Tackabery Chronicle

What do we really want at NC State?

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There has been a groundswell of unrest among Wolfpack faithful this spring after the terrible performance of the basketball team. Season ticket holders and fans came out to see the Pack in large numbers this year. Coach Lowe had more support losing this year than Coach Sendek ever had winning. I can remember during the Julius Hodge years, when we made the NCAA tournament and were grinding out wins, albeit not always against the toughest opponents, hearing Sendek imploring fans to show up and watch the team, and nights when Tony Haynes called 12,000 fans in the RBC Center an achievement. This year, Lowe’s team drew 14,000 plus on a regular basis. It appeared to me that people really wanted to see him succeed.

Then came loss after loss after loss, and the agony of watching a team that never gelled, rarely talked to each other on the court, sulked on the bench, and played as if they were in some hated biology class that they had to sit through. After suffering through another year of mediocre football, was this just too hard to take?

Animosity has now focused on Lee Fowler, our un-esteemed athletic director. Fans’ bile started spewing after Fowler made reference to his time as a basketball coach when pleading for patience with Sidney. This was a major mistake, especially with my husband, who immediately pointed out that the team for which Fowler served as an assistant coach, after arriving at the NCAA, was slapped for recruiting violations, an achievement we sincerely hope he wasn’t referring to when he asked us to be patient with the program. Bile has continued to rise weekly, at least in my house, with Fowler’s statements on his television program, in which he repeatedly points to his achievements in facilities as indications that the athletics programs are going in the right direction.

I know people are tired of hearing Wolfpack fans whine, and Wolfpack fans are tired of losing. There seems so much to be proud of at NC State. Our booster club has recruited 20,000 members, and despite being fifteen and thirty miles away from other nationally-known collegiate athletic powerhouses, NC State now has the best facilities for the major college sports money makers in the RBC Center and renovated Carter-Finley Stadium, which is simply the best ball field for many miles. We also have some of the most loyal fans, who continually support the program with their wallets, something that, while I have no hard numbers to support this, does not appear to be the case with the two programs we play locally. Go to a Duke or Carolina game, and count the number of people in collegiate apparel and holding other tchotckes. Carolina may be the best-selling brand among NCAA programs, but that’s because gang bangers buy their clothes, not because local fans do. One of my favorite past times before a Carolina game is to count the number of fans who merely wear their cleanest light blue shirt. But I digress.

It seems we are perturbed because all this loyal support and hope and fear does not result in wins for our program, and instead of explanations we get a lot of talk about how nice our buildings look and how patience is a virtue. State Fans Nation posted yet another diatribe today, and while I can’t blame them, I’m still left wondering, what is it we want, exactly, that makes us whine so much?

I know what I want. I want to compete, and not hear about how we don’t belong in the Triangle with Duke and Carolina because we’re simply not on the same level, when in fact our program is the one that raised the level in the first place.

I’m back, I think

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I’ve been gone so long this blog could consider itself abandoned, but I’m back. The past few months have been full of three things: my husband, my new job, and finishing up my last semester of school.

I give my capstone presentation in the Tech Comm program on April 30th, and then the profs decide if I get the shiny paper. Four days later Richard and I are off to Las Vegas for a week. After that my blog might be changing homes, and probably themes. We’ll see. But I’m still around, still writing, still trying to figure it all out.

Howdy.

Equilibrium

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Over the last two months my life has been burdened by some unusual family stress, and the coping mechanisms I had previously held in place had already been sacrificed to get me through a very tough semester of school. So when things started to go south just before Thanksgiving, I didn’t have any reserves left to fight off the family stress. Thanksgiving was bad, while the month after was unbearably tense.

Anxiety disorders are about nervous systems that are out-of-balance. I’ve been thinking lately of my nervous disorder as something akin to an allergic reaction, but to stress instead of some environmental trigger like dust or pet hair. Stressful situations call up our emotions, but an over-sensitive nervous system, like mine and, I suppose, like many other people with PTSD, hair-triggers to stress.

I am reminded of this metaphor especially because of a misconception about exposure to harmful substances; the erroneous thought that, over time, given enough exposure, our body will become de-sensitized to the irritant. The fact is that immunotherapy for allergies is the second line of defense for allergies; the first is avoidance. People who suffer from reactions to allergens produce an abnormal amount of immunoglobin E (IgE) which makes them hypersensitive to the allergen. Piling on more allergen, in many cases, only brings out more IgE, which causes hives, an excess of mucus, sneezing, coughing, and all the other lovely symptoms that come with allergic reactions. The production of IgE is why many pet owners develop allergies to their cats after years of peaceful coexistence; such was the case with your humble author.

