The Independent Voice Of American Soccer Since 2009

Come play the Vince Binder Bracket Challenge!

Neil W Blackmon

On a perfect Atlanta spring evening in April 2010, I was attending a Braves-Cubs game at Turner Field when I received a series of text messages and phone calls from a dear, longtime friend, Jim Schultz. Answering the phone call would ultimately change my life forever.

My friend told me that another friend- my oldest friend- Vincent Binder- was missing, having disappeared from his home in Tallahassee, where he was a graduate student at Florida State, earlier in the week. Confirming I hadn’t seen or heard from Vince in about a week (we had been in the East Bay and San Francisco together shortly before that), it was easy to see how serious the situation was. No one- not family, not friends, not colleagues at Florida State- knew where Vince was.

A frenzied, tireless search ensued. After weeks that seemed like months, a body was found nearly 150 miles away from Tallahassee, in a field just outside of Jacksonville, Florida. The body was identified as Vince.

Vince was lost to violence of the most random sort: three Louisiana prisoners escaped from the labor camp detail they were assigned to and, in their desperate attempt to gain permanent freedom and avoid recapture, left a trail of crime and devastation in their wake. When they reached Tallahassee in a stolen truck, they encountered Vince, who was walking home after an evening with friends. That chance encounter, the statistical odds of which are mind-boggling, resulted in Vince being kidnapped and ultimately murdered when the risk of him surviving outweighed the risk of killing him to the men who took him.

As is almost always the case in acts of random violence, no one that loved Vince was able to say goodbye. What we have instead is his memory.

For me, that’s the memory of my oldest friend from high school, the gregarious, bright, warm, funny and kind young man “from Brooklyn” who embraced a shy, insecure and southern kid from Atlanta who had just moved to a (then) sleepy town in South Florida and was having trouble making friends. That friendship eventually bloomed into a lifelong friendship.

When my parents divorced, shortly after the move, Vince and another friend, Jim Schultz, invited me to join the debate team. Debate changed my life, and Vince was there every step of the way.  He was a better debater than me, a star when I was simply adequate in high school and immensely successful and great as a collegiate debater when I merely good.  Without Vince, I probably never would have gotten into debate. But with debate, I became a more confident person, a better student, a better researcher, and ultimately today, a better lawyer. As often as I look for work writing about soccer full time, there’s little chance I am an effective, zealous, passionate lawyer for my often abjectly poor clients if not for my friendships with Vince and Jim.

In the six years that have followed Vince’s death, I’ve changed the trajectory of my legal career to help the helpless, been married, started a family, made new friends and lost old ones. And I’ve thought about Vince most days, what he would be doing, whether he’d be proud of what I’ve become and what I am yearning to be. Above all, I’ve tried to live my life the way Vince did, with humor, unadulterated joy, kindness and passion.

I’ve also been unflinching in my support of one of Vince’s greatest passions: debate. In the wake of his death, a debate scholarship was established in Vince’s name. The Vincent J. Binder Fund is intended to honor his legacy in debate, as well as his passion for teaching. Like many aspiring debaters, Vince and I came from a school with a limited debate budget. Debate can be an expensive extra-curricular activity, so Vince, his family and my family had to make difficult sacrifices to pursue the passion. It is the hope of his family and friends that this award will assist other aspiring debaters who are financially limited in their ability to compete regionally and nationally, opening the high school debate field up to many more debaters and improving the lives of the recipients through their participation in what we know to be a life-changing activity.

So if you made it this far, you are probably wondering- what does this have to do with March Madness? Great question.

Every year, the largest fundraiser we do for Vince’s scholarship fund is the March Madness Bracket challenge. There are prizes for first place and second, paid for outside of the fund, of course, and every cent of the entry fee goes towards scholarships for kids who need it the most.

Look, you’ll probably enter a March Madness bracket contest this year. You’ll likely enter one that costs money too. And you’ll most likely lose. So why not enter a contest that helps kids and honors the memory of a great human being, lost far too soon?

If you want to play:

Go to http://urbandebate.org/How-…/Vincent-J-Binder-Scholars-Award