Team Bonding on the Road to TCU

Senior outfielder Jimmy Waters is back with another update about the joys of traveling to the team’s first series at TCU last weekend.

The trip began by getting on the bus with our driver J.B. to take us to Kansas City Airport. With this being the first time the team traveled anywhere by bus, senior Wally Marciel, made sure to remind the freshman that they still had the freshman duties of staying on the bus and cleaning it when everyone else got off. It’s a pretty nice feeling not be a freshman anymore with those responsibilities.

It seemed like everything was going smooth until Ka’iana Eldredge, Wally Marciel, and myself tried to check in to receive our boarding pass. We had no idea why we were holding up the huge line behind us and then we started thinking what we all had in common. We realized the three of our names are juniors (James Waters, Jr.).

KU baseball players wait in line at KCI Airport

They ended up sending the three of us to the same counter to open up more counters for people to check in, instead of having three Southwest employees working on the same problem. Brilliant idea. The lady trying to solve the situation was on the phone figuring out why the computer system would not allow us to check in. Turns out that the system was reading the Jr. suffix as a last name and some how that erased our date of birth too.

After about 45 minutes of standing next to the counter with our bags and wondering if we were going to even be able to get on this first flight to Dallas/Fort Worth, the people at Southwest finally figured out how to resolve the issue. The Jr’s were finally able to check in.

While waiting to get on the plane, Nolan Mansfield thought it would be funny to prank one of the freshmen Tyler Smith. Tyler left his boarding pass under the seat and Nolan grabbed it when Tyler was not looking. When Tyler realized he was missing it he began secretly looking for it. He was moving chairs, checking his pockets, and dumping out everything in his bags. When we asked Tyler what he was doing he would not admit he lost his boarding pass. He was telling us he was not looking for anything. Nolan let him sweat it out for a while, but finally gave it back to him when we thought he was going to go tell Skip (Coach Price) he lost it.

The pranks were not over just yet. While at baggage claim in Dallas/Fort Worth, Wally Marciel and I thought it would be a good time to get freshman Frank Duncan with “The Bag Swoop”. Since all of our travel bags have our numbers on them, it is very easy to take someone’s bag without being too obvious. When Frank’s came out, Wally grabbed it and took it outside to the curb.

We then decided we would grab Alex DeLeon’s bag also. Alex was standing right behind us when we took it and was blind to what we had just done. Wally was able to sneak it out with out him catching on. About ten minutes later Frank and Alex were the only ones waiting for their bags to come out. They both finally figured out that they were being laughed at and came outside to find their bags waiting on the curb.

Pulling pranks like this are always good for getting a laugh at somebody else’s expense, but they’re also great for team bonding. With so many new faces this season, that’s something we really need to do to bring everybody together.