The Recruitment Blues

When your morning starts off running out of gasoline on the Ohio turnpike, you can bet it’s not going to be the greatest day!!!





















[Above, Kenny shares my misfortune, which he clearly found hilarious... and Paul and Michelle double back with gas... two flippin' miles from the service plaza! Click to enlarge each photo.]

I can’t believe I am admitting that publicly, as it is rather irresponsible, I know, but it’s also just too funny! I’ve never run out of gas before, but since the four of us traveling to the Ohio High School Forensics tournament to recruit were in three different cars, I didn’t have a chance to call them in time to say we all needed to pull off as we past the first travel plaza, and unfortunately I didn’t make it to the second. It never would have happened had I been by myself. The truly hilarious part is that my car sputtered to a halt right in front of the “2 miles to service plaza sign!” This was also a good lesson for me that the gas light in my 14 year old car does NOT come on!

Then, once in Canton, we drove around in the ghetto for an hour before getting on the right side of town and finding the high school! It was an interesting day to say the least. Being that my high school didn’t have a Forensics team, I didn’t know what to expect, but it seems that with high schoolers, everything is the same: high drama! These kids were stressed! The result was that they were none to interested in thinking about the rest of their lives. Looking back, it reminded me of my competition days in high school solo and ensemble (music) contests… had their been college recruiters there I don’t suppose I would have been interested either, as I was also always focused on the competition at hand.

The annoying part was that everyone was flocking to Ohio University’s table because they had cookies… never mind that Bowling Green gives out five times the amount of scholarship money and is currently number one in the state. At one point a girl asserted to me, “there’s nothing to do in BG… OU’s better…” I reminded her that OU is smaller; she came back with “you have no ice cream shops!” What?!?!? No ice cream shops? I replied that indeed we have Dairy Queen, right on Wooster Street, to which she went back to the OU table to get a tally of total ice cream shops there. When she returned to me I politely as possible suggested that if she was selecting higher education based on ice cream shops, perhaps she should rethink her future plans!

[Above, Paul and Kenny stand next to our display.]

All and all the recruitment was not as successful as we had hoped, but I guess only time will tell. Hopefully we’ll get some response from the hundreds of pamphlets we shoved into their hands.

On a sunnier note, I ran into not one, but two fellow Miss Ohio contestants! Miss Stark County Elise Healy was there helping to coach kids from her high school and when I snuck out midday to go to Suzie Lee’s apparel shop I ran into Miss Southeastern Ohio, Jenna Wilson! It was great to meet Elise for a first time and see Jenna again.