Note: this is the account of an event that took place around five years ago. Because memory tends to play tricks on the mind, I cannot claim historical accuracy. But in any case, here’s the story as I remember it.
Saturday, late September, about three weeks into my sophomore basketball preseason. 7:45 am to be precise. Twelve of us hopped on a slick voyager bus, securing our usual seating. Sporting various items from our loud Pirates wardrobe, we looked somewhere in between Smurf and cotton ball. Just like every other day.
The coaches said goodbye, since they weren’t joining us on the adventure. As the bus driver negotiated his way onto Seton Drive, a few girls double-checked the content of their backpacks. Cell phones. Mosquito repellent. Beef jerky. Sigh of relief. A few more girls munched on fresh bagels, half asleep. The team secretary had just brought them over from the local bakery, to make sure we had eaten some semblance of a breakfast. Objections could be heard from different corners of the bus:
“Why are there no knifes for the cream cheese?”
“Shut up and use your fingers. I’m trying to sleep.”
“Hey, who took the onion bagels? I wanted some.”
“Too late.”
“Man, I can’t believe were goin’ there for two days.”
For the first time in my college career, we weren’t headed towards an airport, a Hilton, or a Marriott. We wouldn’t be resting on a plush mattress, snuggling with orthopedic pillows and cozy goose down covers. Tonight, we wouldn’t plead for some free Internet so we could “do our homework.” Tomorrow morning, we wouldn’t head down to the hotel lobby for a 20$ breakfast buffet of bacon, sausage, fresh fruits, and custom-made omelets. Nor would we lunch in a conference room, gobbling on the best pre-game meal combination known to mankind.
No. We were headed towards the New Jersey Pine Barrens for a weekend camping trip.
Why? About six months before, Coach’s post-season resolution had included an important component: change. Such a resolution was probably taken every year, but that’s neither here nor there. This season, she had said in a team meeting, we would work on something called ‘empowerment’. After all, the concept was gaining momentum in the self-help community. So players, it was decided, would gain more decisional power over their own existence. Which seemed like a good idea. In theory.
One of the first questions Coach asked us during that team meeting was this: “Now, everything’s going to change next year. You know, we have six freshmen coming. And you’re going to have to get to know them, whether you like it or not. So, anyone have an idea for a fun preseason activity?” Since we were conditioned to rhetorical questions, and had learned from experience that not speaking was usually much more productive than actually speaking, no one ventured a proposition. I don’t think anyone had an answer in mind anyway. Unless something involved more sleep, free food, or some good money, we weren’t always extremely creative.
So, after what seemed like an eternity, someone finally suggested… a camping trip. Two words aptly describe that move: not smart. Somebody had reasoned that we could use a weekend away from the gym. Plus, nature felt like a great bonding place. Call me Thoreau, but it seemed like a wonderful idea at the time. Just like Stephon Marbury’s Starbury tattoo seemed reasonable one point in time too, I’m sure. The camping idea somehow gained some momentum.
And that’s why we were now busing over to the Pine Barrens. Empowerment, and getting to know our new teammates.
As we drove past South Orange Avenue’s countless liquor stores and 99cents shops, some admitted having never spent time outside a city before. The admission had the following form: “give me just one good reason why I’d wanna spend the night out in the cold with no mattress, and sleep on dirt with a bunch of insects? That’s just ignorant.” The six new players, still oblivious to the fact that a weekend camping trip was about as good as it could ever get, wondered what kind of dumbass could possibly have come up with such an idea.
About two hours – and two hundred grievances – later, the bus dropped us off in a gravel clearing bounded by pine trees, a log cabin, and some moderately rocky terrain. A woman sporting plaid flannel, a smile, and frayed hiking books welcomed us on the nature reserve. Her voice, it seemed, fueled on helium. Her cheerfulness fueled on laughing gas. Her overall mood could have made Richard Simmons look catatonic. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But if you’ve ever spent time with college basketball players, you know they generally don’t view “a bit corny” as a desirable personality trait.
“Well hello everyyyyy-body!” she said.
“Welcome to naaaay-ture!” she added, branding her hands up in the air, twisting and flailing, looking up at the sky.
Oh boy.
Two minutes into her introduction, she explained that we should “try and be one with the ecosystem”. Green rhetoric, if you will. Groupthink allowed us to absorb such rhetoric with about as much enthusiasm as an Exxon CEO would. And then, gasp, the only rule for the weekend was announced:
“You won’t be allowed to use your cell phones while you’re here! Service is really bad anyway! Plus, you don’t need a phone, I promise! Look at me, I don’t have a phone, and I’m a really happy camper! Hahaha!”
