MY TIME AT A DIVISION III SCHOOL
Sometimes people ask me what I would do if I could go back and do it all over. To be honest, I’ve asked myself the same question. If I put in more work in high school, could I have played at a big-time D-I program? What would it be like to play college ball in front of 30,000 fans or in an arena like Cameron Indoor? Even though I can’t answer those questions, as I look back at the time I spent at Trinity – the experiences, the games, the friends – I find myself wondering, if I could change things, would I even want to?
It’s going to sound cliché, but attending Trinity allowed me to be a true student-athlete and still have time to be a normal college kid. I went to all my classes, made friends, had fun, goofed off – and played a very high level of basketball. I truly believe Division III schools hold this unique advantage over D-I and D-II institutions. You are expected to be a student first, an athlete second. Please don’t get me wrong, we took basketball very seriously. During my time at TU, we won conference championships, competed for national championships, finished the season ranked in the top 5 nationally, took a Big 12 team with two future NBA lottery picks down to the wire, and won more games than any other stretch in school history. If you really wanted to get Coach upset though, you didn’t mess up on the court, you messed up off it. We were expected to be model students and model citizens. I’m not sure this sentiment exists at higher levels of the NCAA.
Because we were held to a higher standard, we worked harder than the average student. We did every bit of school work and found time to put in 3+ hours a day for basketball. We learned how to multi-task, how to juggle commitments, and how to manage our time most efficiently. We learned how to be grown men. We didn’t have notes handed to us – we learned class material and put in the hours to get good grades. We weren’t one-and-done players moving on – we became friends for life. We didn’t have a tutor doing the work for us – we juggled class, basketball, and a social life successfully. When we graduated, we could not only look back with pride on what we had accomplished at our time at Trinity, we could look forward to the future with confidence that those years had prepared us for what lie ahead.
In my mind, this is what makes Division III athletics so special. The expectation to succeed not only on the court but in the classroom forces you to become a well-rounded individual. Your time as an athlete will come to an end. Mine did, but I’m grateful every day for the lessons I learned as a Trinity University athlete and how ready I was for life after basketball.
Go Tigers.
Mike Gilb ‘08
