Roger Grossman, a broadcaster for WRSW and writer for the Times-Union in Warsaw, Ind., recently had an opportunity to play golf with members of the Grace College women’s golf team. He wrote about the experience in the newspaper this week. A portion of the column appears below. Click here for the complete article.
A Walk Even The Rain Couldn’t Ruin
I got an email two weeks ago inviting me to play golf.
I get those emails occasionally, but this one was extra intriguing to me, so I followed up on it.
It was from my good friend and fellow adoptive dad Denny Duncan.
Denny is on the list of people that when they ask you for help or a favor, you do it gladly. Denny was a principal at Jefferson Elementary School in my early years of working in Warsaw, which is where I got to know him best.
Now he is the women’s golf coach at Grace College, and his email invited me to come play a round of golf at Stonehenge with some of his girls.
In my head, I was thinking “OK, so you are asking me to come play golf with your ladies, at Stonehenge, and you are going to walk around with us … can I say YES fast enough?”
So last Tuesday I headed over there to tee it up. I hit a bucket of balls first, though. I don’t play golf nearly as much as I used to (having kids will do that to you) and the last thing I wanted to do is look like a dork in front of girls who are playing college golf, right?
I crossed Pierceton Road and found Denny and some of the girls on the practice green, so I joined him as he was sending out the first groups for a nine-hole practice round. He introduced me to Sydney Abbott, a sophomore from Greenwood. Within a few seconds, Lauren Keiser from Pataskala, Ohio walked up and said hello. The Grace women’s golf program is only in its third season, and Lauren was the first to commit to playing her college golf there.
Our fourth had a late class, so we walked over to the first tee to get started without her.
It was cold and a little windy, so we were bundled up. The sun would peek through heavy overcast on occasion, but it was definitely pullover weather.
We put golf clubs to golf balls and set off on the front nine. Not long after we arrived at our tee shots, Anna Marshall, a sophomore from Wauseon, Ohio, hustled up to meet us.
The purpose of Denny inviting me to play that day is that he wanted me to meet and get to know his girls. He is so happy with the quality of the people in his program that he wanted someone to come and spend some time with them – get to know them more the way he knows them. At a place like Grace, winning matters but making people into winners matters more, and Denny genuinely gushes about how much he likes coaching these ladies. More than that, he just looks forward to being with them.
His enthusiasm for them made joining him that day an easy choice. You can never meet too many quality people.
Click here for the complete article.