Next week will be busy but will also be one of my favorite weeks of the athletic year. On Monday, I will get to travel to Savannah, Ga. to cheer on our women's tennis team in the Southeast Regional as they take on defending three-time national champion Armstrong Atlantic. On Tuesday night we hold our annual Athletic Awards Banquet in Moffatt Dining Hall at 6 pm. The awards banquet is a time for us to honor many accomplishments of our student-athletes during this past year and to say thanks to our seniors as they head out into the real world. We have a few special awards each year which take center stage at the banquet. The top senior student-athlete/s is presented with the Jake Todd Award. One of the criteria for this award is that the recipient not only be an outstanding performer on the field but maintain a 3.0 GPA as well. Ironically we have never had any problem with that, because history has shown that student-athletes at Erskine who excel in their sport also show the same discipline when it comes to grades.

We will also present the Karen Bell Award on Tuesday night to the student-athlete who best represents Christian mission during their athletic participation. This is a special award for me because Karen was a loyal Erskine athletics staff member for many years and still four years after her passing, I still miss her dearly. We also will unveil a new award this year which is a secret until Tuesday night but will be tied into service. Tuesday will also allow us to honor Jocelyn Smith, the 2011 Conference Carolinas Murphy-Osborne winner as the top student-athlete in the league. Jocelyn picked up the double play of accomplishments this spring as her softball team won their first-ever conference title.

The week will end on Friday with the Flying Fleet Festival at Cherokee Trail Elementary. The festival is is a field day for the students at Cherokee Trail run by our student-athletes at Erskine. Three years ago when we first started the festival I worried that our student-athletes would complain about taking time out of Reading Day to come help out. What we have seen has been totally different. The majority of our athletes have just as much fun at the festival as the elementary kids. It is a great community engagement program for us and helps our student-athletes give back to the Due West area.

So next week is going to be busy, but what a great time it will be for Erskine Athletics and for me personally, it makes me glad to be the athletic director. Go Fleet!

Happiness is winning two conference championships in one day! We got to feel that happiness Sunday in the South Carolina Midlands as our women's tennis and softball teams took home Conference Carolinas titles in Sumter and Hartsville. It is awesome to win a conference title, two in one day is quite extraordinary. For our women's tennis team, the victory was old hat, their 7th straight title. This one took a little more effort though than the previous six. With two matches remaining on the court, both in the 3rd set, Erskine had to have a win in one of them to grab the title. Tessa Rheault's come from behind victory was more dramatic than any of the Fleet's previous titles under Coach Calhoun Parr.

The softball championship was on a different end of the spectrum. The Fleet had never won more than two games in the tournament so winning four straight was a first. Over the last few years Coach Alleen Hawkins has turned around the fate of our softball program, so we knew it was only a matter of time before the first-ever title came our way. Riding the dynamic duo pitching of sophomores Kelsey Spurrier and Heather Richey the Fleet made history and for a brief moment even made Coach Hawkins speechless.

It was a special day for our Fleet. As my daughter and I drove through Florence on Sunday evening we stopped to take care of my two great vices in life: Coke Zero and Krispy Kreme Donuts. In the past year Florence, SC has added a Newspring Church campus and a Krispy Kreme, proving Florence has a great movement of God going on! Anyway, the theme of Coke is "Open Happiness" while the theme of Krispy Kreme is "Happy All-Around." You can judge me for my vices, but with two conference championships, a dozen donuts, and 12 ounces of Coke Zero, Happiness ruled the day. Go Fleet!

'Life comes at you fast' is a wonderful catchphrase for an insurance company advertisement because how real it is. The Peeler's life came at us fast two weeks ago today when our seven year old son Max took a full swung baseball bat to his head. It originally appeared to be a bad head wound head wound that needed stitches but as we soon learned was a fractured skull full of blood clots and infections. Over the next 14 hours Maggie and I lived with a lump lodged between our throat and chest wondering if everything would be okay. After over an hour in the operating room and awesome neurosurgeon at Greenville Children's Hospital had put our little man's head back together and removed the lump in our own bodies. Max's healing has gone well and just yesterday returned to school. It does not appear that there will be any long-term effects due to the injury. We are so thankful that God has restored our active 7 year old to his normal life. Now we have to deal with the over-protectiveness of being a parent who has watched their child suffer. Max doesn't want his life to change in anyway but his parents do. We will gradually become more comfortable with his child-like reckless abandon but right now we respect how fast life comes at you and how fast life can change.

One thing that was not lost in this ordeal was all the support our family received from all over the country. Max was prayed for by so many people that I know his doctor felt the presence of God as he worked on him in the operating room. Our family felt so blessed to have so many people thinking and praying for Max. It showed us how special places like Erskine, FCA, and Newspring Church are. We hope one day to pay all of that forward to people in need. But my real prayer is that life doesn't come at any of you that fast.