Give Me Liberty...

Not worry, despite the title, this isn't going to be a political post. In fact, it's probably about as far from a political post as you can get. If I had to classify it as anything, I would probably throw it into either the sports category or the #wednesdaywalk community sponsored by @tattoodjay.

You might recall a bit over a week ago @mrsbozz and I traveled down to Virginia to watch our niece play softball with her university team the Radford Highlanders. Unfortunately, neither of the games were "at home", so we had to do a bit of traveling to get to each of the locations. On Friday night the game was at the University of Virginia, and then on Sunday the game was in the middle of the day at Liberty University in Lynchburg Virginia.

To say Liberty has a beautiful campus would be an understatement. However, it's a stark contrast to the small hometown feel the Radford campus has.

Liberty University was founded in 1971 by Jerry Falwell Senior and Elmer L. Towns as Lynchburg Baptist College. While the early graduating classes at the school were quite small, they have grown to reach about 16,000 student currently enrolled in the school.

A large reason for the schools rapid growth can be attributed to Falwell Junior via his mega-church and scores of "God's money" (as my brother in law puts it) flowing into the school. In fact, in 2007 the university only had about $259 million in assets. That has quickly skyrocketed to $2.5 billion in 2020, however, Falwell Jr. left his role at the university in 2020 due to allegations of sexual and professional impropriety according to Wikipedia.

I guess sometimes a beautiful vener can hide a multitude of nasty ugly stuff. Being a Christian university, the school has a fairly strict honor code that highlights the conservative and deeply republican values of it's donors and enrollees. That's about the only political thing I will say. As we were watching the softball game though, my wife and sister in law were commenting on how the Liberty uniforms weren't quite as form fitting as softball uniforms usually are. No doubt to keep the young men's raging hormones in check because why should it be up to men to control themselves right?

My brother in law was saying that Liberty has grown to be one of the top five softball schools in the nation. Oddly enough, the softball coach for Liberty is one of the daughters of the Radford softball coach. His other daughters coach alongside him at Radford. I think that is a big part of the reason Radford gets these fall games against Liberty. It's good practice for them to go up against top class talent, and the family connection doesn't hurt either...

Like the rest of the campus, the sports facilities were impeccable. I don't think I have ever seen a softball stadium with quite so many seats in it. At least not in person. My brother in laws father came to watch the games with us and he made a point of mentioning it's not often that you get to watch a softball game in a 1000 seat stadium.

Plus the views were pretty awesome too. The whole university sits kind of on the side of a hill, so you can see for miles off in the distance depending on where you are sitting.

As expected, Radford lost their first game against Liberty 10 to 4. However, their second game they played against Sweet Briar Community College was a win for them. We had to leave early, so I didn't get the final score, but we did stay long enough to watch our niece get a single and from that hit steal a couple more bases to finally make it across home plate!

It was interesting to visit Liberty University. I don't know as though I would ever want to go back there again, but there is a good chance I probably will as long as our niece is playing softball for Radford. It would be cool to see the inside of their football stadium sometime, because on the outside it looked absolutely amazing!

My Sports Account - @bozz.sports

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All pictures/screenshots taken by myself or @mrsbozz unless otherwise sourced