The Woodberry Harrier2010: Volume 9

The fruit of kinship....

We have all so enjoyed reading what the seniors have written this season that I quail a little at having the task of concluding these annals.   In reading their meditations I have been touched by the depth and complexity of their feelings about their experience, and I know that nothing I could say would finally capture what this fall has meant to them.  My grandmother often said,  “You preach your funeral while you are living.”  As a child I never really understood that,  but it has come back to me as I think about trying to lay down these thoughts.   She was, I now see, saying that words always fail to reflect the real worth of a life. And what is true of a life is true of any time of that life, however brief, especially the times when we are fully awake and alive and doing wonderful things.    The real meaning of this season lies in the hearts and the still-green memories of these boys, not in any narrative I can construct.   I am, in fact, humbled before the mystery of it.  I feel the heat and see the glow,  but I know I can never fully comprehend it, nor can I predict how it will abide with them down the years, though I believe the memory will give them comfort and strength and bring smiles to their wrinkled faces in sixty years.

            For a long time now we have read the St. Crispin’s Day speech from Shakespeare's Henry V before the state meet.  The speech, unfortunately, has suffered the same fate at the hands of Pop Culture as the face of Mona Lisa,  its best lines robbed and ill-used by ad men and TV script writers.  But the speech itself, which very few people actually read through, is beautiful, and it never disappoints.   In it the oft-quoted phrase “band of brothers” does not refer to hearty camaraderie or esprit de corps or a team bond, as people want to believe.  It refers to something which mattered far more in the harsh medieval world than these soft notions.  It refers to kinship and the duties and fealties of kin.   More important, it rather boldly claims that such kinship—and the nobility within it—comes not by bloodline or birthplace but by shared risk and sacrifice.  This is the special kind of brotherhood of this little team we have.   It is tempting to see this though the sepia lens of sentimentality,  but that does it an injustice.    These boys were not, in the last months, living in the frames of Knute Rockne:  All American or even Chariots of Fire.    They were living something as real cracking bones and heaving stomachs and unwanted tears and flashing anger and flushing embarrassment.    Yes, it has been sweet,  but not sweet like candy or cake.  More like fruit ripened on the vine through hot, dry days, surviving wind and birds.   It is a subtle, layered sweetness which mellowed and aged from early bitterness and retains the hint of it.  It is rich and distinctive.  It carries the flavors of the ground and the rains and the droughts and the neighboring plants.   There is nothing simple or simplistic about the taste which created the smiles so many parents captured in snapshots at the finish line on Friday.

            Indeed there is no simple or simplistic way to make sense of this season, which has surely been the most complex I have ever had.   Some well meaning fellow coaches have offered kind words:  "You should be proud of them" and "You can't ask for more than that."   I am grateful for their support and friendship, and what they said is very true, of course.   The problem is that it is somehow too obvious and easy a way to name what I had just witnessed.  What happened in the state meet was simply the final manifestation of the collective soul of this team, and it was something far more extraordinary and ineffable than "fighting the good fight" or trying to "win one for the Gipper."  It was, in short, the public performance of what I am not afraid to call a holy mystery.  But this mystery has shown itself many times throughout the fall.  I saw it every time I watched the guys congratulating each other after a race, every time I saw them pushing each other through workouts, every time I looked into their tired eyes and saw courage beating fear.

            To say that we have had a season of disappointment is to see only the surface of things.   Yes, it is disappointing to have the #1 runner in the state miss all but the beginning and end of the season and lose the chance to win a title he would surely have taken.  Yes, it is disappointing to have our #2 runner drop back to last with a rebelling stomach.  Yes, it was disappointing to improve so dramatically and fall four points short.    But these disappointments are layered into that sweetness I am talking about.    It would have been wonderful to watch Kevin win the state title, but what he did was far more noble and profound.   I appreciated him already, but I was deeply moved watching him labor for weeks alone in the pool just for the slim chance of joining his teammates on the line at the state meet.     I appreciated Addison and Logan already, but I was frankly astonished by the way they responded to our need by becoming better than they ever dreamed they could be.   I appreciated Matt already, but I was deeply grateful for his steady leadership on all the days when he did not have his co-captain there, when the team's prospects seemed so doubtful.     I knew I could count of Josh and Thomas in the pinch, but I never felt so grateful for their true grit--and never so grateful for Conor,  Hagood and Peter fighting to fill the widening breach. 

            We had some dark days back in October when I know each wondered at one time or another what the use was of continuing to work so hard.   And all those misgivings and doubts are part of that sweetness too,  just as the hard lessons are.   Our plans are straw in the life's whipping winds.   Sometimes your very best gets you second place.   Your body will let you down.  Pain does not always lead to gain.   All this gives edge and texture to what is already so very savory:  long afternoons in the fall sunshine, the satisfaction of sore muscles, the abiding joy of present friendship, the delight of running fast over God's earth,  laughter on even the worst of days.   Not to mention pride and hard-earned honor and the satisfaction of becoming every day more of a man.

            Well, for someone who began by talking about the inadequacy of words, I have said far too much.   I will close by saying that the boys ended the season with as much courage and nobility as I could ever have hoped for.   I have told them more than once that my hope for them was simply that they leave the season having done something truly extraordinary, and they did that on Friday (and the Friday before).   Woodberry has won nine state championships, and our score Friday was lower than the last seven of those---the lowest score we have had since 1978, when there were only sixty runners in the 3-mile state meet.    (Before that we had only one championship--in 1968--and that record may be lost to history.)   We finished the day with six all-state (with the winning team getting only five).    As Henry says in the final lines of that speech:

He that shall live this day, and see old age, 
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours, 
And say 'To-morrow is Saint Crispian.' 
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars, 
And say 'These wounds I had on Crispian's day.' 
Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot, 
But he'll remember, with advantages, 
What feats he did that day.

Here are the results:

Virginia Independent Schools State Championship
Woodberry Forest School – Upper 5K course
November 12th,  2010
2nd place out of 20 teams Top-five spread: 0:45 Top-seven spread: 1:07
Runner	Time	Place out of  190
Bennert	17:02	4th	After 6 weeks in a boot; ALL STATE
Garrison	17:02	5th	A 42-sec. WFS PR; ALL STATE
Trudgeon	17:09	7th	A 42-sec. WFS PR: ALL STATE
Rafield	17:46	13th	A 31-sec. WFS PR, a 1-sec all-time PR; ALL STATE
Winston	17:47	14th	(5 seconds off his WFS PR); ALL STATE
Laws	17:49	15th	(3 seconds off his WFS PR); ALL STATE
Shelton	18:09	26th	A 9-sec. WFS PR
Evans	18:30	39th	A 33-sec. WFS PR
Flynn	18:38	47th
Exum	18:52	60th	A 41-sec. WFS PR
Grantham	18:57	67th
Gimbert	DNR	DNR