Dutelle’s Pitt athletics wish list speckled with stories

When I was a freshman, I made a list. Sure, it was a little different than what most… When I was a freshman, I made a list. Sure, it was a little different than what most 19-year-old Pitt newbies were doing at that stage in their lives, but it mattered to me, and it still does. It’s one of the few things I think I’ve managed to keep from that year.

It centered around things I wanted to see happen in Pitt athletics in my time here. There are the obvious ones – see a national championship or a major bowl game, sit front row at a game and get on “SportsCenter” or have one of your athletes win a Heisman-like prize – but those are trivial. Nobody wants to go four years without the possibility of seeing one of those.

I would say most of the scenarios I envisioned were more viable than any of the above for a school like Pitt. We’re not winning national titles in football anytime soon, and basketball, while closer, appears to have a few kinks to work out before taking the next step.

That doesn’t mean there haven’t been several incredible subplots sprinkled throughout the last four years at Pitt, though, and I think that one of the reasons I got involved at The Pitt News, as both a writer and editor, was so that I could be close to these events when they happened.

As with any list, some of my wishes came true. Others didn’t, but the ones that did made for some great storylines.

I wanted to see the Pitt women’s basketball steal the spotlight for a change. This actually did happen, but it wasn’t during the team’s stellar, record-breaking 2006-07 campaign. It actually came last year when, after the men were already out of it, Agnus took her team to the semi-finals of the WNIT. It wasn’t that they got that far, though, it’s that they rocked Fitzgerald Fieldhouse immensely, and it was incredible. For that week, there was only one basketball team on Pitt’s campus.

I wanted to see Pitt get a field deal done for the soccer teams. Imagine you’re a college soccer coach trying your darnedest to sell Pitt to a recruit. He or she comes down, sees the campus and likes it. You ride to the top of the Cathedral and check out the views. You stop at Primanti’s, and then you show him or her the Pete in all its splendor. Then, he or she asks you that awful question:

Recruit: So coach, where do we practice and play? (You were hoping he wouldn’t ask) You: Well, I’ll show you. We’ll need about two hours, though. You have a car? Good! We’re headed out to Indianola, Pa. That’s where we play all of our games