The original date of publication for this essay is Sunday, November 15th. It is the 18th of what’s intended to be a year’s worth of essays, published on Sundays. That intention, like everything, is subject to change.
Last week’s essay: On This Country, Which Is Bigger than Its Government
“We like to have fun, and we like to win, and we do a good amount of both.”
I don’t remember the exact quote. It’s been over ten years ago now. It’s a cliché to gawk at the passage of time, but sometimes it can’t be helped. It’s been over ten years now since that after-school meeting. May of 2010. So I don’t remember the exact quote.
There must not have been a baseball game that day, and evidently there wasn’t practice, meaning either the season had ended or it was one of the many days our sophomore coach canceled on us, citing back pain rather than admitting the team was a mess, giving up twenty runs a game with some regularity and struggling to do things like get everyone in the lineup that day to the plate during batting practice. Whatever the cause, I was free after school, and while I was going to join the cross country program regardless of an informational meeting (I don’t remember having such a meeting either of the next two years), it was striking to hear that combined promise—success and fun—and to know it was a promise that would be kept.
Crystal Lake Central’s boys cross country program is no titan in the state of Illinois. It’s not a dynasty. That would be York. Central’s consistently good, though, and it has a state title to its name, from 1995, back before the IHSA split the sport from two classes of schools to three. Most years, it qualifies for the state meet, and “most” might be an understatement. The day I walked into that info session, Central was coming off missing the state meet for what would be the last time for ten years. It’s a solid program, especially in the context of the school’s overall athletic heft. I knew this. I also knew that the friends I had on the team enjoyed the program immensely, and enjoyed being led by its coach, Bill Eschman, an unpolished man of a math teacher who sprays spittle when he gets animated, and is most always animated. Eschman’s a loud presence, and a warm presence, and he combines the free reign he generally gives his team with commanding authority when authority is necessary, a combination probably responsible for the “fun” half of the promise. The word is that he’s softened over the years. He used to be more of a yeller. But the warmth and the love: that, they say, was always there.
We had plenty of fun during those two years I spent in the program. Nothing exceptionally interesting, but the kind of fun 13-18 year-old boys have. Wedgies. Hand-to-hand combat with those big foam rollers. Rites and rituals and nicknames. Breadstick-eating competitions at Olive Garden. Yelling “We are PR” (the cake eater school in town is Prairie Ridge) when we ran through the library parking lot, as the library had explicitly asked us not to do. Silly things. Kid things. The kinds of things that go on in every high school athletic program where there’s at least a semblance of freedom and a semblance of friendship among teammates. One time, when a sophomore on the team sat on a rolling chair and put his foot into a bucket of ice, three of us—two seniors on the chair, myself on the bucket—wheeled him away to the elevator, helpless to fight back without spilling ice all over the hallway, and stranded him in the middle of the second floor, where he finished his icing before dragging the bucket, still full, back down to the fieldhouse.
But we also had plenty of success. We finished in the top ten at state both years. We won the conference my junior year, and when the conference split its title into divisions my senior year, we took advantage and won the small-school division. We were good enough that the high school athletic ideal of a state championship was not an entirely unrealistic aspiration, or was at least close enough to realistic that it could be held aloft as a target without irony. And something about this success or about the legitimacy of these goals amplified the fun into something deeper. Something bigger. Something that revolved around retrieving teammates from their homes when they overslept in the summer, and dragging teammates back onto the track in the midst of a grueling 800 workout, and gathering around a very much not-allowed griddle in a steam-filled locker room on frosty Wednesday mornings for pancakes as state approached. Something that sapped. Something that invigorated. Something that inspired. Something driving, and connective, and soul-stirring. Something that left me, at the end of that first season—my junior season—weeping in the locker room when we returned from the state meet, not because we’d missed the third-place trophy by fractions of seconds—for one thing, I was an alternate, and for another, I didn’t really understand in that first year how elusive trophies are—but because that season was over, and that specific iteration of the team was set to fade into a picture on the fieldhouse wall.
I realize now, looking back at it, that we call this “culture.” We talk about it as a business buzzword. The Wall Street Journal writes pieces on how others are building it. Leadership books hum about the thing. We had it. Eschman, through luck or intention or just consistently doing what he thought best for high school kids, had done it.
I didn’t appreciate at the time how unusual it is to find this kind of culture in an organization, or for it to be such a lasting standby. I knew it was a new thing for me, but I wasn’t yet 18. I hadn’t experienced many organizations. And while I’m now only 26, with many groups of life ahead of me, it’s striking now how unusual that culture was. I’ve been a part of many an organization, and while most have had fun, and many have achieved some kind of success, there hasn’t been that depth or that longevity to either. There hasn’t been that immersion, even just for the working hours. There hasn’t been that sense that this thing we, the organization, are doing is important, and that it’s therefore a joy to do it. Some of this, as I wrote back in September in one of these, seems a personal choice—there appears to be a strain of thought that forbids immersing oneself in a common cause, ignoring that in quite a few circumstances, commitment to a common cause lifts every individual who commits. Even Howard Roark had teammates at times. And Howard Roark’s individualism was about more than “work-life balance.”
I thought, throughout college, that I would like to build such a culture myself. I applied my thought process to choirs I was a part of, with sometimes disastrous results. At a point, I realized I was thinking about cross country so much that I should try to build such a culture myself one day in some high school athletic program. Perhaps a cross country team. Perhaps in an underfunded public school, where it might make a bigger difference. I thought building a culture there would be straightforward. And yet I lacked the commitment to even make a move in that direction beyond half-hearted emails to athletic directors every other fall or so, and when the thought comes to me now, I question whether I really could, and what my motivations would be—whether I’d just be using kids to get back to an environment I’ve missed, and whether that would matter if true. It’s possible I’ll still have a chance, or make a chance, to do such a thing somewhere further along life’s course, but through the opportunities at leadership I’ve been afforded, including one season assisting Eschman himself the fall after I graduated college, the world has demonstrated that building a culture is a difficult thing. Even in that season as an assistant, a season in which the team again finished near the podium, the thing felt perilous as we looked at the roster over the years to come. Fun is easy. Success, while challenging, is tangible. Cultures are special. It takes a lot to make them last.
And so, I realize now how special that culture was, and how I was in a unique position to appreciate it, coming from a dysfunctional baseball program (the varsity coach, bless his heart, was a good man with no support from the administration) and a basketball program figuring things out (and they did briefly figure things out, producing two of the best teams in school history across the four years after I quit). That line at the informational meeting stuck with me for a reason, and not just because it was a promise fulfilled.
I was lucky to have that culture. I will be lucky to ever again find or help craft such a culture somewhere else. But just having it, knowing it existed—if that’s all I ever get, it strikes me it would be more than many get.
There’s something hopeful about encountering something great. About seeing it was there. And of all the places for me to encounter such a thing in my life, it came in an inauspicious high school fieldhouse, and on the streets of a very normal American town. It came in the way a quarter-blind math teacher got teenage men to, for the most part (yes, of course there were problems and exceptions and things I would hope changed over time), treat each other, and to treat their common cause.
Last year, Central dropped the ball. Central missed qualifying for state for the first time since that fall before I walked into the info session. This year, with the state meet canceled due to the pandemic, Central won one of the five sectionals. Central finished ranked among the top three teams in the state. There is no trophy. But the success piece of the culture is measurably intact. The team is again winning. And the team, I have no doubt, is having fun.
Next week’s essay: On East 6th, When It All Comes Back
