Loose Talk: The Editors’ Take

Odds are, if you’re one of the few people who takes the time to read an 850 word coumn about sports, then you probably read the weekly “Top 12”  joke lists that we publish. Last weeks’ list, “12 Ways to Make Varsity ___ in 2015-16,” was a series of jokes that poked fun at various sports and groups across campus, from “recruits” to managers. While the list was fairly well-recieved by most of the people that talked to me about it, there was one team in particular that took offense—girls’ varsity water polo. The girls felt that by singling them out in the list, we were making a mockery of their team, and therefore a mockery of their hard work throughout the season. When I first heard about this, I was less than sympathetic. If anything, I was annoyed. “Good lord,” I thought, “Don’t they get that we’re making fun of everyone?” Then the girls issued Tommy Cefalu and me a challenge: practice with them for a day. If it was easy enough to joke about, then we’d have no prolem keeping up with them in a pool. Because I had crew practice GH and Tommy had English class H, we thought we’d never be able to take them up on the challenge.

However, later that week, the crew team’s practice was moved to Sunday and, as luck would have it, Tommy had H format auxiliary that day as well. Instead of using my Tuesday afternoon as a rest day (sorry Coach Caldwell), we took the girls up on their offer to swim with them. After texting Coach Andrew McTammany to make sure everything was in order, Tommy and I picked up a pair of grays from Mac and made our way down to the pool at the start of G format. By the time we got on the deck, the girls had already begun their warmups, but Tommy and I jumped right in and swam along with them.

I hadn’t been swimming since I quit the local swim team in the summer after third grade, and Tommy had done the same a year later. I imagine that may people reading this have had similar experiences, so perhaps a refresher on the difficulties of swimming would be helpful: swimming is awful. Every second is a fight to avoid drowning, and when you haven’t had to take part in that struggle for years, plunging yourself into drills that require stopping, starting and turning is not the best way to get back to good form. After ten minutes of warmup laps, McT called everyone to line up in the middle of the pool for drills. I floundered my way to the center, but when I looked around for Tommy, I saw him clinging to the pool walls, exhausted. No matter how many times I called him over between drills, this kid was not coming back. He was completely gassed.

The team let the two of us stay for another twenty minutes: I tried my best to do the passing drills with one of my friends on the team, upper Madison Hillyard, but Tommy was out for the remainder of practice. Once the girls started contact drills, we were asked to head out, and only once we made it back to the safety of the locker room showers did either of us dare to talk about the practice. Going into the day, I didn’t think I’d do phenomenally—I hadn’t swam in years. But I still certainly thought my performance would be better than what I’d done. Tommy and I drastically underestimated the difficulty of swimming. While it’s true the girls had played water polo far longer than either of us had and they were in the middle of their season, that doesn’t detract from the message they sent us: “We’re better than you, and it’s not even close.” We ate a slice of humble pie that day, and it tasted awful.

Before the practice, when I was talking to Jack Hirsch about the girls’ response, my biggest objection was that they were complaining after they’d been treated equally. And yet, that wasn’t totally true. Something Jack said that I hadn’t considered was the respect of people on campus. At the end of the day, no matter how many jokes we make about the hockey team, nobody will think less of them. The same is true with the football team, the lacrosse team and many other teams on campus. But it isn’t true about those girls. A lot of people give them flak about what they do, and it stings after a while. Coach McT said the workout we did was about a 3/10 on the hardness scale, and he gave me a C+ and Tommy an F. Two guys in pretty decent shape could barely do what these girls can, and it’s not just wopo. Golf, fockey, girls’ lacrosse—a lot of teams don’t get the respect they deserve for all the work they put in. So next time, before you make a joke about another team, stop for a second. Because odds are, you probably can’t do it. So just sit back and commend them for doing what we ask of them: representing Exeter with pride.