Two of my teammates exchanged a look that could only mean “she lies.” This was not a good start. Picture Joan Baez and Walt Frazier stranded on a desert island. The former on a lot of speed. The latter on a lot of skepticism.
The proverbial cell phone rule was first transgressed seven minutes later, inside a wooden latrine perched at the top of a nearby hill. Ever ingenious, one of the freshmen would lock herself up inside the cabin, stand up on the toilet bowl, and tolerate smells of feces and urine while waiving her phone in the sky. Her antics would be successful in catching some remnant of signal.
“Screw this. I didn’t sign up for this tree hugging bullshit,” she said, to whoever was at the end of the line. Pause. “What? What, wait! I can’t hear you! Just a second.” From outside the cabin, you could hear her feet shuffling around. “Okay, good!” A lengthy description of the nasty toilet, nasty horse flies, nasty pine trees, and nasty inhuman rules instilled in torture retreat was given. The traffic to the toilet would quintuple from then on.
Our first day in the “forest” consisted in a series of teambuilding activities promoting cooperation. After a group icebreaker involving imaginary pistols, a game involving tin cans full of “radioactive material” (it’s just water, but use your imagination!), and a few rounds of hide and seek, we were shipped to a busy parking lot neighboring a lake. Families walked by, some of them cheering us on with friendly “Go Pirates!”
Our first big assignment of the day was announced. We were to build a sustainable raft out of wood planks, rope, and buoyant plastic barrels. A raft that would support the entire team on the lake without sinking. This was not well received. Some of my teammates wore at least two life vests during workouts in the university swimming pool, and usually held on to the buoyant lane ropes for dear life. Now, we were about to jump into a lake.
So by 11:00 am, a mere hour into our weekend journey, the collective mood hovered somewhere in between “very funny, now stop joking and take us to Wendy’s” and “someone will pay for this in the form of death or serious injury.”
By 11:02 am, thirteen scholarship athletes stood in a parking lot somewhere in South Jersey, surrounded by Range Rovers and picnicking families, looking at blue plastic barrels as if they had come from Neptune. While many of us eventually fought over our raft’s future configuration, some just stood around, defeated, and munched on some beef jerky. Our guide, who I will now refer to as Janis, claimed that the process of raft building “might just be metaphor for your season, if we want it to!”
Considering our record that year, I’m pretty sure her prediction was dead on.
When we finally agreed on a rectangular model, about fifteen minutes later, an undersized man with an New York Jets picnic cooler walked over, curious. “What are y’all building there?” Upon assessing our predicament, he informed us about his stellar knotting abilities, and was thereby assigned the job of engineering the raft, on his own. In other words, he began tying everything up in a fury, disregarding any of our reservations about his methods. A few players sat on the grass.
“So, why are we here again?”
“Doing hippy things, like the hippies do. Be one with nature. Ohmmmmm.”
“Hahaha you’re stupid.”
“This, is stupid.”
“Yeah, how bout that. I’m sure we’ll beat UConn if we build that raft.”
“Yeah right. What a joke.”
“Janis is gettin’ on mah nerves”
“I could be back at school, sleepin’.”
“I could be playin’ Madden. Havin’ me some Popeye’s. Man!”
Meanwhile, mister-Jets-fan worked his magic. His knots looked a whole lot like sneaker bows, and his understanding of Archimedes’ principle was apparently non-existent. Our raft, when finished, looked like a gigantic amoeba. “Right, well, the kids might be waiting for me over there” he added, now tapping on his Jets cooler.
Result: the raft fell apart on its way to the water. We threw the pieces into the lake, and threw ourselves over them, fulfilling Janis’s instructions. Fortunately, our failure gave some of our teammates the opportunity to conquer their fear of water, which was then internalized as one of the activity’s greatest successes. A bit like losing a basketball game by 70 but being satisfied with the box outs.
After the raft failure, we returned to the forest, for more fun activities. At one point, we were instructed to carry eggs along an obstacle course. We broke at least half a dozen of them in the process. Essentially, we failed at every single activity we were assigned, and began to take healthy pride in that. Some of us felt bad for the guide, whose unwavering enthusiasm only meant increased group antagonism.
And we hadn’t yet set up our tents, cooked dinner over a fire, heard about the bears, or even canoed six miles down a river just yet.
But you’ll have to come back next week to read about all of that…
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