I went out to watch my grandson’s JV practice Monday afternoon because his mother asked me to and because the alternative was sitting in the kitchen while Denise reorganized the spice cabinet by, and I am quoting her here, ‘energy.’ I figured an hour on a metal bleacher was the safer play. I was wrong about that, and I’ve been wrong about worse.
The new coach is named Brennan. Brennan has a clipboard, a fanny pack, and a haircut that costs money. He gathered the boys at the fifty, had them sit cross-legged in a circle, and asked them to share their ‘intention for the session.’ One kid said winning. Brennan told him that was a goal, not an intention, and the kid looked at him the way a calf looks at a gate it doesn’t understand.
Then somebody pressed play on a speaker the size of a small dog and what came out was not a whistle. It was a song. With words. About manifesting. The offensive line was supposed to stretch to it. Coach DiMaggio, who ran our two-a-days in 1974 in heat that killed a man’s lawn, would have walked into the Atlantic Ocean.
I called Ray Kowalczyk on the way home. Ray coached middle school ball in Bethlehem for thirty-one years and now winters in a condo where the HOA won’t let him put up a flag. I told him about the intentions. Ray was quiet for a long time and then he said, ‘Duke, my intention is for you to stop telling me things.’ Ray gets it. Ray has always gotten it.
Brennan, I learned from the program the booster club printed on actual cardstock, holds a certification in ‘Adolescent Performance Mindset’ from an online outfit out of Boulder. He also has a podcast. It is called Inside the Whistle and the cover art is him pointing at the camera in a quarter-zip. I listened to four minutes of an episode about ‘the language of accountability.’ My truck started making a noise I’d never heard before. I think it was protesting.
The practice itself, when they finally got around to it, ran fifty minutes. There was a ‘breathwork reset’ between special teams and seven-on-seven. A kid pulled up with a hamstring and Brennan told him to honor the signal his body was sending. In my day the signal your body was sending was that you were a coward and the response was a lap. I am not saying that was correct. I am saying it produced linebackers.
Here is what gets me, and I’ll try to say it without spitting. The boys are fine. The boys are great, actually. My grandson, Marcus, who is built like a coat rack but mean about it, hit a kid so clean on a crossing route that the helmet sound carried all the way to where I was sitting. He didn’t celebrate. He helped the kid up. He’s a good one. The kids almost always are. It’s the adults who keep finding new ways to make a simple thing weird.
I think about Petey Corrigan, who coached the freshman team at our school for twenty-two years for an honorarium of one ham at Christmas. Petey couldn’t have told you what a ‘mindset framework’ was if you held his pension over a fire. What Petey did was show up at five-thirty in the morning, stand in the parking lot in a windbreaker, and know every kid’s mother’s name. Three of his players went D-I. None of them did breathwork. All of them, last I checked, can still run.
Brennan ended the session with what he called a ‘gratitude lap.’ The boys jogged the perimeter and were instructed to think of one person they were thankful for. Marcus told me in the truck he thought of me, which was nice, and then said he also thought of the kid who runs the snack stand because he sneaks him extra Gatorade. Both of those, I told him, are correct intentions.
Denise is making chili tonight. She says the recipe is from something called the Modern Hearth Substack. I told her I’d eat it. I have my own intention.