Author:
An Observer
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Date Posted: 13:25:02 05/10/24 Fri
Back in the ancient days when people of my age applied to college, Harvard would send admitted applicants a formal certificate, aesthetically appealing and suitable for framing, which stated that the named individual had been admitted to Harvard College.
I guess Harvard had a pretty good idea back then that getting in is the hard part.
I am genuinely sad for Vernon Collins, because I am so confident that someday he will regret his decision. In the immortal words of Rick Blaine, "Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon -- and for the rest of his life."
It didn't have to be this way.
Somebody in his life -- maybe Henderson, maybe his best friends at Princeton, most naturally his parents -- should have stopped him.
That is one thing of many things which I disrespect about the current generation of young Americans. There's a political correctness about life choices that says all decisions are correct, all choices are equally valid.
NO.
All decisions are not equally correct. All choices are not equally valid. And young Mr Collins is going to find that out, probably as early as next winter arrives when he discovers that Western Carolina is not the answer to all of his basketball dreams.
We on this board know that getting into Harvard is tougher than graduating from Harvard. But he doesn't want to explain this to everybody who will be judging him down the road, from graduate schools to employers to the pretty young thing that he's trying to pick up from the bar. "You know, I got into Princeton and went for two years. Do you want to come back to my apartment and see my Princeton notebooks?"
For the rest of his life, just as Ilsa did after she got on that plane with Viktor Laslow, Vernon Collins will have on his resume that he graduated from Western Carolina University, not the #1 ranked university in the country.
Somebody needed to slap him across his face and say, "Hey, you idiot. Here's what you're going to do. You're going to tell Coach Henderson that if you don't have a legitimate shot at getting real minutes, you want to become the team manager for the next two years. You're going to spend two more years in Tigertown, getting your degree and hanging out with your friends. But you'll have saved your athletic eligibility. Then once you've got that sheepskin in your hand, you're going to call Western Carolina or Michigan or Georgetown and you're going to one of them as a grad transfer with a Princeton degree."
This easily available option has less downside and more upside than his choice. Therefore, his choice is the wrong one.
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