What are your Exorcist Stairs?

I'll start  with an edited excerpt from my still-being-written, yet untitled, in-search-of-a-publisher/agent, novel about a season of high school lacrosse in a fictionalized Ithaca, NY:

They hate that hill in March.

They hate that hill in April.

In May, we stay away from it.

Their quads burn, and the frozen air they struggle to gulp down make their teeth itch.  They lose track of how many reps they’ve done, but the coach knows. All they hear is: “line up” and they keep yearning for “last one.”

Some think: If others quit, I might too.

Some riders-of-the-pine slow their ascents to a trudge. But the captains, the seniors, some juniors, and that sophomore in search of a starter’s job are still charging hard.

They start down by the river, and on the whistle climb the road running parallel to the gorge. It’s steep, not much for switchbacks, and there’s a section where, no matter how hard you pump those legs, forward progress seems stalled. They stop on a relatively level stretch, where Coach Motts has spray-painted an orange line across the road. “Keep your arms above your heads, boys,” he urges as their urge is to double over, hands on knees, or even lie down on the loose pebbles and asphalt.

They are even with the top of the neighboring waterfall, but they don’t see it through the thick trees and don’t hear over their own labored breaths.

They hate that hill in March. And April. In May, we stay away. But come June, if we are still playing, if State tournament hopes are still there, we climb it again.

Just one rep, at a jog. Coaches and captains at the front. We climb past the orange line (Coach Motts repainted it yesterday, and scoffed it up to make it look old, like it had been waiting for them since April). We climb higher, and after a few turns, and an off-road scramble, we walk out on the sidewalk of the bridge that sits high above the creek and the waterfall in the glacier-carved gorge. They look down over their town. They point out the school, the parking lot they’d crossed to reach the base of the hill. They get a partially obstructed view of the field. Some see their homes.

Then it hits them. That hill they hated, they now own, together. And that particular hill is not in Syracuse, not in Rochester, not on Long Island. Only here in this town.

The Painting:

Lone Runner on Exorcist Stairs, Acrylic on board, 2014

You get to the top of the Exorcist Stairs, winded, quads slightly twitching, and just off to your left is the warm hearth of The Tombs (where surely some friends, or at least acquaintances, are laughing and chatting and tipping a mug) and a couple doors down a Chicken Madness is sizzling on the grill top at Wisemiller’s. Or you can turn right down Prospect Street and loop around for another charge up those steps (or maybe you are an up-the-steps, back-down-the-steps runner).

On your first loop, perhaps you turn down the cobblestones of 35^th Street, but that’s an easy way to roll an ankle. You’re better off making the loop a little longer and safer with 34^th Street. After all, the stairs are the test, the downhill just recovery.

If you’ve walked around Georgetown guided by a student, alumnus, or DC denizen, the Exorcist Stairs have likely been pointed out to you. Maybe you stood at the top and took a picture. Maybe you hiked up them.

If you’ve donned the blue and gray, I’ll bet you’ve been made to run them; and, in the offseason, you’ve likely also chosen to run them on your own. You’ve conquered them some days. Maybe other days, they beat you; left you bent over, retching, unable to complete the number of reps you’d set out to do.

There are hills of grass or pavement, staircases covered or uncovered, trails wooded or sandy, stadiums with rows of steps, all over.

What are your Exorcist Stairs?

Let me know what that place was/is for your team. Comment here, on Twitter (@jimfenzel) or Facebook (/JimFenzel)

My playing days ended on March 16, 1996

It took years to harden my heart.

Suited up. Pre-Injury

My playing days ended on March 16, 1996 in Happy Valley, Pa. I’d push off my left knee only to be met with acute and intense pain. Such episodes had occurred throughout the season, my knee would lock up on a warm-up jog, or buckle during line drills. On that day it was far worse and more frequent. Six Advil at halftime got me through the game, but afterward I couldn’t even carry my equipment as I limped a ridiculous distance to the visitor's locker room.

I spent the next few days on crutches, got x-rays and an MRI, and when the doctor scoped it a week later, I naively figured I’d be on the field in a couple weeks.

