College Kin

I happened to notice a piece in the local paper about two Virginia cousins playing on the state champion high school baseball team who have decided on Brigham Young University as their college (link). It’s interesting in what it says about family ties and the place of BYU as part of those ties for some families.

Just before Matt Favero pulled the trigger on his college commitment Wednesday afternoon, the Madison rising senior pitcher had to make one call.

On the other end was Pete Nielsen, his cousin and fellow Warhawks rising senior. The two had played baseball together their whole life, and with Nielsen having narrowed his own recruitment to Brigham Young and Virginia, Favero thought his close relative would be interested to hear his college choice.

“I called him and said, ‘Hey Pete, I’m about to commit to BYU,’” Favero said. “I think maybe he was waiting for me to do it; I don’t know.”

In some ways, Favero was right. Even after watching Virginia hoist its first College World Series, Nielsen still felt a stronger tug on his heartstrings from BYU, the same school for which his father, Mike, once suited up and where both his and Favero’s older brothers currently play.

“When Matt told me he was committing to BYU, I was like, ‘Sweet,’” Nielsen said.

Even the Washington Post sports section is running a piece on the sweetness of Mormon life?

For the rest of this post I’ll repeat something I wrote nine and a half years back at Millennial Star:

One thing I liked about BYU was the presence of families. I’m not referring here to spouses and young children, though they added to the wholeness of the place, too. I’m remembering the siblings and cousins.

So many of the people I knew there, I knew as a brother or sister of someone else. I believe I knew more of them for knowing them with that added context. I remember three cousins who lived together in an apartment near mine. Once I bought a used abstract algebra text and found my cousin’s name in it. It gave a texture to society to have unbreakable bonds coursing through it. And at which other schools could I have taken a roommate’s aunt out to a movie?

Such relations added to my happiness. My sister and I shared a couple of years there. Our time studying together at the top of the Eyring Science Center is precious to me. We would meet at 6:00 and enjoy the sky dawning before us. School buses would shuttle up and down the hillside. We would go over chemistry together, or Frieda would ask me questions about calculus, or we would study separate subjects with interspersed conversation. It was always fun when people who knew us separately would learn our connection; it was as though scales were falling from their eyes and new realms of awareness were flooding their minds.

Later I studied at another school. The students there were all intelligent and capable, but there was a dimension of life completely absent from the place. I felt bad for all those atomized individuals for whom family connections were a completely personal matter. I was poorer for not meeting their cousins.