The varsity has some running to do.
An area baseball team is atoning for their sins the hard way: good old-fashioned team torture.
Running poles is the baseball equivalent to running a set of lines in basketball, or gassers in football; it’s arduous, demanding and unavoidable.
The team in question owes their coach ten of them.
With a light drizzle beginning to fall and the JV already taking their spots for infield practice, the Varsity is only halfway finished. The looks on their faces tell the story. “How did we get ourselves into this?”
Regardless of how they came to this painful reality, there’s only one way out now: everyone must finish. This is team-building at it’s finest. And prep sports at theirs.
Can you imagine Ichiro, Figgins and Milton Bradley (assuming he hadn’t left the stadium during the game) taking up the cause of corporeal punnishment because Jose Lopez took a called third strike? Would Marshawn Lynch go all Beast-Mode on a set of gassers because Justin Forsett fumbled during a drill? The answer is, they would never be asked to.
And that is the beauty of watching a high school baseball team run past exhaustion before practice even begins.
Upperclassmen chide a younger player for attempting to forgo his final pole, unrelenting until they see him taking off for the opposite end of the outfield. The players can still police themselves at this level.
2010 Dallas Cowboys rookie Dez Bryant made SportsCenter last year for refusing to carry a veteran’s gear after practice. None of the other Cowboys were in a position to make Bryant and his multi-million dollar rookie contract give in.
There is no such sense of entitlement at play on this afternoon. Players race one another to the finish, transforming an otherwise downtrodden activity back into sport, smiles abound.
As they finish, there is no carping over the painful beginning to practice. No one questions the methods or purpose of the coach. Everyone just grabs their gloves and takes their position in the field, ready to play the game they love.
