TeamWork

(Editors Note:  This photo was posted on Facebook today - it appeared over 50 years ago in the Millville Daily Republican the week of football camp for the Millville High School Thunderbolts. These men gave up their time as a labor of love for the game and worked hard - before and after their sons graduate to feed 81 hungry boys all vying for a spot on the Bolt's Varsity - all toiling in the heat of late summer the week before Labor Day - this easily sparked a Millville Memory that I hadn't thought of for a long time.)

Labor Day was a week away and the sun was boiling that day.  

However the excitement of another football season was in the air as we boarded a school bus bound for the Thunderbolt’s football camp.  We met at the high school and got our equipment – the scrubs got hand me down pads and ragtag practice uniforms with rips and tears, while we the mighty seniors were issued brand new helmets and jerseys.

 Here we were again, my 3rd and last visit to a week of really hard practice at the YMCA’s Camp Hollybrook.

The new guys got to bunk in the open air screened cabins and had army cots to try to sleep on.  The varsity was in the “lodge” and had bunk beds.  Lewis Clark, Bub Clark’s dad of our starting quarterback that year was one of the chief cooks and bottle washer he said.  And this was his the culmination of his service to the school – Bub was going to graduate in June.  (And never to throw a football again)

I looked forward to (believe it or not) the baloney sandwiches on white fresh Sunbeam bread with tons of yellow mustard and the “secret” formula bug juice which did the job many years before the trendy formulas came out for hydrating athletes. 

We went to bed exhausted that first day of practice at dusk and a bit afraid of what our coaches had planned for us tomorrow.  We woke to the blaring sound of a scratched 45 rpm record - RAIN RAIN RAIN – by Frankie Lane and the Four Lads.  A sound I grew to hate and it’s still embedded in my memory bank.  It conjures up the scent of sweat, purple bruises and running until you want to drop – but you don’t.  Playing the song about rain was our lament.  Not that it would delay any of the two per day practices – never.  It just cooled them below 100 on the shade-less field of cactus mixed with and a blade of stubborn grass here and there.

“Rile” as we called Coach Bob Riley lead our trek in our shorts out of the camp and up the country road to the big tree – about a mile out and on the way back he blew his ever present whistle and we sprinted to the lodge and a wonderful breakfast - each day the run got longer. 

Breakfast was followed by the first practice followed by most of us tossing up our wonderful breakfast among the weeds on the field.  

We hit and ran and then ran some more from September 1 to Labor day, whenever it fell on the calendar,  Each practice ending with the agony of endless wind sprints.  The days seemed to never end.  Each morning it was tougher to get up and get going - everything seem to hurt. The line got bigger as the team trainer administered yards of mole skin on the battered and blistered.  

But like everything in life - it ended.  And for most of us who stuck it out - it would be remember as a strange kind of fun.  Each year when we broke camp – head coach John Barbose took us home via a side trip to his beloved Laurel Lake for a visit to the annual Labor Day Regatta, speed boat races.  We had to promise not to tell anyone – but the whole town always knew about this team tradition.  The breeze off the lake was always like heaven and we got a brief look at what regular people did on this holiday.

 Oh how I yearn to spend one my week again - running and playing all day – (if you never did this you will really never understand what it meant to each of us.  We were a TEAM after that week.) 

For most us we learned more than our book of plays – we learned that sacrifice, some sweat and hard work is really what life was about and to succeed one must hear the RAIN - get up and do everything the best one can.