By Lindsey Besecker
Assistant Sports Editor
It was 3 a.m. on Friday and I was headed to the airport to fly to Norman, Okla. I was expecting a long weekend of basketball and people I didn’t know. However, when I flew back to Los Angeles on Monday night after many delays, I discovered that I was returning home with more than I had expected.
When I arrived in Oklahoma, I saw what I had expected: brown grass, gray sky and stretches of flat land.
Our hotel was in the middle of nowhere, so I didn’t expect to see too much of Oklahoma. I figured that the team had traveled together and that I would sit in my room all weekend, except for the game, and watch television.
My impressions immediately changed. Assistant coach Jodi Sackville called my room about an hour after I arrived and invited me to go with the team to Shannon Mayberry’s house. Mayberry grew up about 30 minutes from our hotel. I hadn’t seen the team yet and I didn’t expect them to know who I was because, after all, I am just a freshman.
As I walked to the bus, Sackville called out to me. I guess I looked lost, which is the truth. I climbed onto a bus full of strangers and sat next to head coach Mark Trakh.
We left to go to Mayberry’s aunt’s house, which turned out to be one of the most amazing houses I have ever been in. After we took a tour of the house, her relatives served us heaps of delicious food.
That night I started to get to know the team. They are some of the nicest people I have met in my six months at Pepperdine. They like to have fun with each other, but they also realize when people, like me, don’t exactly fit in.
I already knew Jen Lacy from a class we had together first semester, but Tamara McDonald was one of the first to introduce herself to me. I ended up talking with her for much of the night as we watched the UCSB-Louisiana Tech game on television.
The next day was pretty uneventful for me, since I was not allowed to go to practice because it was closed to the media.
Then it was game time.
As I walked out of the tunnel, I could see Pepperdine’s fan base behind the bench, all decked out in their “WCC Champions” orange T-shirts. I looked up and saw Mayberry’s mother and brother passing out shirts to the OU fans that had arrived a few hours before their game. That’s one way to represent Pepperdine.
The game was slow, which I blame on Villanova. It was a tough loss for the team.
We didn’t leave until Monday night, so on Sunday about 20 of us piled onto the bus and headed to the Oklahoma City Memorial site.
The bus driver made my trip. Richard was from Tulsa and figured that we really wanted to know all we could about Oklahoma, down to who the streets were named after. There were a few snickers when he tried to describe thongs to us, which are known better as flip-flops, and how they go in between the big toe and the one next to it.
What I really enjoyed about Richard was that he really seemed to enjoy our company. He even stuck our duct-tape nametag we made for him on the bus and wore one of our orange shirts. When we arrived at the memorial, I encountered one of the most moving sights that I have ever seen. I think everyone else felt the same as I did.
The hoard of kids in green sweats who were also visiting the memorial helped us to forget the sadness all around us, not to mention how Tamara kept pointing out people with mullets.
I can say that I got more out of this trip than I expected. The typical reporter-athlete relationship was absent. I was treated as a peer instead of as someone regarded suspiciously by many athletes because of the reporting part of the job.
Even though the team suffered a tough loss on the trip, they were able to see it as a learning experience and not dwell on it. They showed me that the bonds they have went past the court and that they can still try to make the most any situation.
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File photo
WAVE GOODBYE: Crystal McCutcheon takes the lane at home.
March 21, 2002