How the Special Olympics brought TCU, Indiana State together
Despite being the lower ranked seed, the TCU Horned Frogs will be hosting this weekend’s Super Regional instead of Indiana State.
Why? Because the Sycamores are hosting the Indiana Special Olympics. Terre Haute, where the school is located, is a city with just under 60,000 people.
Indiana State officials said having multiple large scale events would be too much to handle from a logistics standpoint. There wouldn’t be enough hotel rooms within reasonable distance of the field nor enough workers available for a Super Regional and the Special Olympics.
Instead of trying to squeeze everything into one city, Indiana State made the tough decision to travel to Fort Worth for this weekend’s Super Regional. Their loss was the Horned Frogs’ gain, but TCU fans didn’t just use the moment to celebrate the unlikely event of being to host a Super Regional.
Instead they decided to give back in the hopes of trying to help Indiana State make up the loss. Lupton Drinking Club, a TCU fan twitter page and podcast, took the Twitter after learning the news of TCU hosting Indiana State.
“Please join us at the LDC and donate to Indiana Special Olympics,” LDC tweeted. “Nothing can replace hosting a super regional, but we sure can help support our next foes in a different way. Click link & and donate, gang. #FrogsForSycs.”
That was around 7 p.m. Monday night. Since then, the post has been liked 1,900 times, has been retweeted a total of 700 times and has been viewed a million times on Twitter.
The response was so overwhelming that LDC eventually had to stop retweeting all the people that donated, because there were so many. Even the NCAA took notice, with the NCAA baseball page shouting LDC and TCU.
“Baseball fans prove yet again that they are the absolute best,” the page tweeted Tuesday morning.
When play begins this weekend, the games will surely be intense with a bid to the College World Series on the line, but both the decision by Indiana State and the gesture by TCU was a reminder that life is bigger than just baseball.
This story was originally published June 6, 2023 at 11:41 AM.
