If you coach basketball for 35 years, you make a lot of friends and acquaintances.
A couple of those people are Matt Graves and Mark Slessinger the Head Coach and Associate Head Coach at Indiana State. I met Coach Graves first when he was an assistant at Evansville and was recruiting Trey Kaufman-Renn who played for us at Silver Creek and is now at Purdue.
What a great human being.
Same with Coach Slessinger.
I first met him when he was the head coach at New Orleans and my then 8-year-old son and I attended one of his practices.
That was 9 years ago and we have stayed in contact.
If you don’t know what the last couple of weeks has brought for the Indiana State basketball program, I’ll explain briefly.
About a week and a half ago, Coach Graves decided to get checked out because of the chest discomfort when working out. He could have shrugged it off, but he went and checked it out. The doctors found that he had serious blockage in his heart in three areas and ended up with triple by-pass surgery.
In what was a serious, scary situation, it helped that Coach Slessinger was on staff at Indiana State.
As Coach Graves was dealing with a serious issue and will rehab to get back, he has Coach Slessinger, and the rest of his staff.
Coach Slessinger has multiple years of head coaching experience, and has dealt with almost every issue that a program can experience.
What’s the big deal?
This isn’t so much about Coach Graves and Coach Slessinger, but in how everything happens for a purpose.
Yea, if you talk to those guys, they’re going to see providential intervention, and it doesn’t take a genius to see that.
Coach Slessinger left a head coaching position to be closer to home, he’s from Bloomington, Indiana, so that he could be close to his aging parents.
He felt that he should be closer to them, and after one year of being closer to his parents, his mother passed away and his father dealing with Parkinson’s has moved in with him.
Because Coach Slessinger, instead of turmoil and upheaval dealing with these situations, listened to his conviction, he was able to be closer to home, his children were able to spend much quality time with his mother and it made for a smoother transition in what could have been much more difficult than it already was in dealing with the passing of a parent. And dealing with an aging father.
That brings us to the recent events at Indiana State.
If Coach Slessinger does not follow his conviction, Coach Graves would not only be dealing with a serious health issue but also without someone who can lead his team through this difficult time.
This isn’t a story about Coach Graves or Coach Slessinger, I guess it sort of is, but how we think miracles do not happen anymore, that we see nothing but bad stuff happening, but that couldn’t be farther from the truth.
What is meant for bad or for evil can have a higher purpose and be used to glorify in that less than perfect circumstance.
Coach Graves is doing very well and should be up and running (figuratively) soon.
And Coach Sless, Coach Byron Jones, Coach Jake Odum, Coach Feig, Coach Tisdale and all of the support staff are going to work to help Coach Graves and the team to be as successful as they can be.
Each moment that occurs, there are thousands of miracles that happen to get to that point.
Coach Graves had to get the head coaching job at Indiana State.
He had to hire his staff, including Slessinger.
His assistants all had paths that led to this moment.
And because of this…everything’s gonna be all right.
Now, pay attention to what is happening around you and see the miracles in what we often think are happenstance.
They’re not.
Open your eyes and don’t just see, perceive and believe.
Coach Perry Hunter
phunter@scsc.school
