A Parable for Nega-Vols

No other children preceded me; for seven years I was my parents only bundle of pride and joy. I don’t remember having any strong feelings about the coming of my baby sister, but my parents told me she’d become my playmate, and that excited me. I dreamed about all the fun, sisterly things we two would do together and planned out all manners of games for us to play. Then she was born. A tiny, whiny thing that did nothing but sleep and smell funny. I waited patiently for months for her to grow up so we could do fun things together. In vain I waited. By the time she was a suitable companion for a seven year old, I was a teenager and more wrapped up in my own life than ever before. Then we became adults and besties and it all worked out, but not before some growing pains.

To explicate: when we say this is a rebuilding season, it’s true. And by rebuilding, we don’t mean replacing a few seniors like most coaches do. We mean, our previous coaches so abused the program we’re having to form bricks out of clay before we can even start rebuilding. Not only are we perhaps the youngest team ever fielded in college history, our coaches are also babies in SEC years. They will all end up being fantastic, but they need experience. More experience than half a season. The wait is painful, I know. I thought we’d be all fixed by now, even though I knew the process actually takes a few years. In order to get to the point where some people believe we need to be would take a miracle of epic proportions—a miracle outside of the ‘any-given-Saturday’ mill, one the universe has not deigned to give us. Just hunker down, send our coaches nothing but love and support through this storm, and remember it only gets better from here.