Boise State Quotes

In 1979 Griselda Drown was a senior volleyballer at Boise High, a terrifically tall girl with trunky thighs, slender arms and a volleyball serve that won an Idaho State Championship despite T-shirts claiming it was a team effort.

The Patriots had picked Brady in the sixth round, and he soon turned out to be one of the two or three best quarterbacks in the League, and absolutely perfect for the Belichick system and for the team's offense. So, as the team continued to make a series of very good calls on other player personnel choices, there was a general tendency to talk about how brilliant Pioli and Belichick were, and to regard Pioli as the best young player personnel man in the League. Just to remind himself not to believe all the hype and that he could readily have screwed up on that draft, Pioli kept on his desk a photo of Brady, along with a photo of the team's fifth-round traft choice, the man he had taken ahead of Brady: Dave Stachelski. He was a Tight End from Boise State who never a played a down for New England. Stachelski was taken with the 141st pick, Brady with the 199th one. 'If I was so smart,' Pioli liked to say, 'I wouldn't have risked an entire round of the draft in picking Brady.

Coach Beckner of Boise State explains the power of body language through the “thermostat” effect of the game changer: “When playmakers walk into a gym, they are thermometers. They take the temperature of the environment (competitiveness level, talent level, energy/emotion) and they adjust to it. They conform to the temperature. The game changer is a thermostat. He walks in the gym and sets the temperature. If the competitiveness level, talent level, or energy/emotion isn't where he likes it…he sets it. He demands, insists, and fights to have the gym and environment the way he wants them” (Phil Beckner, pers. comm.).

A dry lightning storm is a storm where the rain never reaches the ground. It evaporates in midair, trailing down from swollen cumulus clouds in long, graceful strands called virga. The electrical charges from a dry storm do not trail off before they hit the ground, however; they rip into the mountains like artillery. On July 26, 1989, lightning was hitting the upper ridges of the Boise National Forest at the rate of a hundred strikes an hour. Automatic lightning detectors at the Boise Interagency Fire Center were registering, all over the western states, rates up around two thousand an hour. By nightfall 120 fires had caught and held north of Boise, little one-acre blazes that eventually converged into a single unstoppable, unapproachable front known as the Lowman fire.

The push for diversity can lead to absurd results. Bone marrow donations almost never work unless donor and recipient are the same race, so non-white patients suffer because almost all the people who register as donors are white. In 2008, the National Marrow Donor Program announced that all marrow registries would be required to meet quotas for minority donors. Officials at St. Luke’s Mountain States Tumor Institute in Boise, Idaho said they would have to shut down their donor registry because the demographics of the region made it impossible to find more than a handful of non-white donors. Likewise, the largely white Amity Regional School District that serves the eastern suburbs of New Haven, Connecticut, stood to lose tens of thousands of dollars in federal money because it did not have enough non-white autistic students. The district had no control over who was diagnosed with the condition, but federal officials said a ratio of 38 whites, one black, and one Asian was “significantly disproportionate,” and threatened to withhold $67,000.