Two unsuccessful surgeries over the next year left me hobbled and bitter. I symbolically suited up for our last game of my senior year. Once we gained a big enough lead, the plan was I’d see some crease attack action—try to score one last goal. But, we never got a big lead, in fact we lost. I don’t know if a last shot would have given me any closure, but being denied the opportunity made me angry. In a fit of self-pity, I took it as proof that the guys I used to play with (guys who still got to play while I unsuccessfully rehabbed) didn't give a damn. But honestly, I’d done more to shut myself out than they had to exclude me. I’m not that close to guys I played with in college (certainly not as close as I am with high school teammates), because I deemed my-own-damn-self a pariah when I could no longer play.

The bitterness festered amidst a volatile mix of inherent love of the game and hollow anger at a busted knee.

As an assistant high school lacrosse coach, frustration would rise when, unfairly or not, I would interpret a player’s lack of effort or preparation as a slight to the sport, an offense to those like me who had the game ripped away. I was often unhappy on the sideline, but couldn’t fathom resigning that post. And then, one summer when I was surrendering a week of vacation to coach a team camp, I broke down. I had taken it all so personally, for nearly a decade, and I needed to cut ties with the sport.

That cutting of ties didn't last all that long, but the act of it let me come back to lacrosse without the burden of that gaping open wound.

They called it “dashboard knee”, seen more in car accidents than the lacrosse field. The bent knee allows a massive traumatic blow to be delivered to the hard, smooth cartilage on the base of the femur and a chunk falls off. At first the diagnosis was delivered to me as good news (“Your knee structure—ACL, MCL—is in great shape”). But ACLs they can mend; I've had multiple surgeries on both knees. Been “non-weight bearing” on crutches for a month and a half each time. But I’m left with knees that swell to grapefruit size with a round of golf, or the mere thought of making a hard v-cut.

I am currently doing a painting featuring guys I played with in college, guys who made their mark, have accolades recorded in the program’s history. I’m not in it. I’m not bitter about that anymore.

Vs. Duke 1995

www.laxpopart.com

Lax's Moonlight Grahams

To utterly misquote F Scott Fitzgerald: “There are only second acts in American lacrosse.”

As the sport’s popularity grows, perhaps we are in sight of a new era in which pro lacrosse players and coaches make enough in salary and endorsements to commit full-time, teams play in dedicated stadiums (as opposed to college, even high school campuses), and teams practice multiple times per week allowing the strategic game to advance. I’d be interested to see that development in the game. I’d like to know what MLL caliber athletes could do with more sophisticated game plans and more time training together.

And yet, I hold tightly to what we have had.

As a coach of middle and high school students, I was thankful that our sport offered no lucrative professional options which might muddy the values of coach or player. It made the metaphor ‘lacrosse is life’ more, well, metaphorical. The lessons learned on the playing field of teamwork, perseverance, and integrity were always meant to be applied to other pursuits, always meant to contribute to the kind of man you’d be in your life and career after your playing days.

The metaphorical “second act” is and was perpetual reality; even the greatest players in our sport have eyed another profession as they played and studied in high school and college. This makes one’s college degree and college choice more meaningful. We are not a sport in which college is a way station on the road to the pros. Instead, lacrosse can open the door to some of the best colleges and universities in the country, for the purposes for which such institutions exist.

 [Within that line of thinking, a NOTE: As a freshman and sophomore in high school, I had no idea which college I should attend. I am thankful that recruiting in the 90’s still meant you took your five official visits and could pick your college your senior year. I hope we get back to a time frame more like that.]

Much like the USCLA players before them (the battlers of the Mt Washington Lacrosse Club, Brine, Long Island Athletic Club, etc.), today’s players enter the highest level of post-collegiate lacrosse knowing it is not a career. But times have changed as well. Today’s MLLers are not weekend warriors; it is no beer league. The players train as professionals, but on their own time and dime; not at a team facility while being generously compensated.

Now to taint a lacrosse post with a baseball reference. Remember this bit of dialogue from Field of Dreams:

Ray Kinsella: Fifty years ago, for five minutes you came within... y-you came this close. It would kill some men to get so close to their dream and not touch it. God, they'd consider it a tragedy.

