Chapter 66

David
David’s week hadn’t gone totally as expected. He’d been forced to remind himself that change doesn’t happen overnight, and that he wasn’t back home where he’d built his credibility. It didn’t help that everyone could tell that Coach Clayton had just paid lip service to his grand announcement that he wanted to win national championships. David would have bet that if asked, Coach Clayton would say that was his goal, too, but it would be done his way without input from David or anyone else. It was his program, after all.

The younger guys were more open to David’s message because they hadn’t been in the system long enough to become jaded, pissed-off, or looking to transfer out. The starters mostly didn’t want to rock the boat. That left the more cynical, the more aggressive, and the backups.

After spring ball was completed, six players announced their plans to leave because it was apparent that they would get little or no playing time. One of them was Travis Barry, Matt Long’s primary backup at quarterback.

When he was asked about Travis and the others opting to transfer, Coach Clayton had played it off. A day later, one of the national college-football websites added Coach Clayton to their list of coaches on the hot seat to be replaced. David was sure Coach Clayton wasn’t happy to be the subject of that kind of rumor.

Bo Harrington, David’s former personal quarterback coach who’d become the quarterback coach at Alabama and was now the head coach at Western Michigan, had scholarships available. A new model of recruiting was emerging for schools that weren’t necessarily in the top tier. They had started to hold some of their scholarships in reserve to use to fill gaps on their rosters when top players left schools like USC.

Only a handful of teams could consistently recruit top-level freshmen, plug them into their system, and have a never-ending supply of starters. While USC was one of those schools, they were bleeding off talent to transfers, thanks to Coach Clayton’s system. Schools in the bottom half of the Big Ten and similar conferences would offer the ones exiting a chance at playing time.

While Western Michigan would never be able to go toe-to-toe with the big boys for a top high school recruit, they were an attractive destination for transfers. By the time a player was ready to transfer, the glamor of going to a big-name college had worn off. The players leaving had had their eyes opened to the business of big-time college football. They were looking for a destination that would give them the best chance of getting the exposure needed to get to the NFL.

Bo had picked up where his predecessor had left off. He had his school ranked in the top 25 at the end of the year. That was no small feat for a school not in one of the Power 5 conferences. They were projected to have another 10- or 11-win season this coming year. Because of the exposure, they’d developed several players who had either been drafted or picked up in free agency, giving them a realistic shot at catching on with an NFL team. The combination of winning and coaching made Western Michigan a place where top underclassman talent wanted to go to resurrect their careers.

The only hesitancy transfers had was that coaching at Western Michigan was considered a stepping-stone type of job. It was a school where talented young coaches cut their teeth and, if they were successful, wound up on short lists for consideration when better jobs came available. David suspected that his friend Bo would only stay for another year or so before his name would be floated when the coaching carousel began after the season.

David sent Bo a text listing the three USC players who were entering the transfer portal that he thought could help Bo’s team. The other three were busts, which happened for a variety of reasons.

David got to Accounting early and was happy to see Alyssa already there with his tea. She was busy, so he pulled out his tablet and began to look at the sample data the county had sent him for his stats project.

David was frustrated because he’d wrongly assumed that the county would send him a file he could pop into Excel and just sort to get what he wanted. What David found was that no one file had every piece of information he wanted. The data was scattered across different systems or departments in the county. The county housed information on systems run by Zoning, Appraiser, Tax Assessor, County Clerk, Code Enforcement, and the list went on. The scary part was that many of those departments had different files for different purposes. What had him scratching his head was that each one collected information in wildly differing formats.

He’d wondered at the time why the nice lady who’d sent him the sample data had chuckled when he made his request.

“What’s that?” Alyssa asked.

“It’s my Stats project, and I’m starting to think I’m in over my head.”

“What are you trying to do?”

“Part of it is to figure out who has bought multiple properties in a given time frame. The county sent me over a bunch of sample files, but I don’t know what I’m looking at,” David admitted.

“What’s the key?” Alyssa asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Database key. What is used to tie all the files together? How do they do queries?” Alyssa asked.

David gave her a look like she was speaking a foreign language.

“I know what each of those words means, but I have no idea what you just asked me,” he conceded.

“Do you want help?”

“You can figure this out?” David asked with sudden hope.

“You do know that I’m working towards a combined Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science and Business Administration, right?” she asked.

“And you’d be willing to help me?” he asked.

“In my Data Structures and Object-Oriented Design class, we have an assignment to create interconnected databases. This would be a challenge, but we would help each other with our projects. Once I load the information into a database, it’s just a matter of writing a program to give you what you want,” Alyssa explained.

“That would be great,” David said, both excited and relieved.

He’d all but decided he would have to join the shoe-shopping group to turn in an assignment. He’d even figured out what kind of shoes he would be willing to drive all over the county to look for. That assumed he could talk his professor into joining the group since the prof had already declared that the groups were set. Then he worried again when Alyssa gave him a look that he recognized as the one she got when she was about to call him a ‘horse’s ass.’

“You can actually get the full data, can’t you? You aren’t just getting the sample information you have here?”

“Uh, yeah. I think so,” David said.

“How will you get it?” she asked.

“I had Lexi, my PA, call the county to figure out who I should talk to. When I called, the lady in charge was super nice and even invited me down to meet her staff. I agreed to take them all out to a team lunch as my treat. I don’t think it’ll be a problem,” David said.

Alyssa’s eyes all but rolled into the back of her head when she heard how he planned to obtain the data. Before David could find out what her problem was, class started.

Their midweek baseball opponent was UC Irvine. The Anteaters—a truly horrendous mascot name—were hovering around ten games under .500. His teammates had dropped two of three games over the weekend, so they needed a game to remove that bad taste from their mouths.

Coach Deneau had decided to shake things up and had announced that David would lead off that night. When he went out to center field to start the game, he saw the stadium was three-quarters full. He’d given Cassidy his tickets and saw she was sitting with the friends who’d gone on spring break with him. Allard and Seamus must have given up their tickets, too, to make it happen.

The Anteaters went down in order in the top of the first, so David took the plate to kick off the bottom half of the inning. As he settled in, he remembered his five hitting steps: rhythm, seeing the ball, separation, staying square, and weight shift and transfer.

On the first pitch, David knew it would be a long night. UC Irvine’s pitcher threw him a curveball that was one of the best he’d ever seen. He followed that up with a slider that David had guessed to be an outside fastball. At the last moment, it dove towards the plate and was called a strike. He struck David out on the next pitch, which was a fastball that David had guessed was another curve.

By the fourth inning, the Anteater’s pitcher was well on his way to pitching a terrific game. He’d allowed a base runner in each inning, but the Trojans only had one run to show for them. Scott Martino, the Trojan’s left fielder, led off the fourth. He surprised the Anteaters by laying down a bunt to get on. Tucker Frost, the third baseman, came up and hit a long sacrifice fly to right field to advance Scott to second. Seamus Walsh, who played catcher, hit a screamer right at their third baseman, who decided to throw Seamus out instead of holding Scott at second.

The Trojan’s pitcher, Rex Winter, came up with two out and a runner at third. Rex wasn’t much of a hitter, so David was happy when he walked. There were now runners at first and third with two outs. With the score at 1–0, this was a big at-bat for David’s team.