Ritual

This is another in the “Sunday Story” Series. There’s nothing “political” here – no great moral outcome or outrage. Just a story about ritual – and me.

Schedules

Many of my classes at Denison University in the 1970’s had “high stakes” testing.  Two written exams; one in the middle (mid-terms) and one in the end (finals) made up the entire grade for four months work.  There was no room for error, for having a “bad day” or failing to prepare.  Blow the mid-term, and there really was no coming back.  Blow the final, and you wouldn’t even know until you left campus and arrived home.

So studying for exams was serious business.  The week before exams there was always a “pattern”:  starting with re-reading underlined texts ( there were highlighters back then, but I didn’t use them).  Then it was onto the pads of notes.  I’m left-handed, so Spiral Notebooks were never my friend.  The spiral always got in the way.  And since for most of my college career I anticipated going to Law School,  “legal pads” were absolutely necessary for note taking. 

Before exams ever began, I wrote a “schedule”.  How many days until the first exam (we had a “study week”), how much time between each test, how much effort I needed to make for each class.  There was an organized process, that paced me through to the last exam on the last day, before I loaded the Volkswagen and headed out.  For those who coached with me over the years, they know – there’s always a schedule.  That started early.

Pancakes and Pennies

I’d study until the night before an exam, going so far as to write “sample essays” of the possible exam questions.  But at some point, usually past midnight of the day of the exam, we headed to I-Hop (International House of Pancakes) in Newark for a late-night breakfast. I put all the study materials away.  When I was done studying, I was done – there was no “cramming” at the last second to confuse and distract me.

But there was one last ritual to perform, to symbolize the completed preparation.  I  lived in Crawford Hall at Denison, farthest to the East from the Academic Quad.  The walk to the main quad passed in front of Swasey Chapel, and in front of the Chapel was a sundial.  That exam-eve night, after returning from I-Hop, my friend Tony and I would stand at the sundial, and throw pennies off the hill and into the darkness, chanting Julius Caesar’s ancient invocation as he crossed the Rubicon:  “Alea Iacta Est”.  We studied, we prepared, there is nothing more to do:  the die was cast.

The Die is Cast

That ritual always served me well on those exams.  I went into the tests confident, and prepared, and other than trying to keep my handwriting legible in the “Blue Books” full of answers, I  did well. (As a career teacher, I am glad that my recent students could take exams by typing rather than writing – I feel badly for the professors who had to decipher my scrawl).

Later as a Coach, “Alea Iacta Est” became important in my strategy.  When training track and field athletes, there is a tendency to try to do “one more thing”, one more workout, one more vault, one more throw.  It was important to know when to stop, when that next interval or attempt wasn’t worth it.  “Ending on a good one” was important mentally, but ending before an athlete was exhausted was critical.  That was even truer at the end of the season.  Rest became more important than effort – but the pressure to do “one more thing” was intense.  “Alea Iacta Est”– or as I learned in rural Pataskala when I first arrived – “the hay is in the barn”. 

Sprinter’s Mind

As an athlete I had personal “rituals”.  My first really competitive sport was swimming – with all it built in customs.  “Shaving down” for the big meet seemed like such a good idea, slipping through the water like a shark:  until it became a “blood-letting” like the shower scene from Psycho.  I determined I needed the red blood cells more than the “mental edge”.  But being clean and shaven (at least my face) before the meet, any meet, became a ritual for me, in swimming, wrestling and onto my track career as an athlete and coach.  

As a track athlete I had the “sprinter’s mind” of always being warm.  I was a two sweat-suit guy, even on the hot days.  I was usually soaked through before I ever got in the blocks.  But as a coach I envied my peers who wore track warmups to their meets.  I did that a couple of times and we had horrible team performances, so sweats were out for me.  Shoes weren’t that important, on bad weather days boots were just fine, and getting a “Teva Tan” from sandals at the summer meets was great.  But there was the base:  either blue jeans or khaki shorts and the coaching shirt.  For really, really hot meets I might switch to a team t-shirt, but that damn black coaching shirt was always in my bag.  When the pressure was on and the big races up, it went back on.

Damn Shirts

I finally retired that shirt after the 2016 track season, replaced with a different one – but it looked just like the old one.  That one became “that damn shirt” for 2017.  It’s still hanging in the closet, a lingering reminder of coaching the “black and gold”.

And speaking of shirts – never, ever, no matter how “sure a thing” it might be – order championship T-Shirts in advance of winning the championship.  It took a rival team in the Ohio Capital Conference to prove that was a bad idea.  They were so sure of themselves:  they wore their new 2009 Team Championship camouflage shirts to the prelims of the 2009 Championship meet.  My kids noticed, and some words were spoken between the teams and even my team and their coaches.  I put a stop to that – but don’t think I didn’t use that shirt as a motivator for the finals.  We won the Conference by almost fifty points.  I don’t know what our competitors did with those red, white and yellow camo shirts.

Location-Location-Location

I’m not obsessive compulsive – at least not too much.  But as any team I’ve coached will tell you – I have a spot.  There’s a spot for the team camp, a place for our team warmup, even a spot where  I want to stand to watch the pole vault or yell “ARRRRRMMMS” for the 4×400.  At Heath we camp on the high jump end just beside the visitor bleachers.  At Wheeling it’s on the fence at the back-stretch, and at home, it’s across from the south long jump pit.  

And me – I want to be at the events I directly coach – or on the backstretch.  Always on the backstretch – I can yell, I can talk, and occasionally even swear, without being in the middle of a crowd.   

But the ritual that prepares me best for coaching (or officiating these days) is “the walk around”.  Sometime after we arrived at the track, I’d “take ownership”.  I would walk around the track, looking at field event areas and exchange zone colors; checking how the timing system was set up and where the clerking area was.  I’d learn the place, and organize in my mind how the meet was going to go.

Saying Goodbye

It didn’t always work, but the ritual got me ready.  And that last year in cross country at State, and a few years later at the Regional in track, I also took a moment to take it in.  I did a mental check, making sure that it was “OK” for me to go.  I remember standing at Scioto Downs by the south gate, looking across the infield, knowing I was going to retire.   I waited for the onset of “panic” that would let me know: I couldn’t go through with it and resign. But there was no panic.  I was so confident in what Coach Jarvis would do, the program would only get better.  That’s how I knew I was ready.  And John has proven me right.