Dr. Archibald "Moonlight" Graham: Son, if I'd only gotten to be a doctor for five minutes... now that would have been a tragedy.

Lacrosse is full of Moonlight Grahams, men who pursued their lacrosse dreams, and then pursued another. Young lacrosse players—pour your heart into the game, and through that struggle learn to pour your heart into other lives.

Jim Fenzel

jimfenzel.com

Spots of Time: Throwback Blog from 2008

The following is a chapel talk I gave at the end of my St. Albans School tenure. I continue to explore the themes from it (an in progress novel, which I leak bits of into this blog) addresses some of theses ideas). It's a long one, bear with me.

Chapel: 5/19/2008                                                                  

My story this morning will end with a memory of throwing a lacrosse ball against a brick wall.  Over and over, just like a million times before.   And while I will talk about lacrosse, let your mind visit your own story.  Shooting endless free throws in an empty gym, taking ski run after ski run, playing guitar for hours, rehearsing a scene—whatever your own interests are.

* * *

 In a regular season game, the varsity lacrosse team scored 3 goals in the last three and a half minutes of the 4^th quarter to go to overtime with Landon.  Where, ultimately, we lost.

 After the game, after I’d changed out of coaching clothes, grabbed my school bag, and was walking home, I went to field again as some of our players still lingered out there.  Sticks in hand, and bag of balls dumped out in front of the goal.  Shooting, passing, or just standing there.

 Two of them were juniors, juniors whom I’d taught in C Form my first year, their first year, at St. Albans.  I tried to think of magic words… words that could have helped me back when I was in their situation. 

I told them they’d played well, played hard.  But I don’t know to what extent they heard that or were ready to hear it. 

 In their eyes I saw just raw emotion. And in the midst of the pain of this loss, they held onto their lacrosse sticks, unwilling, unable to vacate the field.  I didn’t know how long they’d stay into the evening and shoot.  As I stood there, I envied not their pain, but the utter passion and dedication that makes such pain possible.  And I was happy for them for caring that much.

 Elie Wiesel wrote that the opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.  The opposite of beauty is not ugliness, it’s indifference.  And the opposite of life is not death but the indifference between life and death.

 In athletics, too, the ‘thrill of victory and the agony of defeat’, are infinitely close.  One hundredth of a second, a shot that ricochets off the pipe, a ball that teeters then drops off the wrong side of the rim, a line drive caught or uncaught. 

 So close, yet able to produce such disparate emotions.

 There are no guarantees that if you work your hardest, train, practice, lift with all your might, you will win. 

You can care deeply, work toward brilliance relentlessly, play with the utmost conviction that you will win, and still lose a game.  And while that cuts deep, can feel like betrayal, can seem to tear your heart out… You will survive it.  Your teammates will survive it, and you will grow stronger, as individuals and as brothers.

 I also want to talk about something else, moments not recorded in the stat book, not part of the box score.

 If you care enough…you’ll have these amazing moments along the way. 

If you care enough, give enough, you get what Wordsworth wrote of as “spots of time”.  Along the way you’ll be given vivid memories, key moments in your life where time seems compressed, your senses heightened, you feel you’re inside something important. 

In A River Runs Through It, Norman Maclean writes:  “Poets talk about ‘spots of time’, but it is really the fisherman who experiences eternity compressed into a moment.  No one can tell what a spot of time is until suddenly the whole world is a fish…”   

Combine skill and passion, and those moments find you.  Whether carving a steep path on skies, zipping through the woods on a mountain bike or in your trail shoes, on a field of play, with an instrument in your hands, or a paint brush, they’re possible.  You can’t guarantee them, you don’t know when they’ll come, how long they’ll last, but it certainly seems, the more skilled and passionate you are, the more likely they’ll arrive. 

Wordsworth didn’t consider these moments mystical, and neither do I.  As we move at high speeds, seemingly acting on reflexes and instinct, our brains are engaged in an advanced analysis of current situations and past experiences, and maybe at certain moments, it all comes together.  In these serious moments your eyes will be “wholly open”. 

