GETTING ORIENTED: BRAD BOTSCH: MR. EVERYTHING MOVES IN TO `ORGANIZED CHAOS' AT TOWERS WEST

Bradley Botsch is an alpha male hunting an education.

At Bernie High School, where the enrollment is about 250, he was Mr. Everything: captain and MVP of the basketball team, a shortstop-catcher-pitcher on the baseball team, honor roll student, member of the student council, class president as freshman, sophomore and junior, chairman of the prom committee, and named to Who's Who Among American High School Students.

In the summers he helped with youth basketball camps and umpired Little League baseball games. He's also a member of the Bernie Parks Board.

Now Botsch is just one of the 1,200 or so freshmen who will begin classes today at Southeast Missouri State University.

He spent Thursday, move-in day for freshmen living on campus, in a state he described as "organized chaos."

His plan to move in at 10 a.m. was thwarted by a requirement that the freshmen go first to the Show Me Center, where they were checked in and received their keys.

His roommates on the second floor of Towers West are Jason Crow, a friend since kindergarten, and Keith Crawford, a sophomore from Kennett. "He knows how the room needs to be," Botsch says of Crawford.

On move-in day, their room is another example of organized chaos, heaps of unshelved books and shelves filled with electronic devices.

So far, nobody has been able to find the phone jack.

But this is where Botsch wants to be. Both of his parents graduated from Southeast. His late father, Neal, played jayvee basketball for the Indians in the mid-1960s.

Sports consumed much of Botsch's time in high school, but he won't be playing intercollegiate ball. "I think it takes too much away from academics," he says.

His mother, Myra, thinks he'll quickly begin taking part in Southeast's intramural program.

Botsch loves hunting and fishing; in fact, he spent the last few days before school started fishing a Wappapello Lake. He has filled his mother's freezer with fish.

Mrs. Botsch is a kindergarten teacher at Bernie, where all 500 or so students in grades K-12 are housed in the same school. She has seen her son on campus and in the cafeteria on school days for the past 13 years.

"It seems kind of strange not to see him standing there in the lunch line," said Mrs. Botsch, whose school already is back in session.

One family story tells you a lot about her son, Mrs. Botsch says.

When he was only 4 or 5, an aunt took him to a circus. He wanted some cotton candy, but the line at the concession stand was long.

He went anyway and returned very quickly with his cotton candy.

The aunt asked him how he did that. He said the line was long so he went to the front.

"He's very aggressive," she says. "When there is something he wants ... he goes for it."

She says his competitiveness came from his father, who coached his Little League baseball and basketball teams.

Neal Botsch, who was a teacher, died four years ago.

Botsch has a sister, Tara Zeller, who lives in Jackson.

"I plan on running back and forth. You have to have a good meal every once in awhile," Botsch says. "You don't hear good things about cafeteria food."

She's the third teacher in the family, but the profession doesn't tempt him. "They don't make any money," he said.

He hasn't declared a major yet, but criminal justice interests him. He hopes someday to attend law school at the University of Missouri. The aunt who took him to the circus is an attorney in Poplar Bluff.

On weekends, Botsch plans on driving his '94 Chevy pickup the 60 miles home to Bernie to see his girlfriend, Tracy Silliman, a student at Three Rivers Community College.

He also can see a younger sister, Stephanie, who still lives at home. She is a sophomore member of the high school volleyball team, which has won the state championship the past three years.

The university scheduled a gauntlet of orientation sessions for the freshmen. Botsch and his roommates were to attend a Towers West floor meeting at 5 p.m. Thursday.

From 7-10 p.m., they planned to watch more organized chaos, wrestling, on TV.