Pre-Season: Pros and Cons
By HENRY WISE ‘27
At the end of this August, like every other year, students arrived early on campus for various reasons. In addition to E3, student leadership training, and proctor training, preseason was one of the reasons. What is preseason, you might ask? Preseason is a time for all fall athletes to arrive on campus before classes and train to prepare for the upcoming season. Preseason enables athletes to bond with each other while training and getting back into shape for the fall season.
One thing preseason does really well for athletes is train them to be in shape for their games in the fall. When I first came to preseason, I jumped in the pool for water polo and felt like I would sink to the bottom. I could barely swim, and every stroke I took felt like I was swimming through oil. But as preseason went on, and our team had more and more practices, I started to feel more like I had been playing water polo for the entire summer. The more practice we had, the faster, stronger, and more well-balanced I felt. If I had just come to Exeter at the beginning of the season to play, I would never have gotten back to the ability I had been at before, having not played water polo for a month. Because I had preseason, I could get back in shape before our games and play to the best of my ability, and I’m sure many other preseason athletes feel the same way.
Preseason also offers unique opportunities for teammates to bond. For new students who come to Exeter as fall preseason athletes, people on your team become some of the first friends you make here at Exeter. During preseason, there are so many ways to bond with your team. For the water polo team, we would go to breakfast before practice at Elm every day, talk to each other about practice, and get to know each other if we met for the first time. We would have team bonding times in other people’s dorm common rooms after practice, talking, playing ping pong, watching TV, etc. It was a great experience for me this year and last year, because I really got to bond with the members of the team. After night practices, our team would go to dinner at Las Olas or Elm Street Dining Hall, and everyone would have time to talk with each other and meet each other.
I also appreciated that I got to come to campus early to get accustomed to Exeter. It didn’t apply much this year since I wasn’t new, but last year, being here an entire week before everyone else gave me time to get used to how Exeter operated before everyone was on campus all at once. I was able to find where everything was, explore the surrounding area of Exeter, get used to being in the dorm, and be prepared for when the upcoming school year began. Even for this year, coming for preseason was great because the dorm was pretty much empty besides five other people, so I was able to get in and out of the dorm super quickly on move-in day and was able to carry everything up to my fourth-floor room without running into five people on my way up. At the same time, however, coming to preseason meant that my summer ended a week early, something I didn’t appreciate.
One thing that wasn’t great about preseason was the weather. Every day, it was between 80 and 90 degrees, and living on the fourth floor of a dorm, which does not have air conditioning, really makes it difficult to enjoy yourself in the dorm. In particular, on move-in day, my dorm, Soule Hall, which is just two giant staircases and no hallways with no elevator, the heat made it unbearable to walk up and down the stairs every time I needed to grab another thing to bring up to my room. Every day during preseason, the inside of the dorm was probably 80-85 degrees, and it was almost impossible to sleep comfortably or at all when it was that hot at night.
Overall, preseason was, in general, a pretty fun experience. It was an extremely beneficial opportunity to get used to life at Exeter before the chaos of classes happened. Even though there were some negative aspects of preseason, I still am grateful I went to preseason, and I’m sure many other athletes feel the same way.