I have spots of time of my own that I can look back on and years, years later even seem to place my self back into.  I can picture a particular goal against Navy, back on a rainy night in 1995.   But I can also picture a shot in high school I cut across the crease, in one motion caught the ball and cranked it—perfect off hip placement, snug inside the pipe. But before the shot got to the net, the goalie’s stick came out of nowhere to snag it.  Maybe he was experiencing his own spot of time.  Or maybe not.  Of the hundreds of shots I’ve taken only a handful have had that feeling attached to them, and as far I as can tell, watching them on tape, they appear no different than any of the others. 

When I gave Norman Maclean’s quote a few moments ago, I didn’t complete the sentence.  It goes like this:

“No one can tell what a spot of time is until suddenly the whole world is a fish and the fish is gone…”

 When you push yourself, you may lose. 

There’s a motion detector security light outside my old high school gym.  If it senses movement it turns on, maybe for 30 seconds or so, then goes off, resets, and another movement will turn it on again. 

The night we lost in the state quarterfinals, I stood there alone in the alternating dark and light, throwing a lacrosse ball against the wall, Bang thump, Bang thump, bangthump like countless times before.  I’d throw harder and harder and as I let go, or as ball and wall met, or on its return the light would click off, and in the dark I’d try to catch it.  But I had no Jedi powers so I usually heard the ball scuttle away in the grass field behind me, sometimes it would smack my stick, arm or even my shin.  And I’d track it down and throw again.  But rarely I’d catch it, and if I did, I’d throw right back at the wall.  Sometimes the light would have reset already and the movement would turn it back on.  Sometimes it would not have, and a ball thrown in the dark was never caught in the dark. 

I love that memory.  I can see myself out there, car radio on, stick in hand any time I’m back in Ithaca and drive by my old high school at night.  And while I would have preferred to win the game that night, the next best thing was to lose it.

As you go forward embrace your interests: athletic, artistic, and academic.  Throw out fear and take on challenges.  This is a special place, and I’m sure I won’t know just how much I’ll miss it until I’m gone.

jimfenzel.com

Groundballs are the Spirit of Lacrosse

I wasn’t the fastest kid on the field—a middle of the pack sprinter. I wasn’t overly physical.

Yet I had a knack for groundballs.

Toeing the line before a coach’s whistle commenced a one-on-one groundball, my stomach would flutter. If I got a good jump, I could use what Coach Urick once referred to as: my “rather large hind quarters” to block out and scoop the ball. If, as was quite likely, I was beaten to the ball, the poke check on the back hand (catching the glove solidly, or the exposed wrist) was my best friend. My competitor would scoop right over the ball, over run it, and there I’d be. And even if he gained possession, it was never over until his pass made to the coach’s stick. While one-on-one groundball drills made me nervous, I loved being in that middle line for the two-on-one GB. It was a satisfying experience to scoop that ball, return to line, and listen to the coach chew out the other two.

As a grade-schooler, a few times I won the camp-wide groundball contests at Gilman lacrosse camp and Bob Scott’s lacrosse camp. As a high school attackman I’d annually win the Hoover Award for most groundballs.

I have memories, even from my earliest playing days of existing outside a scrum of players, and waiting, anticipating as the others slashed and body-checked and the ball got batted about.

My dad was a coach, so of course he stressed groundballs. He even innovated this little contraption:

When I needed a theme for a painting depicting the “Spirit of the Game”, my mind was locked on groundballs.

The painting depicts players from disparate generations and a ball, a loose ball. And the desire in each of these men to get to it, to get low (backhand down) to scoop through and endure the coming hacks to their forearms, that is the spirit of this game.


www.LaxPopArt.com

Fix the sticks, don't start the clock

Fix the sticks, don’t add the Shot Clock

While Quint’s colleagues are lauding his latest article as the definitive word on the shot clock (John Jiloty even claiming: “the only opposition [to the shot clock] coming from budgetary concerns…” Really!?), I found the actual substance to raise more questions (namely the BIG one: Why?) than were answered.

