Interesting fan letter about Beaver football players

Not much going on in Beaverland these days. Just waiting for spring football and taking in a few baseball games.

Here's a feel good tid-bit about Beaver football as things have been plesantly quiet this spring...

Albany Democrat-Herald - A truer look at OSU players

Terri Burr of Lebanon had an experience last weekend that sheds more light on football players at Oregon State than any number of second-hand stories in the news.

She wrote to Mike Riley, the coach, and sent me a copy of her letter.

On Sunday she took her 8-year-old nephew, Gus, who was staying with her and her husband that weekend, to a football clinic on the OSU campus sponsored by the Boys & Girls Clubs of Albany and Corvallis.


“I can’t tell you how impressed I was with the players who participated in the clinic,” wrote Terri, a lifelong mid-valley resident and OSU alumna (Class of 1989) who works as a shipping coordinator for Pennington Seed. “The fact that they were willing to spend an entire Sunday afternoon with a bunch of grade school kids was surprising and impressive by itself. When I saw how they interacted with the kids and actually seemed to be enjoying it, I was completely blown away.”

She added this vignette: “Right before the huddle at the end of the clinic, one little boy appeared to be lost and was crying. One of the players saw that the boy was having a hard time and stuck by his side until the boy found his dad — for five or 10 minutes. That player went out of his way to help that little boy.”

The players also did the kids other favors, such as posing with pictures and signing their footballs.

Terri Burr’s conclusion: “With the media constantly bombarding us with negative images, I think that sometimes we lose sight of how fortunate we are to have so many admirable student-athletes in our midst.”

That is great news after all of the bad publicity this time last year.