Rider Pride Game: A Night for Everyone to Cheer at Roosevelt
Sam Crowe gets a big assist on a slam dunk during the Rider Pride game at Roosevelt High School.
The challenge with this story is to explain how the Roosevelt girls’ and boys’ basketball teams had their best games of the year on a night when the schedule said both teams had byes.
Here are some clues:
- There were no bad calls.
- The crowd did nothing but cheer.
- Losing was impossible.
Okay, enough riddling; Roosevelt took advantage of Friday night’s midseason intermission to stage a game labeled Rider Pride. The varsity boys’ and girls’ teams and a bunch of special needs students from the school’s chapter of the Best Buddies program were divided into the Blue and White teams for a game that was kind of scoreless even though plenty of points were tallied on the scoreboard.
There are 18 Best Buddies high school chapters in Iowa. Besides Roosevelt, Hoover and North are among the DMPS schools involved. Since 1995, Best Buddies has paired students with intellectual and developmental disabilities in one-to-one friendships with classmates that might not happen otherwise in the halls and classrooms. The Rider group meets every Wednesday after school throughout the year, but Friday night was something special.
The student section of the stands was filled with face-painted fans. The band was there in full force, tooting and banging the fight song at every opportunity. The cheerleaders did their thing. A halftime dance troupe included some clumsy staff members looking for laughs at their own expense. But, as is always the case on Friday nights, the game was the thing. And it did not disappoint.
Usually the term game-face implies grim determination and there certainly was some of that look displayed by the non-varsity players. But there were also lots of smiles bounding up and down the court. And there were some unexpected basketball highlights. Maybe you already caught a couple of them on ESPN’s Top Ten Plays of the Day over the weekend. You know, Sam Crowe’s dunks?
Sam Crowe is part of the Rider basketball family, one of the teams’ student managers. He does not look nearly tall enough to get above the rim. But Friday night, with a couple of extreme assists from Mario Manuel, he reached those heights twice for emphatic throw-downs that rocked the house and made clear that this unofficial game absolutely did matter, even if it had no impact on any league standings or state rankings. Mario Manuel hoisting Sam Crowe all the way up to a standing ovation; that’s what Best Buddies are for.
“You can bet this is going to be an annual event,” declared first-year Roosevelt Principal Kevin Biggs about the first-ever Rider Pride game. “What a lot of fun!”
So even though the teams were tied at 22 when the final buzzer buzzed and no overtime period was played, this game absolutely is to be continued…
