T-Sizzle
Staff Linebacker
Following the Wooster men’s basketball team’s regional semifinal loss to Illinois Wesleyan University on March 9, President Grant Cornwell and Athletic Director Keith Beckett made a formal announcement to the student body. “We are sad to see the Fighting Scots bow out of the NCAA Tournament so early after a great season,” Beckett said to a crowd gathered in Timken Gymnasium. “But there is a positive to be gleaned from this loss: you can all stop giving a shit now.”
The crowd breathed an audible sigh of relief as the weight of pretending to have school spirit was lifted off their shoulders. “I know you all supported this team with as great a passion as anybody at the Division III level, which is to say you attended at least two home games on average,” Cornwell said. “But now that the Scots have lost, you can go back to not caring about our athletic programs. I know I have.”
Seniors who previously had minor hopes that the Scots would bring home a championship in their final year were encouraged to focus on their Independent Study. Beckett told the crowd to be relieved that they wouldn’t have to spend spring break at the Final Four in Salem, Va., which he referred to as a “festering pustule of a city.”
The end of annual shit-giving could not have come at a better time, as spring has arrived and brought with it a variety of sports that people don’t really give a shit about, such as softball, golf, tennis, lacrosse and the kind of baseball played with an aluminum bat. The student body no longer feels the obligation to read the sports section of the Vice, and thus its writers have returned to the more enjoyable work of trying to get away with as many jokes as possible regarding such topics as a certain News editor’s small penis.
Also relieved of caring were the students of Wittenberg University, whose basketball team was knocked out of the NCAA Tournament by Illinois Wesleyan in a regional final game, causing them to stop pretending to care about some joke rivalry that is perpetuated almost entirely by first-years during fall semester. “We don’t even compete with Wooster for students,” Wittenberg Athletic Director Garnett Purnell said. “And I’m pretty sure that Lutherans and Presbyterians aren’t really ‘rival’ Protestant sects. Why are we supposed to hate them again?”
Following the announcement, students filed out of the Scot Center, looked at their surroundings, shrugged their shoulders and went about their days, much like after a normal Wooster basketball game.