Hope Assistant Basketball CoachTom Davelaar is either really smart or just the opposite. In a post game interview after a four point win over winless Alma on Holland's AM station WHTC 1450, Davelaars stuck his neck out--big time. What he said was simple and sweet, ``we will win, we will find a way.'' He also added, ``If Hope comes to play on Wednesday, then Hope wins.''

These succinct words got me to thinking. Davelaars never struck me as one of the regular Hope crazies, like Glenn Van Wieren, scratching his head trying to find a way to beat Calvin or Hope's biggest fan the man wearing the once orange, now pink pants to every game. He just seemed different. So I will make my case for both points, crazy and brilliant and then you decide.

Brilliant, a word describing an idea or plan that one would never expect from his/her opponent. And that is exactly what this was, a move we (Calvin) never expected. It took the pressure and the heat from a raging fire of rivalry that surrounds the Calvin-Hope game and dumped it on him. This allowing his team and head-case head coach Van Wieren to prepare for the game somewhat in peace. Never before in his twenty plus years of being on the Hope bench has he ever said anything this outrageous before. He outright guaranteed a win for Hope. This maneuver is used often in pro sports to take the heat off of the team and focus it on the coach. Brian Billick, head coach of the former Super Bowl champion Baltimore Ravens, does it all the time. He makes a regular show of himself to levy some of the attention his direction. If you look back to the season after Ray Lewis was arrested for a murder charge, he was constantly trying to get the attention off Lewis, and onto him. Also, look to Scotty Bowman, he uses this technique all the time. He purposely says cutting things to the media about players to try to send a message to them, forwarding some of the pressures to himself. So who knows, maybe Davelaars is smarter than we ever gave him credit for.

Crazy, stupid, bone-headed, and off-color. All words that could describe what Davelaar was saying last Saturday afternoon when he made his proclamation to the world about the upcoming Calvin-Hope game. I mean what kind of coach puts your team in that kind of hole. You are already going into the Calvin Fieldhouse a place you haven't won in a long time, and you are stacking the deck against yourself. The Knights have dominated the Dutch the last five meetings, and are looking to do it again. Ask any Calvin Knight if that article got them going, and made them more fired up for the game, and their response will surely be positive. Davelaar may have dug his team's own grave by going on record and promising a Hope victory, but it sounds like that was a risk he was willing to take. Maybe, in those hours of scheming that he and Glenn do, that was their best plan to try to upstage Calvin. Well in the future, you may want to try a new approach.

Well after writing the first part prior to the game, I laughed myself all the way back to the Chimes office. My thought revolved around how Hope never had a chance to win the game, and I wondered if that started when Davelaar made his profound comments. Well for know, the Knights have the Flying Dutch's number and will continue to have it as long as Hope keeps putting bulletin board material in Calvin locker room such as Davelaar's crazy predictions.