Road Trip!

OC Domer and the OC Family are getting ready to go on a road trip. The Domer daughter is getting ready for her junior year of high school, and it's time to start looking at colleges. She has been an excellent student since she was a tot, has been a varsity volleyball player since her freshman year, is an officer (three years running) in student government and volunteers at a local children's hospital. Does anybody know of any colleges that might be interested in this type of student?

Of course, she has a few ideas of her own about where she would like to go to school once she has successfully run the high school gauntlet. Let's call that Plan "A". But Our Lady's University has gotten very, very competitive and you can't reasonably assume that Plan "A" is going to come to fruition. You've got to have some contingency plans. My daughter loves the look and feel of ND, and looks forward to going away to college. So we've been poring over the guides to top colleges looking at other schools that could give the OC Daughter a Notre Dame-esque experience. Some are Ivy League and near-Ivy caliber. Some are just a notch below that.

It just occurred to me this morning that I have had an odd kindred with most of these schools since I was a little Domer wannabe. Do you remember watching college football as a kid (maybe an Oklahoma game), and then getting all the scores from around the country at halftime? When I was really young, ABC would actually have the scores printed out on signs hanging on a wall of the studio and the camera would pan across them as the announcer read them off. Later, they developed the first generation of cheesy on-screen graphics to display the scores. Finally they took the quantum leap to the crawler scrolling the scores along the bottom of the screen while you were still watching your game. And I mean ALL the scores. Slippery Rock. Dartmouth. Virginia Commonwealth. Places that I had never heard of, which, to a nine year old, seemed slightly exotic and mysterious. As far as televised coverage of college football has come (so many channels, so many games, on so many days of the week), I miss the crawl at the bottom of the screen telling me how the Ivy League schools did that day, or how the small colleges in Pennsylvania and upstate New York and New England fared. I think the relentless focus on the Top-25 and the BCS conferences is a mistake.

Well, on this trip I'm taking the family back in time to my exotic and mysterious childhood. We'll see and take the tours of Princeton, Lehigh, Bucknell, Cornell and Boston College. Perhaps we'll take a quick drive by Columbia, NYU and Harvard just because we'll be in the neighborhood and they would be neat to see. I laughed this morning because I remembered it was schools like Princeton, Lehigh, and Bucknell that had their scores flashing across the T.V. screen back when I knew absolutely nothing about them. Fast forward three decades and I'm taking my family to the east coast to play tourist in NYC and Boston, and to finally know those places that once seemed so foreign and unknowable. The Domer Son is looking forward to the trip because many of the schools we're visiting are Top-25 teams - in lacrosse!

We're still praying that Plan "A" comes through for us, but I am looking forward to seeing what Plan "B" might look like, just in case. Wish us luck.