“Some of you are a level above the others, but all of you have the same heart. All you have to do is find it.”
So sayeth my coach. He’s my first real coach. I’ve never been a team sport-y kind of guy, so I haven’t had much in the way of athletic mentorship since Little League. In Little League, coaches are sort of a cross between cheerleaders and babysitters. They’re there to remind you that you have to actually run toward the base after you hit the ball, or to alert you to the fact that a line drive is fast approaching your head, or to tell you for the last time to stop eating the pine cones behind the backstop.
But now I’ve joined the Wildmen, Wharton’s very own ice hockey league. Wharton is serious about club hockey. Over 110 men and women are members of the league, which has four separate divisions and six different teams. The A division consists of former college players, and to my untrained eye they look scarily good.
I’ve joined the D division. D is the catchall that includes people who have never skated before, people from countries where no one has ever seen ice, people who speak languages that don’t even include the word “ice.” At least, that’s how it was pitched to me. In truth, most of the people in the D division are returning second-years, ringers who couldn’t or didn’t want to graduate to the C division, and whose hockey skills are miles ahead of mine.
Still, I’m not a complete novice. Thanks to some practice on rollerblades, I can skate competently in a forward direction. And as long as other people stay the hell away from me and I’m not expected to touch the puck, I look reasonably graceful doing so. Things I can’t do include: stopping, skating backward, skating quickly, or manipulating small objects dexterously with an L-shaped stick.
That’s where coach comes in. I have a coach! The type of guy who puts us through lung-busting drills, who shouts at us to show some hustle out there, who gets pissed off if we don’t give ahunneranten percent, who delivers locker room sermons about how we’re playing for something greater than individual glory, something greater even than victory, something called…the team.
I don’t know coach all that well yet, but I’m hoping he is tortured by some inner demons (what he saw in the war, the temptation of the bottle, youthful promise unfulfilled, take your pick) that he will finally slay when we, a scrappy team of underdogs, steal the championship away from our preening and heavily favored rivals at Harvard with a miraculous, beat-the-buzzer slapshot delivered by…guess who? Guess, guess, go ahead, guess. That’s right, by yours truly, the last kid picked for the team, the kid from the wrong side of the tracks (yes, the dreaded east side of the tracks), the one in the hand-me-down clothes and taped-up shoes, the one— I digress.
And I have an actual locker room! It’s a co-ed locker room, so it’s devoid of the towel-snapping homoerotic camaraderie that I associate with real locker rooms (at one point I had to turn to the wall to deal with various challenges posed by my unfamiliar and unloved nadbaske— er, “athletic supporter”), but nevertheless my locker room is filled with pleasingly macho post-practice banter. True to role, the novice first-years meekly suit up while the swaggering second-years trade put-downs, make inside jokes that reference the legends of years past, and plan post-game outings to Bonner’s, the team’s favorite watering hole.
Several people have told me that Wildmen is the best thing they did during their MBA careers. I’ve been dying for the season to start ever since I got to Philly. Put me in, coach. I’m ready to play.
