This is an exciting week for college basketball. It is Championship Week on ESPN and conference tournaments are being played througout the nation. This is the week that the major conferences, such as the Big East, ACC, SEC, and others, host their title games.
Yesterday afternoon in Conference USA, Marshall’s Thundering Herd brought excitement to their fans with a thrilling 105-100, triple overtime quarter-final round, win over Tulsa in Memphis.
In the ACC tournament, not much was expected of Wake Forest. The Demon Deacons did do an early exit lost to Maryland 82-60 in the first round.
But, this is a story to help us put games, life and losing in perspective.
One of the assistant coaches at Wake Forest is a former college player in our state, Jeff Battle. Battle was a high school player at Dobbins Tech in Philadelphia. Because of his diminutive size, he had no Division I recruiting offers to speak of, but he was offered an opportunity to walk-on at Marshall by former Herd coach Bob Zuffelato in 1981.
During his junior and senior seasons, he would become a starting point guard for Marshall’s 1984 and 1985 teams that won back to back Southern Conference titles and played in the NCAA tournament.
After college, Battle then embarked on a coaching career. His first stop was as a high school coach at Caeser Rodney High School in Delaware, and then he was an assistant to Jeff Jones at Delaware State. Eventually, he was hired by the late Skip Prosser as an assistant coach at Loyola (Md). Prosser is a former high school in our state at Wheeling Central.
Battle then followed Prosser to Xavier and eventually to Wake Forest. While there, he recruited one of the best point guards in the country, Chris Paul.
Life was good for Jeff Battle. He was coaching in the ACC. He was married to a beautiful wife, Joyce and they were blessed with a son, Jordan.
However in 2000, Joyce was diagnosed with a rare form of lung cancer. She battled the disease for eight years. Then, one day in June of 2008, she was driving when she became ill. She called her husband to tell him that she was going to the hospital. She would never return home.
Three days later, on August 6 of that year, Joyce Battle passed away. Young Jordan lost a mom. Coach Jeff lost a wife.
Since Joyce’s passing, Jeff Battle has been trying to help a Wake Forest program that has been struggling. One of his best friends in coaching, Ed Cooley took the job at Providence last year and tried to get Jeff to go with him. But, Jordan was a senior and Jeff did not want to uproot him. He had been through enough.
Jeff Battle has learned that winning and losing in March Madness is not life and death. He understands the reality of life and death.
So, this week many fans will live and die with their teams wins and losses, and agonize over whether or not their team will get a bid. While doing so, I also encourage you to think of former Marshall guard Jeff Battle. He now realizes more than anyone that basketball is just a game.