For the student who skipped last Thursday’s classes to watch the NCAA Tournament, for the student who sat in the back row on his laptop with March Madness On Demand on the screen and the ‘boss button’ easily within hand and for the student who cursed Belmont’s final five seconds, here’s something that will make you jealous.

There’s a Syracuse sophomore down in San Antonio, spending three weeks in a motorcoach with six flat-screen televisions, the Internet right in front of her with no task but to watch as much college basketball as possible and jot down notes on a blog about those games. All expenses are paid, and if she does this dutifully, she will attend the Final Four.

And you thought Acapulco during Spring Break was paradise.

Her name is Stacey Rice. She’s a broadcast journalism student who received an e-mail from Newhouse last month advertising the Coke Zero Dream Job. The promotion looked for passionate college basketball fans, with the winners blogging from San Antonio in the three weeks leading up to the Final Four and, upon completion, going to the Final Four with former San Antonio Spurs All-Star Sean Elliott. (Apparently Mitch Richmond and Jimmy Jackson weren’t available as high-scoring swingmen from the 90s.)

Rice applied, writing an essay about Syracuse basketball and a photo of her in Syracuse garb in her room at home in Oswego, N.Y. The room is a shrine to SU basketball. In the photo, Rice held an Orange sign that read ‘Pick me Coke Zero! Go Orange!’ Rice’s fanaticism was enough to convince the selectors to provide her with a chance for a dream job – along with three other college students – from a pool of more than 500 resumes.

‘I thought, they created this contest for me,’ Rice said. ‘But I didn’t think I had a chance.’

She learned of her selection right before Spring Break and quickly negotiated with teachers a way to miss three weeks of classes. During her off days, she completes homework and e-mails assignments to the professors. This is the lone solemn part of the story. The rest of the time is devoted to college basketball, blogging and eating Papa John’s.

During game days, Rice doesn’t leave the trailer – nor is there a reason. It’s a 40-foot motorcoach with wireless Internet access, a pair of flat-screen televisions on the roof, one outside and three inside. Satellite television provides every Tournament game, and she blogs about the games on the laptops. It’s not Sports Illustrated-like insight – simply a college fan presumably speaking to college fans.

She provides some basketball analysis:

[ITALICS]My best friend who just got into graduate school at Pittsburgh is going crazy about their win and has changed her loyalty from the Orange to the Panthers. Pitt should go deep into the Tournament with the way [they’re] playing. They had a lot of points coming off the bench and were pretty solid from the free throw line (10-13).[/ITALICS]

She also mixes in some personal experience:

[ITALICS]To put into perspective our game day meals… let me end by saying: I just bit into a piece of chocolate, and it tasted like Papa John’s Pizza.[/ITALICS]

And this was just her first weekend. Rice has never written a blog before – before last week, she had never flown on her own before – and she is getting used to being in the spotlight. Her name was in USA Today and The New York Post, and television cameras waited outside her home for interviews. Rice joked her sister is already sick of people asking about her.

That doesn’t even factor all the other opportunities. There are tours of the Alamo and San Antonio’s RiverWalk, a Spurs game vs. the Los Angeles Clippers. Her days are spent in the motorcoach with fans walking by eager to see what and who is inside. Her nights are spent in a hotel room. And as the Tournament progresses, it only gets better.

Starting today, Rice will watch the Regionals on those six televisions, blogging along the way. On April 5, she’ll attend the Final Four with Elliott and the other bloggers. In between, she squeezes in class work and interviews. Hoping to become a sportscaster, Rice is collecting business cards from the media in San Antonio. She already met one Newhouse grad.

Rice laughs at the thought of her friends at school – or any college basketball fan at SU – having to juggle the schedule to glimpse the afternoon games. She is empathetic, because she knows the feeling.

‘I have a really busy schedule, and I know I wouldn’t be able to watch all the games,’ Rice said, before offering a caveat. ‘If Syracuse was in, I would watch.’

No school for three weeks. Watching the NCAA Tournament on six flat-screen televisions. Treated like a celebrity. Attending the Final Four with a former NBA All-Star. [ITALICS]And[/ITALICS] a mention of Syracuse playing in the NCAA Tournament.

Rice really is living a fantasy.

Zach Berman is the featured sports columnist for The Daily Orange, where his column appears weekly. E-mail him at zberman@syr.edu.

Published on March 26, 2008 at 12:00 pm