What's On My Mind:
Last Bear Standing by A.J. Kohlhepp
February 13, 2014
Having just returned from the U.S. High School National Championships
in Philadelphia, I come away with a number of observations and
questions that squash fans might enjoy reading. To wit….Even the
clearest of rules can sometimes get confusing when they run into real
life. Heroic actions and epic scenes are not always played out on
center stage. While the road to failure is paved with “no ways,”
the greatest adventures always start with someone saying “yes.”
To say that things are doubtful at the moment is to understate just how
ambiguous the state of affairs and how improbable the odds for one
particular competitor. This much we know for sure: we are down
9-2 in the fifth game of our final match at the U.S. High School Team
Championships, and the Bear on court is as sick as a dog, and the
Beaver she faces is just about ready to head home with a victory.
The player we are cheering for, a senior and three-year team member,
had doubts about coming on the trip from the very moment we started
talking about “nationals.” She was tired after a long January at
boarding school, nervous about keeping up with her academic
obligations, and sad about missing a formal dinner/dance on the weekend
of the event. After repeated conversations with me, her
teammates, her advisor, her parents and anybody else who might proffer
an opinion, she had finally relented and signed on. The day we
were due to leave, however, she started to feel a cold coming on, yet
she decided to simply grin and bear it. Extra tissues, extra
orange juice and extra cold medicine laid in for the duration, we had
hit the road to Philadelphia.
From a squash perspective, our tournament had gone well to that
point. The girls, led by five seasoned seniors, had secured a
strong victory in the opening round against Portsmouth Abbey (RI), then
come up just a hair short in a bid for the semifinals, dropping a 4-3
match to Darien High School (CT). The rebound effort against Mary
Institute – Country Day School (MO) saw Berkshire in dominant form once
again, cruising to a 5-2 win with both losses coming in five tough
games. A Saturday night on the town with the Berkshire boys’
team, competing in the same event, and a good night’s sleep got the
Bears to the cusp of their last challenge.
The final contest found Berkshire facing Brearley (NY), green-clad
Bears lining up to take on maroon Beavers. Berkshire’s #7
Chelsea, a late substitute who valiantly volunteered to fill a
teammate’s spot on te weekend, fell in five, while #2 Olivia grabbed
victory in three. #3 Clementina followed Silverman on the first court
and notched a similarly secure victory to put Berkshire on top, while
#5 Edeline looked to be following an arduous path of her own. At
a tense moment in the fourth game, Edeline dug a ball off the back wall
that glanced off of her opponent’s head. The referee deemed that the
ball lacked velocity to make it to the front wall, awarding the point
to Brearley. Rendering this decision all the more piquant was the fact
that the competitors teammate was serving as referee, as is the case in
all high school matches, with one player refing and her opponent
marking. (Although U.S. Squash stipulates that all participants
in the event must pass the online referee exam, our experience at
nationals suggests wide disparities in terms of the mastery and
application of the rules. My own team was actually commended and
congratulated by opposing parents for making calls honestly and
accurately, which struck me as a lovely but strange note. [Were the
parents expecting the girls to call it wrong, and on purpose?!])
The Brearley competitor played on for several points, then expressed
doubt about her fitness to continue and, stepping off of the court,
initiated a full concussion protocol on the part of the on-site
athletic trainer.
This is where things got really interesting, and where the letter of
the law proved little bulwark against the madness of the moment.
At the time of the “injury,” the Brearley player had impeded her
opponent’s ability to hit to the front wall, yet the Berkshire player
took a swing at a ball she should have paused on, making this a fairly
straightforward instance of “contributed injury.” Newly revised
rule 16.3.3.2 assumes an injured player who is able to return, while
current concussion protocols all but render that rule inapplicable in
this instance. If the trainer would not allow a potentially concussed
player to continue play, she couldn’t actually choose to return to the
court. This is a pretty sticky ruling around which to determine a
match, needless to say.
Uncertain at that juncture whether the #5 contest would continue, both
teams forged on. Our #1, Michaelann, fell in three games, which
evened the match tally at two each. Looking for clarity,
Berkshire sent forth two of its most seasoned warriors. #6 Serena
dropped a tight first frame, fumed at the water fountain, revised her
negative mindset and reversed the outcome in the second game, then
claimed the third by a more comfortable margin, and finally squeaked by
12-10 in the fourth. 3-2 lead for the Bears, with one to play and
one in doubt.
