 At the Navy game, all three-year old Luke Owen wants for Christmas is his two front teeth. His dad Brendan '88 owns a piece of Hoya Hoop history: as a 14-year old future Hoya, he won the half-time foul-shooting contest at Manley Field House in Syracuse on the day the Hoyas closed the place for good. Luke's grandfather Dennis Owen '51 (not pictured) played roundball for the Hoyas in the late 1940's
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| For the past six months, I have been working on a celebration of 100 years of basketball at Georgetown with a team of colleagues in the athletic department, led by associate AD Kyle Ragsdale and including Mary Jane Cratty and Kedi Milajecki of the basketball office, Kim Frank and Jordan Jarry of the sports promotions office, Mex Carey and Ben Shove of the sports information office, Dan O'Neill of the corporate sponsorship office and Allison Rubin of Hoyas Unlimited. Our work will culminate with an anniversary home game on February 10, 2007 followed by a gala dinner at the Ritz-Carleton Hotel. With the earnest support of Coach John Thompson III and AD Bernard Muir, the celebration promises to be the most magnificent and largest athletic-related weekend since the last Hoya final four in 1985 in Lexington. Within the extended family of Georgetown, the men's basketball program has been a singularly unifying thread for the past 100 years. Its centennial celebration is a commemoration not of an abstract idea. Rather, it is about the interweaving relationships, both horizontally and vertically, of thousands of people: players, coaches, managers, students, faculty, staff, parents, fans, administrators, and alumni. Their stories are myriad and only improve with age. Just as with holiday memories, they come alive when we gather and retell them. |
