Freshman Year

Gerhardt’s first season at Trinity was very much a learning experience. Despite Almquist leading the team in scoring and rebounding, the team had gone 11-14 and Gerhardt was utilized off the bench for a majority of the season (Team W-L Record, n.d.). Coach Henry preferred not to mess with the starting lineups often and typically kept the same players starting in the previous season as the next season (Gerhardt, 2020). Although Henry’s coaching style was favorable to the juniors and seniors of the team, Gerhardt found his way into the starting lineup occasionally throughout the course of the season and had some impressive games, notably scoring 18 points in a 108-97 loss to McMurry (Hart, 1988). Gerhardt’s freshman season was memorable to him in another aspect – it was the first year in his playing career that he had access to a three-point line (Gerhardt, 2020). Throughout middle and high school, Gerhardt could not use his marksmanship to his advantage since every shot was only worth 2 points. Now that he had a three-point line, Gerhardt could be used to space the floor as defenders had to respect his ability to shoot. “I thought, man this is awesome!” Gerhardt recalled (Gerhardt, 2020).

The access to the three-point line was important to Gerhardt’s game, but coach Henry preferred to have the offense run through post-centric seniors John Spillane and Pete Almquist. Gerhardt, as a freshman, did not want to mess with the flow of the offense and obliged, although he later expressed his regrets in our personal interview: “I wasn’t there to disrupt anything. Although, looking back on it, I wish I had that mindset of a Steph Curry. I could shoot from anywhere and I just never wanted to disrupt the flow of how everything was, so I stayed within the confines of everything and did my part… As you progress in life, you look back and go ‘I should’ve opened it up a little bit more’… What are they going to do? I’m not going to get my degree, because I shot too much in basketball?” (Gerhardt, 2020). Off the court, his teammates introduced him to the Omega Phi fraternity and Gerhardt felt like he belonged to a small family that he could spend time with. That, along with basketball, helped him get through not having a good relationship with his roommate and shifting his major from computer science to business and communications (Gerhardt, 2020). Although the team’s record was not where Gerhardt had wanted it, he played well off the bench in his first season with the team and was getting acclimated to being a student athlete at Trinity University.