BOZEMAN — A life-changing basketball event happened Thursday afternoon at Petra Academy in Bozeman with the help of former Montana State basketball coach Brad Huse and a special guest.
Huse helped put on a clinic for kids in the second through eighth grades to help benefit Live The List, an organization that helps widows and widowers fulfill their life dreams after their tragic losses. Huse brought in guest speaker Austin Hatch, a former University of Michigan basketball player who has survived two plane crashes.
The first crash took the lives of his mother and siblings. The second killed his father and stepmother. Hatch miraculously survived each, and his message to campers is one he has had to learn himself: Life, like sports, has two halves, and how you bounce back from adversity defines who you are.
“The metaphor I’ll use is after a tough first half of a game, say you’re down 10 points, you don’t just go shake the other teams’ hands and say, ‘Good game.’ You got the second half, right? You come back out in the second half with new energy and with new passion and bring everything you got in the second half,” Hatch said. “And so I think that you need to carry over that same mentality into other areas of your life, too, whether it be sports or school, business, family, marriage, whatever it may be. So, even if things aren’t going as well as you’d like right now, there’s no reason you can’t come back in the second half with a new energy and commitment.”
Hatch will be speaking at a Live The List event in Big Sky Saturday at 6 p.m. For more information on Live The List, click here.
