Being a member of a team is not just about competing, it’s about the community. We play, practice and eat together, but one of the biggest ways that we bond is through travel.
For the squash teams, the first, and potentially most divisive, bonding arena is the bus. Our men’s and women’s team compete separately, but travel together to all of our regular season matches. While we eat, sleep and compete together during our trips, it’s the bus rides that set the stage and close the weekend.
Since my first time traveling freshman year (and I’m sure much before that), the men have insisted on claiming the back of the bus while the women stick to the front. Our seating preferences generally match up with our “designated” team areas, so this is never really a point of contention. Entertainment, however, is a different story.
Not surprisingly, our two teams often have very different ideas of what makes a good bus movie. On one trip, I distinctly remember waking up to the screaming of a soon-to-be beheaded gladiator. Groggy, I was trying to make sense of the noise when a head soared across the screen. I realized that the women had lost the long-fought battle to avoid watching “300” (2007) at all costs. Instead of gore and muscled men, we usually try to push films like “She’s the Man” (2006) or “Love and Basketball” (2000) with mixed results.
A big success, however, was introducing them to “The O.C.” on our longest bus trip of the year. Traveling to Annapolis, Md., and back to Hanover in one weekend meant over 20 hours on the bus. Realizing that we had time to emotionally invest in a series, we popped in the first fateful disk. By the third episode, the men’s team was more invested than most of the women were, singing loudly to “Californication” and appropriately heckling the characters on screen. By the time we made it home, they begged to see the next season.
The car games of my childhood and trail games from Dartmouth Outing Club first-year trips, too, have come in handy during our longer bus rides. This season, one of our favorites was “contact,” a trail game that often got a little too loud and competitive for the small confines of the bus, but provided us with hours of entertainment and a break from the pressure of competition.
Sometimes we get more creative in our quest to pass the time. This year we were away for the Super Bowl, a devastating blow to the team’s football fans and especially crushing to our lone diehard senior Seahawks fan. Through the wonders of technology and the ingenuity of determined fans, the men’s team figured out a way to stream the game online. While a tough five hours for individuals as apathetic about football as myself, it provided an interesting deviation from our usual sources of entertainment.
While these distractions help us pass the often brutally long hours on the road, they also bring us closer. We bond during practices and at team dinners, but our time on the bus is a different type of bonding. We joke about it being “forced” bonding, which it in many ways is. If we’re trapped on a bus together, we might as well be friends, right?
Though the bus ride home always seems shorter after a win, it provides an opportunity to decompress and bond as a team, regardless of the result.
While a lot of good comes from traveling with the team, being away on the weekends also has its downsides. Cramped legs, bus-induced cabin fever and stiff backs are a few of the physical ailments we face traveling. Being away from campus also has it’s drawbacks, from the inconvenience of rescheduling exams to the disappointment of missing birthday dinners. While I have missed a semi or two and stayed up late catching up on the work I should have been doing instead of playing “contact,” the experience with my team makes traveling more than worth it.
Though we may not be jet setting across the country, Dartmouth athletes’ travel for competition offers both breathing room and a chance to explore the Northeast. While the main purpose of these trips is to compete, our team bonding cannot be understated. These trips give us a chance to get to know one another in a setting other than Hanover, revealing crucial preferences such as movie taste, sleeping habits and more.
Inside the Locker Room is a weekly column, written alternately by Phoebe Hoffmann ’15 and Sarah Caughey ’15.
