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I’ve always known coaches — especially baseball coaches — to be a superstitious group, but when I started covering high school sports in 2012, I had no idea I’d become the good luck charm for an entire town.
I’m only halfway joking.
After our local high school soccer team won state, the head coach glanced at me as we left the stadium and said, “You realize you have to ride the bus up with us from now on, right?”
He wasn’t kidding. I’d ridden the bus with the team to the championship game that day. But it was a little more involved than just that.
His team won back-to-back state championships just a few years ago. I rode the bus with the team both times in an effort to get an inside look at how teams prepare for the big game. When the team tried for their third straight, I had a conflict. I couldn’t ride with them.
“Can you at least send something up with us? Like a jacket or something?” the coach asked. Next, he offered to pick me up at the stadium so I could ride with the team to eat lunch before the game.
“Sure,” I said. Because why not?
Sure enough, a few hours before the game, a huge yellow school bus picked me up in the parking lot, drove us to a local sandwich shop, and I filed a story from a previous game while eating lunch with a bunch of high schoolers.
As it turned out, it wasn’t enough. They lost. After the game, I approached the coach for the usual round of postgame questioning.
“You have to ride the whole way,” he said, looking forlorn. “It only works if you ride the entire way.”
And so, when the team made the state finals again this year, I knew where I’d be — on a bus taking a three-hour drive with a high school soccer team to the state championship.
A couple years ago, another local soccer team made the finals. I meekly offered to ride with them — just in case they needed a little of my latent luck to rub off. This was a much smaller school, not used to much media attention. The coach was worried having a newspaperman tagging along would get the kids out of their routine, spook them a little. It was probably the right call from a logical standpoint, but we’re working with esoteric forces here.
You already know what happened next. They got beat. They should have let me on the bus. I am currently 6-0 for teams that I ride with. Teams that refuse to have me along are 4-5.
I have a burden now. A super power. With great power comes great responsibility, or so I heard from Ben Parker one time.
Superstitions are weird and most people will tell you they don’t believe in them, yet so many of us have odd little things we do, maybe almost reflexively. Especially in the sports world.
In baseball, you never mention the perfect game until after it’s over. If you do, and the pitcher gives up a hit — it’s your fault. You jinxed it. Players tap an important sign with meaningful language on it before games. I knew a coach who drank the same soda, even though he didn’t like it, during a game because once he grabbed one by mistake and they beat a team they shouldn’t have.
Another coach I know told me he wore the same underwear to every game, and when they became unwearable, he cut up the fabric and still carries it in his pocket.
I’ve seen players wearing socks with the soles missing, nothing more than cotton sleeves around their ankles because those socks give them the swagger they need to compete. Somehow.
Athletic wear companies know this. They try to tap into it. They try to become the one item every athlete needs.
But the lesson from coaches and athletes here is simple. It isn’t branded. It’s just this: Don’t mess with what works.
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Image Credits: Getty Images