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Your first trip to Williams Brice

AikenGameFan

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I remember very well my first ever experience. Oct. 16, 1976. 12 years old.
I was over at the State fair. I raised Dairy Cows in the 4-H club, and I had 1 there for my first fair ever. I remember looking across that parking lot and asking my dad what that huge building was. All I had ever seen was HS football so when he said it was a football stadium, I didn't believe him. The very next day he came in the barn where I was with my cow and said, "Come on, we're going to see a football game."
My dad had gone to the stadium and bought us a couple tickets. (Back then they did not even have scalpers out there yet)
We won that game 10-7 and I became a Gamecock fan that day.

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Great topic.

Mine was the 1984 upset of Florida State as a student. Long lines at the Russell House for student tickets that year, so I didn't go to many games, but I went to that one. We walked from Douglas along the railroad tracks at times out to W-B. After the game we went to a party down in Olympia. I don't remember how we got back to campus. LOL

Good times.

If it ain't swayin', we ain't playin'.
 
Great topic.

Mine was the 1984 upset of Florida State as a student. Long lines at the Russell House for student tickets that year, so I didn't go to many games, but I went to that one. We walked from Douglas along the railroad tracks at times out to W-B. After the game we went to a party down in Olympia. I don't remember how we got back to campus. LOL

Good times.

If it ain't swayin', we ain't playin'.
That was a special year for sure. I was actually in the Navy then and hated that they won. but I was out at sea when they played and did not even hear about until 3 weeks later when we got back to Norfolk.
 
My first trip to WB was to cut it into pieces with a cutting torch. The company I worked for was contracted to demolish the old West side plate riser stands to make way for the new concrete stadium Three of us cut it apart with cutting torches. Took us a couple of weeks and a lot of work with a few close calls to get it done.
 
My family did not have the gamecock traditions so no season tickets growing up or anything like that, even though my dad workedfor the University. And money was tight so we didn’t go to any games. In HS, we had some friends that had extra tickets to a game that they invited me and my brother to. I think it was maybe in '88. Can't remember who we played.

I was in Boy Scouts and our troop had access to one of the banks on Bluff rd to sell parking parking. We would go there and do that as a fund raiser once or twice a season. We would listen to the pregame on the radio and and wave people into the parking lot. That was during the Todd Ellis years.

One year our HS football team played a game there I think for some kind of pre-season event that I went to.

It wasn’t until I was a student at USC that I started going to games more regularly. The ECU monsoon game in I think ‘96 comes to mind in particular.
 
When I was a student, I was more concerned with figuring out how I was going to make my way in the world more than taking the time to go to the sporting events.

Rather than do the assignments in between classes during the day like a regular workday, I would find a desk down in the Cooper Library and work on them there at night. That was more of a routine you had to have in high school more than anything else, but I didn't have a clue back then.

That's the complete opposite of what you do in the real world. Any extra work I have to do now is usually done on Saturday mornings from 9-12.

My routine in college seems very backward and unproductive in hindsight, but I had to figure everything out on my own as my parents never went to college. My dad went one semester at a local college and that was it.
 
My first trip to Williams-Brice was in August 2001 when I was a freshman. It was the first weekend after moving in and they had a, for lack of a better term, pep rally for freshmen. They bussed anybody that wanted to go to and from their dorm. Guys on my hall had already found someone to buy us beer, so I'd had a few before I went. Don't remember much except for them telling us to go nuts during the 2001 entrance, as if we wouldn't figure it out on our own. Second trip was a week or 2 later for the opening game of that season against Boise State.
 
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