When Ed read the piece I wrote last week about ‘Minitramps,’ he said, “You need to write about “The Volleyball Incident.”
Yikes.
All one of us has to do is to mention “The Volleyball Incident” to the other and a cascade of vivid memories re-appear. It was one of those moments from adolescence that is ingrained on your brain. It stays with you forever.
For starters, let me tell you about our middle school P.E. teacher – for our purposes here, I’ll call him Coach Baldwin. He had a number of rules. As a bunch of knucklehead middle school guys, we weren’t used to any of that. We quickly learned that if you violated a rule in his class, you’d pay. A second rule was if any one person messed up, everyone would pay.
I guess that would be how a college basketball team teaches discipline. Or even a high school team. For middle schoolers, it seemed very stern. Nonetheless, that is how we were taught.
When you dressed out, everyone was to line up with their toes on the end line of the basketball court. If you didn’t do it, everyone ran. If one person talked while he was talking, everyone ran.
And when you ran, it wasn’t a case as simple as running a few wind sprints. We did the drill called a ‘suicide’ (I’m guessing there’d be a more ‘P.C.’ term for that these days).
Anyway, in this drill, you ran from one baseline to the foul line, you reached down and touched the floor and then you ran back. Then, you ran to the half court line. Same thing. Next, you ran to the free throw line on the other end of the court and touched the line. Then, you came back. Finally, you ran from end to end.
Sometimes, you did it twice.
Needless to say, you didn’t want to mess up – or you didn’t want any of your classmates to mess up – in his class.
Another key rule our teacher had was that he took fastidious care of the equipment in his class. He took great care with the surface of the basketball court as well. These were just givens you knew from the day to day interaction in the class.
So, we had all that background with us on the day of ‘The Volleyball Incident.’ That day started like any other in middle school gym class. We dressed out. We headed out to our end of the gym and, there in front of us, we saw a nice new volleyball net and several volleyballs.
Unlike the tumbling exercises I mentioned last week, the prospect of learning and playing volleyball seemed like a lot of fun. Maybe it seemed like too much fun for some of the guys. One by one, instead of lining up on the baseline, they began to go over and inspect the volleyballs. Before you knew it, there were about 10 guys out there shooting volleyballs up to the basketball goal.
You knew this was not going to end well.
Instinctively, Ed and I stood in our positions along the baseline. A few other guys with a bit of common sense did the same thing. About the time some of the shooters had gotten into the zone, our teacher came out of his office.
“Ayyyyyyyyyyyyyy,” he exclaimed. “What are you doing?”
And he began trotting down to our end of the gym.
After he had dressed the shooters down for a second he told them to line up on the line. Just about then he said something about lots of running in our immediate future and then as an afterthought, he asked for any of us who were not shooting the volleyballs to take a step forward. Seems like there were about five of us. He excused us from the running exercise. He told us to go sit on the stage.
The rest of the fellows, he said, “You better get ready to run.”
The rest of the memory is a blur – almost surreal. Suffice to say, they ran for the whole period. And when they weren’t running, they were doing calisthenics.
Ed and I watched the whole scene unfold before us. Suffice to say, there was a bunch of tired eighth graders when that session came to a close.
Sometimes, the decisions you make are the right ones. Sometimes you decide to do a certain activity; other times you decide not to do a certain activity. In that case, we followed our instincts and it paid off.
‘The Volleyball Incident’ still stands out as one of those unforgettable moments from our growing up years. Mark it down as “Lesson Learned.”
JG
Originally posted 1/14/2013
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