Revenge of the Nerds

Most teams don't dwell too long on one victory with coaches always pushing their players to move on to the next game, but with Caltech, the coach may be encouraging his players to dwell on this victory for as long as possible. Why? Because Caltech's win over Occidental College the other night was the team's first conference win since January 23, 1985.

Caltech probably went into their game Wednesday night with the same feeling that they've gone into every conference game with, looking optimistic on the outside, but feeling gloomy, distressed and fearful on the inside. There was no reason to feel very optimistic; the Caltech Beavers had lost their last 310 games against fellow teams from the Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference; no one on the team was even been born the last time Caltech men's basketball won a game. Their opponent Occidental College was 12-13 on the year, not great but better than Caltech's 5-20 overall record. So why would this game be any different than the rest of them? Because of a senior named Ryan Elmquist.

Elmquist, a computer science major and future software engineer for Google, had one free throw to hit to win his first conference game as a Caltech Beaver. Elmquist, a forward/center, has by no means been automatic from the charity line - on the year, he had only managed to hit just over two-thirds of his free throws - but with 3.3 seconds, in his last game as a Beaver, he let it rain from the line and finally, the streak was over.

Slumps are scary, aggravating, unnerving, etc. for athletes, for coaches, for fans, for everyone involved with the team that is going through the slump. There is an unmentioned feeling that everyone on the team has, a questioning of one's ability and whether they actually are as good as the team on the other side of the court is. The longer a team goes without winning, the more it forgets about what it feels like to win, and the more it expects to lose. And on top of that, I'm sure at least one guy on the Caltech team was calculating the probability of the team winning any of its conference games, a number that was probably never too promising.

But slumps do end - teammates pick each other up, helping one another work things out, doing whatever possible to accomplish the task at hand, to win a game. And maybe that's the main reason why slumps and losing streaks end, because athletes live in the moment, not focusing on the past or future, only the present, only the singular game at hand. In that moment there are no other games to worry or think about, no losing streak to fret about, no slump to agonize over, just the one single game to win.

The Caltech student body may not dwell too long on this win; Caltech is more of a school concerned with winning Nobel Prizes (which they have 31 of) than athletics (Caltech has year-in and year-out been the laughing stock of the Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference in all sports, besides fencing, the one sport Caltech is D-I in). Still, those linked to Caltech basketball will most certainly be savoring this win for a long time, because as they can attest to, no team ever knows whether its next win will come tomorrow or twenty-six years from now.