DeSmetBilliken

They have a very small parking lot, so unless you catch it lucky and get a space there, you likely will have to park on the street.

Well that’s news to their Instagram account. It suggests that they’re open today. It was also open when I was there on Friday before the game.

I don’t know anything about pep band turnout in the arena tonight, but I’ve heard that there’s a pretty good band that has started to play before games at Humphrey’s. Great blend of instruments. Exciting stuff!

I’m sad to hear this. I met Terrance once during a Billikens.com watch party over 15 years ago, but I was primarily familiar with him through this board. Everything everyone else has posted so far is a great tribute to him. When I saw here that he had passed away, I remembered that I had seen him post that he had either gotten married recently or was getting married soon. In reviewing his obituary, it appears that he was married for a little less than a year before he passed. He seemed very happy to have found his wife, so it’s sad to know that their time together was cut short. Rest in Peace Thicks.

Truly one of the dumbest naming ideas I’ve ever heard. It’d be moderately funny if it was done as a joke by a few people, but on jerseys and on the court??? Unconscionably stupid.

Also ripped off from band. For 10 years the saxophones have had a tradition of high fiving whenever they get on the screen, even while playing. Funny when 2-4 people do it as a bit, dumb when they tried to involve the whole arena.

This is a good point. Add in that SLU has typically been pretty abysmal with athletics related logistics, and you’ve got yourself a winning combination.

By itself, there isn’t a problem with the idea of wanting some musical representation at other events. The problem arises when it comes at the expense of the product that has worked well for close to 40 years. The proper handling would have been for someone in athletics to have taken the steps to assemble separate groups to provide that wanted additional representation at other events. At minimum, if they wanted coverage at fill in the blank event, communicate that expectation well in advance, so that plans could have potentially been made. Instead, the course of action that Athletics repeatedly took was to look at a calendar on Monday or Tuesday, decide that there were 5 events at which they wanted band representation, and then send an email to the director on Tuesday, Wednesday, or maybe even Thursday saying “the band needs to be at these 5 events from Wednesday through Sunday.” It’s just a bad way of handling things. What happens if the band couldn’t scramble a group to all of these events? I’m not certain, but let’s just say that the athletics department has shown before that they’re more likely to be helpful when the band does what it wants.

I don't have great answers to all of your questions since I can't speak too much as to how other schools handle things, but I did the best I could given my own knowledge and experience. See below each of your questions.

So here’s the story. SLU’s never been great with logistics, but for years it never really affected the band, other than dealing with some simple annoyances. Things started changing this year, when the athletics department started asking for much more of their time. By that I mean the band was always a basketball only band, with maybe a volleyball game or 2 thrown in if it was doable. This fall, the athletics department started asking them to play at more games and maybe some events, frequently on short notice (48 hours). This increased expectation was unsustainable for many people, and several students dropped band during the fall. Our director met with athletics department officials to discuss this issue, specifically that it was creating a mental health issue for members, which include current SLU students. The athletics department did nothing in response to address these concerns. Our director determined that he was no longer comfortable working with an organization that refused to provide adequate support, so he tendered his resignation recently. Tonight was his last men’s basketball game. He was told by SLU that they were going to announce that he was retiring during a timeout tonight. He asked repeatedly that this not be done, and that he didn’t want them to make a spectacle of him, but SLU did it anyway. What makes it worse is that by calling it a “retirement” it glosses over the actual reason for the resignation. Several of us, myself included, likely played our last game tonight. Admittedly I’m a part-time alumni player who plays a few games a year when the students go on break, so I’m not a huge loss, but there are others who are bigger losses who won’t return. Some will stay and see what happens after the first of the year.

It’s a real account.

Yikes…that’s a rough stat line.

On mine, they called somebody else over, maybe a supervisor, to use the scanner. Eventually it did work, but they weren’t sure how it had worked.

That’s a fair point, but at the same time, we saw plenty of times last year where we got a 10-15 point lead midway through the second half, only to change how we played and ultimately blew the lead and lost. Maybe I’ll have a different opinion if somebody picks up an injury inside 2:00 to go with a 20 point lead, but for now I’m all for keeping the foot on the gas.

Fair enough. I didn’t grab one of the roster sheets because, and I quote myself “ I know who our players are and I don’t care who their players are” so I didn’t know who the UMSL players were.

I chuckled when he said that and immediately hated myself for it.

He certainly didn’t credit the basket to Larry Hughes Jr, but I thought he said Kellen Thames. If he said a player or the other team, that’s an even bigger miss.

Cam Fletcher. He transferred to Florida State after his year at Kentucky. Played at FSU last year.

Got a nice SLU quarter zip today at Costco. It was next to some Mizzou stuff…any chance the guy earlier meant to type Costco and it autocorrected to Cracker Barrel (which would be even more to unpack)?

Oh no.

His teammate at East St. Louis, Christian Jones (former Mizzou commit), landed at UIC after Gates came in and cleared house.

I really hope he does well there. He always seemed like a nice kid and a good teammate.

Seemingly work is still being done.

This. The root of NIL is that college athletes have value involved in their name and position as athletes, and as such are able to monetize that value. Apply this to a normal college student and no one has a problem with it. If an accounting major has good grades and gets a paid internship with a Big 4 accounting firm, they’re using their position as an accounting student to make money off that. If a nursing student happens to have cultivated a large following on Instagram or TikTok and parlays that into sponsorship money or maybe some modeling gig, it’s the same deal. If a SLU student decides that they can make more money or better prepare for the future by transferring to a school in a larger city with similar scholarship money, who’s going to have a problem with that? Effectively, the only difference is that we watch college sports for fun, and nobody in their right mind is watching somebody take an organic chemistry mid-term for their entertainment. Should that be the reason why athletes should be limited in what they can do? I don’t think so. I think some regulation could be beneficial to root out sham sponsorships, but I think that this is the new normal and you have to either adjust or get passed by.

I think they’re joining the CAA this summer.