Like all of her teammates, #4 Allie had played hard all weekend,
winning Friday afternoon, Saturday morning and Saturday afternoon in
straight games but seemingly getting sicker by the match. By
Sunday morning, she could barely get out of bed. A cursory
warm-up got our last Bear as ready as she would ever be, and she came
out swinging to take the first game handily. My advice between
games was simple: keep up the pressure and destroy her will to
compete. Not only was my good guidance ineffective, it seemed to
backfire, for the Beaver bit back with a vengeance to even things at
one each. Allie, alternating between tissues and gasps after the
second frame, simply laughed when we recalled the sagely wisdom that I
had offered her a game ago. Then she went back out and won the
third in convincing fashion, leading all observers to assume the end
was near.
But Brearley would not go gentle into that good Philadelphia afternoon
and roared back to even things again. “You got this,” I reassured
Allie as she came off for water before the fifth, but her look
suggested anything but confidence. The final frame started badly
for the Bear and just kept getting worse, and before long our senior
found herself in a 9-2 hole. And this is where we came into this
tale.
“Come on, Allie,” exhort her teammates, as her opponent’s supporters
urge her in an equally boisterous manner to finish things off.
Taking a deep breath, wiping her hand on the side wall and raising her
familiar blue Dunlop for the return, Allie waits. Then she
strikes, and scrambles, and sniffles, and slugs her way back into the
match.
Ripping good lengths from both sides and punctuating them with
cross-courts – she is far too nervous and exhausted to attempt a drop
at this juncture – Allie climbs back into it, winning back a handful of
points before facing the first match ball at 10-7. Yet she hangs
on. Another point for Berkshire, then a contested let, then
another point for Berkshire, and another, and we are all square. 10-10
in the fifth game of the seventh match of our last day at the national
championships.
The worthy opponent from Brearley, sensing that she is on the wrong end
of history, puts together strong points in two of the next three,
earning herself two more match balls, but she cannot convert.
Allie finally serves for the match, and the clincher for the team
competition, at 13-12, and rips a hard, low, dying cross-court that
sends her wrong-footed opponent lunging in desperation. It is not to be
for Brearley. The comeback is complete, the match status is
resolved, and this athlete’s place in the small pantheon of Berkshire
racquet history is assured.
After a handshake with her opponent and the Brearley coaches, Allie
receives hugs and high fives from her teammates and coach (who quickly
retire to the bathroom to wash their hands). Then she sits down
on a simple blue bench amidst the whitewashed walls at the beautiful
Springside School squash facility, touch and go whether she will
get back up anytime soon. But she does get up, once again, and
makes it to the van, where it is instantaneously and universally deemed
appropriate (not to mention hygienic) for Allie to claim the ceremonial
shotgun position, wherein she sits slumped and sniffling for the next
four hours. Her parents meet us at a roadside motel on Route 22
just outside of Brewster, NY, and quickly convey her home to bed.
When I check in at noon the next day, she is still sleeping, and the
only thing prompting her mother to wake her at all is a doctor’s
appointment at 1:30.
You might have wondered along the way what was at stake here, and the
answer is not so very much. Neither team was in the hunt for the
national championship in any traditional sense of the term, as we
competed all weekend long in the fourth division; even this match in
particular would separate only the fifth and sixth place positions in
our bracket of the massive event (said to be the world’s largest squash
tournament, with more than sixty girls’ and nearly one hundred boys’
teams entered). In a certain sense, it wasn’t even the climax of
our season, for we end the winter campaign with a trip to the New
England Interscholastics at the end of February. Yet both players, and
both teams, invested all they had into this moment in pursuit of a
collective goal: victory.
For us, we got a great lesson in the possibilities of saying
“yes.” Just because we commit to something doesn’t guarantee that
we will succeed, but a failure to commit almost always leads to
failure. If I have imparted any wisdom to my players in the last
dozen winters, I suspect it is this: you have zero percent chance
of hitting a ball you don’t swing it. Just say yes. Give it
a rip. You may be amazed by what you can accomplish. And on
one crazy Sunday in Philadelphia, we got to see what a reeling Bear
could do when she refused to let “no” into her vocabulary.
photo
courtesy A.J. Kohlhepp
About the Author: A.J.
Kohlhepp first picked up a squash racquet at Trinity College (before
the Bantams’ perennial championships commenced).
An English teacher by trade, he has coached boys’ and girls’ squash
over the past dozen years in addition to various other duties at
Berkshire School (Massachusetts USA), where he resides about 100 meters
from the squash courts, with his wife (a real writer) and children
(beginning squashers).
What's On My
Mind is a column by rotating writers.
Contact DailySquashReport@gmail.com