Bill Tierney made a big appearance in my first blog, and here he is in the second. Not because I set out to write about him, but because Quint Kessenich quoted him:

"For years I was 100% against the shot clock, but have now taken a totally opposite stance,” said Tierney who won six NCAA titles while at Princeton. "Not because I believe the shot clock will speed up the game, it won’t.  But, because we have laid so much on the referees over the years, that this will take a huge burden off their chest. I do believe that the ‘timer-on’ call was a great way to transition from the ‘Keep it in’ call of the past, but it is such a subjective interpretation, that it has created more issues than could have been imagined."

Coach Tierney does state he has changed his view to be in favor of the clock, and Quint hopes the reader will stop there.

Coach Tierney doesn’t support the clock because the game will speed up—“it won’t”—but because it gives him another element of the game in which to out-practice and out-coach others. Bill Tierney believes in Bill Tierney’s ability to exploit the shot clock to Bill Tierney’s benefit. Once he gets rid of ‘subjective interpretation’ and every team is in the same situation, wouldn’t he have to assume he could design strategies of play more effectively than other coaches?

I’m not in favor of the clock, and I am in favor of speeding up the game. As a spectator (my only current role) I enjoy the style of game played in the 80’s to the current style. Sure, that’s the version of the game I grew up watching and the players I recall fondly: Del Dressel, Brad Kotz, Dave Pietramala, Tim Goldstein, Tim Nelson, Jon Reese, Rob Shek, Brian Wood, The Gaits, John Zulberti, Tom Marachek, Joey Seivold… None of them played with a shot clock, but they did play with sticks of the sort that keeping the ball in was a skill, not a given.

Quint states: “Ball retention and stick evolution gone awry has skewed the intended balance between checker and carrier...” I agree. And this should be addressed by addressing the sticks, not through a shot clock. There is no reason expert level Division I players need to play with an offset head and a giant bag. Let the little kids use those sticks to learn the game and develop skills, and when skill is gained, have them use a stick that requires it.

Changing the sticks seems so obvious. And yet, all the talk and all the perceived momentum is behind a shot clock.

A shot clock may be needed when keeping possession is too easy (as in basketball), but not in sports like hockey and soccer where it is difficult for an individual to retain possession in the face of defensive pressure. Lacrosse is somewhere between, but moving toward basketball because of the sticks. So fix the sticks.

But a shot clock doesn’t bring back the take away defender. And possession isn’t “earned” 60 or 90 seconds later, it’s given, by a clock. And the manufactured breakaway you think the clock will create? Well, it’s going to start with a ball being rolled into the deep corner, or shot wildly off cage.

Stop the clock. It’s not the answer. Fix the sticks.

Story behind Team USA loss

The ONE man responsible for team Canada’s 8-5 win. It’s not who you think.

When Bill Tierney divulged the secrets of his slide-and-recover Princeton defense to a packed coaching convention in the late nineties, he set in motion the events that, a decade and a half later, created this particular game.

The current team USA long poles and middies—through no fault of their own—are part of a generation that spent their formative years in the game playing for youth/middle school/high school coaches all imitating BT’s team defense. His system was beautifully simple, too simple (the real problem being even youth lax coaches could comprehend it), and every whiteboard had those imaginary field lines drawn on it. And from every sideline came calls of: “No Sweep”, “Turn ‘em back”, “No topside”.

Even in youth lacrosse, individual fundamentals were eschewed for slide-and-recover team concepts. Long poles were never left on an island and told to take the ball away.  At an age when kids should have been learning and developing checks, pushing their creativity, trying and failing to mimic Ric Beardsley, Dave Pietramala—they were learning to be individually conservative in a team system.

Some attribute the disappearance of the take-away defender to the offset head and the offense advantage it created. But the true paradigm shift in coaching philosophy came from Bill Tierney. His way was seen as THE way to play defense. Coaches at all levels were so excited to learn this system, so excited to implement it.

Then what does Bill Tierney do? Sit back and watch? No, invests in box lacrosse and maple syrup. He leaves the relatively Canadian-free Ivy League for Denver. He imports players from north of the border where the Princeton defense was not a thing in their box games. And he uses them to take advantage of the generation of defensemen he’s created.

And when the World Games come to Denver, and the Canadians are holding on to the ball, and the US needs to press, they find their best take away defender is on the sidelines in khakis, his playing days long gone.

Note: No actual research was done in writing this piece.