Up Close With The Tigers

Hopefully you have been noticing a newly-added feature to our upgraded ETBU athletics website, the Up Close section down the left side of the main pages for our sports.

While the site is really not quite finished (not sure it will ever be, because I keep getting all these ideas and I end up changing everything!), we will definitely be keeping Up Close. I try to highlight a player or two each week during the season in hopes that by the end of the year everyone in a Tiger or Lady Tiger uniform will have been featured.

Some sports will have to linger with theirs into the offseason, especially football. To combat that I have gone to two football players in the section instead of one. But we will eventually get to everyone.

If you might be wondering how we come up with the little survey there, that asks the players about their favorite types of things, etc. I give each player at the beginning of the year a bio sheet for them to fill out. This includes athletic information such as their high school, their high school accomplishments, their career plans, etc. The bulk of this information goes in the bios of the players in the media guides.

But I wanted to add the Up Close section to the website, so I attached another page to this year's bio sheets. It's up to the players to decide whether or not they want to answer every question, hopefully they fill it out completely enough to sound interesting.

The questions range from "Who is your favorite superhero?" to "The best advice you could give a child is..." Hopefully the answers are fun and enlightening at the same time. I know I have some fun reading each of them as they are posted to the site.

For some who might be wondering, there are a few trends and popular answers coming so far on the bio sheets. Most everyone lists a parent or close family member as the "person I most admire." The Dark Knight, to this point, has been the most popular movie in the past year for our student-athletes, and not surprisingly, Batman follows as the most popular superhero.

Most student-athletes list the sport they are involved with as the reason they chose to attend ETBU. That's really not a shocking thing, and it tells us that athletics is an important part of our university life.

The "most interesting person from the Bible," ranges to anyone from Paul or Job, usually. I must say here that on most of the bio sheets I included, (other than Jesus). Duh, that would be like saying the most interesting person on your birthday was, well, you. Jesus is The Most Interesting Person in the Bible, period. But I wanted the answers to the bio question to vary this year.

Most TV shows that aren't missed among our student-athletes are stuff like Grey's Anatomy or CSI. Michael Phelps has been a popular "Favorite All-Time Athlete." And, for favorite U.S. President, it's almost a dead heat between Bill Clinton, Abraham Lincoln and George W. Bush.

That's a quick, minor overview of the survey taken of our fall athletes with their bio sheets. We've still got basketball and baseball and softball to come, of course, so the information will be expanding further. Maybe. Or maybe not -- maybe the consensus of the fall is that everyone has pretty much the same favorites here at ETBU.