The Reality of Our Hype

As some people might know (while others might not) besides being a tennis enthusiast, I am also an avid Xavier University basketball fan. Earlier this year while perusing the reports on the latest Xavier victory, I came across this quote from Xavier coach Sean Miller: "the reality of our hype is we're really average when we play anything less than as hard as we can and as unselfish as we can." Upon reading this quote I thought about how it might be applied to another area of my life, the tennis court.

Just like our tennis team, Xavier had a majority of its players returning and were widely expected to be fairly successful, but instead of embracing "good," Xavier went for "as good as possible," and through hard work by all and an equal amount of contribution from the top seven players on the team, Xavier widely exceeded expectations (currently they are ranked #13 in the nation.) I see a possibility for our team to have a historic season that will long be remembered by future Bethany teams, but we also have the possibility to not put the work in and being no better than last year. None of our sectional opponent teams are sitting around, we won't have any easy wins against them. We have the choice, we can kick back and be average or put in the hard work and exceed everyone's expectations.

--- Kashmar (Jonny Shenk)