Proud Papa...

Yep that is me.
My oldest daughter is graduating high school in the spring. She is a brain, has a 4.0, made a 29 on her ACT and is shooting for a 30 in December. She has great character, is a leader and will succeed in whatever she decides to do in life.
So approaching her graduation this spring from HS, She had to start thinking about continuing her education and what she wanted to do in life. Well she has always wanted to attend Southwestern AG Unniversity. I think it is from all the free T shirts she got at Preachers Kid Camp but she decided a couple of years ago that is what she wanted to do and she has not budged off of it. SAGU is a private institution, and private institutions cost a lot of $$$, somewhere around $20,000.00 a YEAR! Lets just say that is a significant chunck of my salary in a years time. To put into perspective that is more than we pay on our house payment, both car payments and my motorcycle payment plus the insurance it takes to insure them. Yeah, I just broke out into a cold sweat also...
So we tell her, you need to make good grades to get good scholarships because we can't do much to help pay for college. Then we started talking about maybe an athletic scholarship. Is it possible? Well she is a good athlete, but is she good enough to play college ball? She had the height, thanks to her dad she is almost six feet tall, but did she have the skills to play at the next level. Well she arranged a tryout at SAGU last week to practice with the team to see if she could compete. I told her, you are still just a HS Senior, seventeen and you are going to be playing against girls 3 to 5 years older than you, you don't have to dominate, just compete.
Well she goes out to warm up and the coach comes in, gives her the once over and shags balls while she was shooting to warm up. She missed her first couple, then she found her rthym and started knocking down shots. She is pretty good from fifteen feet in, and she kept floating farther and farther outside to where she hit at one time seven in a row from just inside the three point arc. The coach was grinning as she hit on after the other, we found out why after we saw his other big players range is only about ten feet.
So the other girls come in and it was so fun to just watch them size each other up. C ends up not just practicing but scrimmaging agaist the starting five and she held her own. She has some things to work on and she still has another year of maturation but from what she showed the coaching staff they agreed that they wanted her for next years team and offered her a "starters" scholarship which roughly is half the cost of school. Mom and I get a ten percent discount for being ordained so that leaves roughly forty percent to be covered by academics which I am hoping will happen.
So C if you are reading this, I am so proud of you and the hard work you have put in. No one can ever say you were given anything, everything you accomplish was earned with hard work and sweat. Keep working hard, be a leader and GOD will give you the desires of your heart, just like he did with your college.