Joke's On You: A Serious Article

With the end of the winter sports season quickly approaching for most with E/A, I’m starting to realize how much I’m going to miss the only thing that’s kept me going during this awful, awful, cold winter term: squash. Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not about to write a degrading article about my own sport which trashes it as barely a physical activity - I really mean what I’m going to say. But as I sit here atop my bed, sweaty from the physically taxing match we just played against Andover (Varsity lost, JV won), I’ve been thinking about the things I’m most certainly going to miss, big and small. If you’ve ever been an athlete, Varsity or JV, you’ll know what I’m talking about. Seniors. It feels the same way each year. You learn to love someone, to admire them, and then they just stroll their way out of this hole and into college. As a prep, which unfortunately was not that long ago, a favorite memory of mine was pestering seniors in my dorm and on the squash team. Fond memories now flow back to me of taping people to walls, forming architecturally-savvy barricades to lock them in their rooms, and happily shooting them with Nerf guns as they walk up the stairs (oh wait, that was this year). Yes, that’s right, I was that prep. I was the prep that no one wanted to deal with, the one they sent the faculty on duty to go check me in. I swear I got them all quaking in their boots, but that was last year. Now that I’m no longer a grimy prepling, I’ve been more focused on forming connections and now I think I will really know what it means to be missing those people who were on your team. And to the senior athletes from the rest of your team, you’ll be dearly missed in seasons to come and the team dynamic will never be the same without you. Inside jokes. Whether they’re just with certain members of the team, or with the group as a whole, you’ll miss those jokes that you can immediately crack and elicit a smile when you get on court. Even the basic ones, like the animalistic noises certain members of the squash team are known to make, will be missed. In order to not make this article obnoxiously long, and to leave Humor readers unnecessarily confused, I will leave out the many, many squash inside jokes we’ve made over the past couple months. On another note, one would think that the end of season would leave a lot of answers, rather than questions. However, I have learned otherwise. Throughout the season you are often left wondering about certain questions that never seem to be answered. Like, can the coach even do the workout he planned for us? Why does the JV coach have us call him by his last name, but the varsity coach by his first name? Are the coaches actually personally offended when I am too sick to play/too injured to play/too bloated to play? Anyway, in all seriousness, winter sports and seniors will be missed, but at least we can now see the light. Only seven school days before finals - you can do it, Exeter.