A week ago, the Hopkins women’s lacrosse team experienced what many sports teams have experienced before: a delay. Unfortunately for the Lady Jays, it was a weather delay that forced them to wait for almost three hours to finish the game.
So what does a team do during a delay, especially one that is controlled by good-old mother nature? Well the Lady Jays threw an impromptu dance party. Snapchat stories came alive over Wednesday night’s game as they kept their muscles warm through twerks and turnpikes.
The Lady Jays are not the only ones to take advantage of rain delay shenanigans; one of my favorites to watch is how the Clemson University Tigers and Davidson College Wildcats baseball teams survive a rain delay. If you haven’t watched it, I encourage you to watch the antics of these teams as they go back and forth putting on skits, trying to outwit the other. Skits include but are not limited to human bowling, moose hunting, curling and dual-team tennis.
But after all of the shenanigans are over and it is time to get back to the game, how do you do it? How do you regain focus and go out there, hungry for a win? For the Lady Jays, it proved to be difficult as they dropped their game in double overtime.
For those who play indoor sports, you are the lucky ones who only have to manage the occasional “light” malfunction or wait the few minutes until the game playing ahead of you finishes. Outdoor sports can pause for hours until play can be resumed.
When preparing for a game, athletes get into their personal zone, allowing them to forget about everything else around them and focus on going out and getting a win for their team. This preparation doesn’t begin an hour before the game, or even during the day. This preparation begins the night before as the athlete prepares for a restful night. They think about the game that is ahead of them tomorrow and what they are going to do to ensure the most successful performance.
When they wake up the next day, the athlete starts taking those steps and the preparation is in full swing until you actually step out onto the court or field. It is very hard to transition back into this state once a delay has taken you out of it.
“Well why can’t you just stay in that mode?” the naive may ask. Well let me put it this way: Imagine that you spend all night and day writing note cards for an open-note test you have in an hour. You show up to the test, start taking it and are feeling great with all the notes you have. Halfway through, the professor comes through and picks up all of your tests and tells you to put away all notes. He then hands out a different test and says that this is the real one, and you must finish it with no notes.
This is how the athletes feel: panicked and unprepared.
Athletes practice and perfect their performance every day. However, there is no way to expect and perfect the art of delays. For some teams, there is only one thing to do: dance. For other teams, you casually throw a teammate on your shoulders and bench press. However you do it, you do it as a team.
