, that much sweeter.  Wait ’til next year.