My burden in the years since my suicide attempt in 1999 has been the endless progression of prescription drugs that march in and out of my kitchen cabinet month after ceaseless month. They pump up my cortisol and prevent me from losing weight; they make me drowsy and, sometimes, dissociative and unemotional. But they tamp down the gears of my nervous system to help me prevent over-reaction. Messing with the careful mix of the meds I take can start a chain reaction that can snap back on me like a mother. The see-saw of equilibrium held carefully between my emotions and my stress level tips. . . which is exactly what it did when I had to stay up much later than usual to keep up with my class work this semester. I was up past midnight every day, and waiting until 11 or 12 at night to take my evening meds upset my sleep schedule. I began having nightmares again, and then I miscalculated a prescription and ran out of Topomax before I could get a new prescription. Within two days I was going through intense withdrawal, including night sweats, tingling nerves all over my body, and racing thoughts that left me pacing in place for hours. I got that straightened out, but damage was done, and more stress was to come as I struggled with a new job offer.

My meds are straightened out, but I along the way I stopped taking my allergy spray when it did not seem to be working (around the time I was withdrawing from Topomax - not a time to make decisions about one’s meds); and my allergies grew out of control because I live with four cats. The result was a nice big snapback; the see-saw tipped, and I went flying. I’ve had a week off between jobs, and in that week I’ve managed to get pretty sick with a kind of head cold and have a car accident.

Equilibrium. It’s harder than it looks. ]]>

I’m not worried . . .

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. . . I’m petrified! The news released today was all bad: Farnold tore an ACL in that fall Sunday against Cincy.

Perhaps we have a fall semester point guard curse?

I would really like to have more confidence in Gonzalez and Johnson but how can you not worry about a guy Sid has not played much when he’s had plenty of opportunity, and a guy who has been eligible for two games and hasn’t seen one inch of regulation hardwood?

So. Petrified. Concerned.

Get well Farnold. Step up: somebody.

tags: wolfpack basketball, north carolina state, farnold degand, javier gonzalez, marques johnson, sidney lowe
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Glass Half Full: RBC Center suffers from cancer of the perspective

<![CDATA[Interesting bit in the N&O today about the Pack’s perceived failure to get butts in seats for games at the RBC Center.

Chip Alexander cites a pretty cool stat: last year the Pack’s average home stand attendance was 13,952. NCSU ranks among the top 20 NCAA men’s basketball programs for attendance.

The. Top. 20. Teams. in. the. Country.

I felt that I had to stutter that to get someone to slow down and shut up. I am rather sick of hearing complaints from Wolfpack Nation about how the RBC Center is not packed for games. The issue in the RBC Center is the perception that the house is not full because of the empty seats in the bowl. We notice the empty seats because the fan cam often lingers on fans surrounded by empty seats early in the game, and the empty seat perception lingers with early entrants.

The fact is, by five minutes into most games, the bowl is usually pretty full and in the nosebleeds where Richard and I sit - where the views are great, just high - there are quite a few folks as well. Those empty seats in the bowl, however, those 6000-some fans who don’t show up, contribute to what some perceive as a deafening echo in the hall.

A perception that Wolfpack Sports Marketing, if they only had a brain, could easily erase. It’s called moving butts into empty seats, and it is not that friggin’ hard. At the last tv timeout before half time, you allow ticket holders from the third tier to take any empty seats in the first tier with the knowledge that if that seat’s occupant shows up, you lose the seat. Movers have to hang on to their seats during the half - price of occupancy, easily fixed when there are two or more people in your party (one person goes for the snacks, how hard is the math here folks?).

The second thing is to be more aggressive with a seat donation program in which lifetime seat holders donate their seats when they are not going to the game, and the Pack re-sells them on game day only. Big cities hire event-day sellers to get rid of those blocks of seats; it is an easy thing to do. More money for the Wolfpack Club, cheap seats for fans, problem solved.

The other quite simple thing that can be done to distract from empty seats is to create more silly promotional games and giveaways that involve people on the third tier, the way the Carolina Hurricans do for every single home game. Again, not so friggin’ hard. If Mr. and Mrs. Wuf are too good for the escalators, I understand that their are seven elevators in the building and lots of dance team members standing around shaking pom-poms. Put those toned butts to work.

And if anyone else bitches about the RBC Center not being full, I’d like to remind them how uncomfortable it is to sit in those third tier seats next to drunk Dukies. Thank you very much, I’ll be here all week.

tags: wolfpack basketball, north carolina state, rbc center]]>

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