Park & Ride

Everyone makes mistakes, mine in the longer run of things seems largely unimportant, as no one had a serious life alteration or really an effect on anyone aside from some serious conditioning in the August heat. To give further context, it was football season. An early morning practice session (1st of the day) was being carried out. By this point we were on the second week of doubles and everyone was pretty well accustomed to the schedule and feel of practice, that groggy surprise of spending five hours out on the dusty practice field was as comfortable as it could get. We had been running into problems all week although. Our teams lockerroom and practice field were both out back of the school. But for some reason a construction group (who was working out front) insisted we couldn’t park outback (but staff and coaches could). Despite them not working back there and us having to walk all the way around the campus just to go to practice. This had been a heated topic because of course our coaches thought it was a beyond reasonable thought process. If you’re going to do all of your activites out back, by the football field and on the football practice field, with our lockerroom. Why are we having a bulk of the team who drives themselves to and from practice, park two-three hundred yards away from the field? Especially when every practice, the parking lot remained unattended and completely silent. So of course we did the only reasonable thing high school kids do. And completely ignored authority from administration and parked out back for multiple days, our coaches weren’t exactly pleased with it, but overall didn’t care or feel strong enough about the topic to make a stink about it.

This ended rather abruptly although, as one day our athletic director (Palmer) came out to practice and notified us as a team to no longer park out back or we would be told to leave practice. So we listened of course, because as stupid as a problem as this was, no one wanted to miss practice over parking.

So a couple more sessions go by, and one morning session me and a couple others elect to park on the side of the building by the tech room. Not thinking anything of it due to it not being outback or in the way. As practice went on throughout warmups everything seemed regular, coach was rather quiet but he had his days where he was more animated than others. Today ended up being his most animated although, as suddenly after warming up and doing some team running he pulled the varsity team aside and sent the Junior varsity kids to the weight room. While we were down on a knee awaiting direction, it struck like a right hook from Tyson right in the gut. All we heard was a very angry, but muffled “What don’t you get about not parking your damn cars outback.” Of course upon hearing this I immediately snapped my head in attention knowing I was part of the problem. Also because I was the team captain and knew this wasn’t a good situation to be a part of. So as I locked eyes with my coach I knew where a bulk of his anger was going to be directed, so he told me that it better never happen again and too keep our cars out front because he was sick of getting shit for it. A fair point that it quite frankly wasn’t his problem to be dealing with us not listening and trying to weasel our way around the order. Now as we finished warming up I for some reason grew a toxic cocktail of emotion in my mind, that of feeling humorous, ignorant and slightly aggressive at the fact I just got reamed out over a parking space. As Coach talked during warmups and brought up our prior incident. I got a wonderful idea to be a class A smartass. As I then said “Coach why don’t we just park in the park & ride by the credit union and walk to practice instead?”. At first he just ignored me or shrugged me off. The team laughed and we continued. Than Tysons left hook followed the right from earlier. As I heard the sound of a baseball cap hitting the ground and a grunt that followed. I knew too well what and who it was, as soon as I snapped my head towards the sound. I heard a powerful scream “THE DAMN PARK AND RIDE. YOU THINK you’re (expletive) FUNNY!” Now at this point I knew this was bad, I had been on the receiving end of a coach meltdown more than once for on field lapses. But never once for being a smartass to him outfront of the whole team. I got a reaming beyond comprehension, bad enough to the point where no words actually escaped his lips. Rather primal noises and deep breathing washed over us. He was pissed. And not like a coach is when they lose by thirty in a big game, this was a personal anger against myself, due to our strong bond between coach and 4-year varsity player and captain, he felt personally attacked by my not so smart comment. Then we ran, full field length sprints, one after another. When would we stop? The moment Pierce (myself) could beat Cruz and Darryn all the way down the field in a footrace. Now those two were our running back and wide receiver. Both capable of sub 4.6 40 yard dashes. Me? A 240-pound tight end who could run a 4.8 on his best day. As you could imagine we ran sprint after sprint. Never once beating either opposition until there was a legitimate lack of ability for the team to continue moving, and I was left alone, to sprint in my own mental stupidity to read the tension of the earlier situation.