Y11 Notes: April 15, 2024
Y11 Notes: April 15, 2024
Open your wallets. Today's the beginning of the best week in sports.
The NCAA basketball tournaments are over.
The Master’s has come to a close.
The WNBA draft is tonight. Even though NBA and NHL playoffs are still ahead, we’re more or less left with baseball to keep us occupied until the good season begins.
But what’s missing from the calendar is this: To me, today is the beginning of what is easily [one of] my favorite weeks in sports of the year.
I’m serious! April only just got started as far as I’m concerned.
Today’s the beginning of the Charitibundi Bowl, aka the EDSBS Charity Bowl. Spencer Hall, the best college football writer out there, has the origin story of how he began this with his friends (Holly Anderson, et al.), and I’ll link his story of how they got to regularly doing this incredible charity drive, but here’s a quick introduction of how to properly donate your dollars via the PDF that he and Anderson published yesterday in their newsletter:
The Bowl is an annual fundraising contest staged by the EDSBS Extended Universe in aid of New American Pathways (@newampaths), a full-service refugee resettlement nonprofit based in Atlanta. We’ve been putting on this celebration for well over a decade at this point, a number we were very happy to hit because in true EDSBS fashion, nobody can quite remember what year we did the first one.
Why New AP?
Many jobs and several mergers ago, a young @edsbs worked at one of their predecessor orgs. You can read more about that time, and what still moves us to work with these communities today, over at Channel 6.
THE RULES
The 2024 EDSBS Charity Bowl will kick off (football term) on Monday morning, April 15, via announcement on the New American Pathways Twitter feed. The game officially concludes on Friday evening, April 19, though we have been known to extend the contest into the weekend in pursuit of stretch goals.
The New AP Twitter feed will have the most up-do-date information regarding official stop/start times, and will also serve as your first point of contact for any issues during bowl week. Spencer and Holly will be camped there all week to field questions and celebrate especially creative donations.
The splash page (linked down below in the FAQ, for reasons) is your home for everything else: A portal to submit your actual donations, a running (unofficial!) tally of all the money we’ve raised so far, and links where you can learn more about New AP and their work.
HOW TO PLAY
Once the launch has been announced, hit the splash page and navigate to the dropdown menu. You will see a long list of schools with football teams. Select the team you want to compete under, and type in your donation amount. By tradition, donations are typically made in the form of a football score or statistic that has sentimental value to the donor. $70.33, for example, in memory of West Virginia’s infamous Orange Bowl romp over Clemson, or $26.28, to honor Barry Sanders’ world-beating single-season rushing record. At the end of the week, the school with the highest donation total will be declared the winner.
You’ll also have the option to make this one-time gift a quarterly or monthly recurring donation, which will earn a year’s worth of multiplier points for our scoring purposes. Example: You’re donating $100 on behalf of Vanderbilt (it’s imaginary!). If you make that donation a $100 quarterly pledge instead, Vanderbilt will be awarded a full year’s worth of donations to their team score in advance, in this case $400. A $100 monthly pledge will add $1,200 to the team score.
(Note that recurring gifts, as well as corporate matching gifts, are not going to show up on the splash page running total, since we have to enter them manually.)
Now comes the good part: TIME TO BRAG ABOUT YOUR GENEROSITY ONLINE. Post your donation receipt (don’t forget to redact any identifying info)! Tag Spencer. Tag Holly. Tag New AP. Tag your school and your school’s famous alumni. Cheerfully bullying your friends and rivals into joining the game themselves is how we keep this operation growing.
And if you’re not influenced enough to donate to the cause yet, that’s A-OK! If you’re not going to help this cause through monetary means, that doesn’t make you a bad person or whatever. But in the spirit of wishing you and yours a good Monday, I want to share this quick nugget from his 2022 piece:
Those are the steps of how I got here, and why I think this is the thing to do. I will always wake up feeling like I have just woken up on the wrong planet. I believe I am here because a long chain of humanity decided to survive, and did not do so alone, despite a hundred lifetimes of pain and human misery. I believe the only good thing binding anyone to anyone else is kindness, and not the reciprocal kind. It has to be grace, unrepaid and unrepayable, and given even when it hurts. That is the only antidote to pain, and the brightest light left on in the dark.
That is how I got here. The EDSBS Charity Bowl ends this weekend, and I hope you donate. But even if you don’t, I hope you reach out in your own way towards helping someone you don’t know, or may never meet. There is a word for that gesture, and it’s how we know we’re about to come home: Welcome.
The rest is simply opening the door.
MY BRAGGINGS
I am, by no means, a rich man. I can make some of the best [REDACTED, YOU DON’T NEED TO KNOW MY DAY JOB] in the city, but my skills haven’t landed me a BMW to just sit in my driveway. Also I’d never willingly buy a Beamer but that’s besides the point. Since bragging is encouraged, it’s probably worth my while to be transparent about how I’ve donated over the years.
Putting money where my mouth is, here are the receipts of mine that I’ve been able to find. The totals include additional fees.
(I apparently didn’t tweet out my first two donations? Either that or I can’t find them. You’ll have to trust me that I still have the emailed receipts from New American Pathways that I’m using to verify everything.)
2023: $124.07, in honor of the last three scores of EMU’s winning streak over Western Michigan (120-86).
2022: $149.88, in honor of Gary Patton’s 146 rushing yards in the 1987 Cal Bowl.
2021: $90.02, in honor of the 2019 and 2020 victories over Western Michigan (87-69).
2020: $58.90, in honor of Brogan Roback’s career TD-INT ratio (57-38).
2019: $30.11, in honor of… I honestly don’t remember what my reasoning was here? The original donation before fees was $29.23, but I don’t remember what I was referring to. I’ll remember in a few hours while I’m doing a remedial task at the day job, but I’m blanking right now.
GO DONATE RIGHT NOW
I plan on making my donation later today, but go ahead and make your donation too. Brag about your donation online. And be creative with it! That’s when this gets really fun if you haven’t done this before. Feel free to tag me on Twitter or in the comments with your donation, and I’ll be sure to share some of my favorites in an update post tomorrow.