SPRINGFIELD — Any time Dylan Bekemeier goes back to Republic, he’s got to have something to fill the hours.
After spending so much time on the court and the golf course, capturing a state golf title and two basketball championships with the Tigers, the routine of practice doesn’t always cut it.
“When you play the sports as long as you play them, just shooting and hitting, it gets repetitive,” he said. “You just do things to keep it entertaining.”
Now a two-sport junior at Evangel, he averages 6.7 points per night for the Crusader basketball team and also captured the Evangel Fall Invitational with the golf team last September.
With that plus school, he has still had time to put together an impressive collection of trick shot videos, his main venues being the gyms at Republic and the Ashcroft Center, any golf course, and his old basement.
“I’ll just kind of thing about something and it’s like hey, I should try that. If I notice I’m getting close, I may as well try to record it and see if I get lucky. People ask: ‘How long did that take?’ A long time.”
People usually see the finished product: wacky bounces, unorthodox dribbling, long distances, all resulting in some round object entering an enclosed space.
“They don’t see the multiple, multiple, multiple fails.”
Like the one for this story that took (number omitted) attempts.
“There was one that actually took me two days. I couldn’t do it so I came back the next day and had to finish it. I had to land it on the chair first and then bounce it over the table and land in a cup.”
“You get to the point where you do something and you tell people and they don’t video. So, you just get it on video.”
Luckily for Bekemeier, he may be one of the most persistent Crusaders on campus. Just watch above.
