MIKE BURKE
Allegany Communications Sports
My friend Steve D’Atri and I were discussing everything and nothing Tuesday when one of us finally hit on something that we both actually heard.
“Tomorrow,” Steve said, “is August 15th, Mikey,” prompting me to put my glass back on the coaster for a pause of reflection.
Actually, “tomorrow” – i.e. yesterday – was August 12th, and we both understood that, but to those of us who grew up some time ago, the mention of August 15th represents a deeper, abstract idea beyond its literal sense, and it triggers the same message in our psyche that “Wound my heart with a monotonous languor” did for the French underground on the eve of the Normandy invasion:
It has begun.
Or, as my friend Kevin Royce once said upon being reminded that “tomorrow is August 15th” many years after his having taken part in an August 15th, “My ribs just started to hurt.”
To a lot of us who are still around, August 15th will always be the red-letter day, because in the days of our youth, regardless of the circumstances of the calendar, August 15th, come hell or high water, was the earliest summer football practice could begin for Maryland public schools, although the MPSSAA would allow practices on August 14th if the 15th fell on a Sunday.
Thus, for many of us, all of these years later, August 15th remains the date, to paraphrase the great George Carlin, that will curve your spine, grow hair on your hands, and serve as the edict that your summer is officially and completely over.
And sure as shootin’, in Maryland, Wednesday, August 12th was the first MPSSAA practice day for fall sports.
It was all so different back in The Day, as today, with the year-round training and activities that are now permitted during the offseason, high school football and soccer have pretty much become year-round activities. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing at the high school level, maybe
On August 14th of The Day, though, football players stormed the neighborhood swimming pool for the final summer fling, as August 14th would be their summer swan song, and they would play it to the hilt, rough-housing in the pool and, most importantly, checking out all the girls they were about to leave behind.
Less than 24 hours away, it was time to play catch-up. Hell awaited – three weeks of three-a-day practices, as in those days school did not start until the day after Labor Day.
What a concept it was to have your entire summer off, as though we knew any better at the time, but particularly when you were less than a day from sacrificing the final three weeks of it, it was a pretty big deal that still resonates at the mere mention of a date on the calendar.
Matter of fact, at Fort Hill then, by the time school started on the day after Labor Day, the Sentinels under head coach Charlie Lattimer, had completed over half of their practices for the entire season.
In this day of the state-mandated heat-acclimation practice guidelines and schedules and with school now starting two weeks before Labor Day, that should give you an idea what those players were sacrificing – a big chunk of their summer vacation.
Of course, it was also their choice and, even then, players didn’t just show up on August 15th to get into shape for the season. If they weren’t in shape by August 15th, they wouldn’t be around for the season, so they had been busy throughout the summer with training and unorganized (wink-wink) workouts.
With West Virginia schools already in their second week of practice, Maryland football practice resumed yesterday, and with it, just as the swallows’ return to Capistrano, old and new generations of railbirds, fence-leaners and completely unneutral observers return as well. As we used to call the same dozen or so guys who attended every practice at Fort Hill, “the braintrust.”
As Royce once said, “I would think the only thing in the world that could be more boring than football practice would be watching football practice.”
Maybe, but it’s high school football, and with the season still over two weeks away, regardless of how small we have become or how large we believe we are, it still has that grip on us.
So in the words of the great Sgt. Phil Esterhaus, “All right, that’s it, let’s roll. And hey! … Let’s be careful out there.”
Everything has changed, and nothing has changed at all.
Mike Burke writes about sports and other stuff for Allegany Communications. He began. covering sports for the Prince George’s Sentinel in 1981 and joined the Cumberland Times-News sports staff in 1984, serving as sports editor for over 30 years. Contact him at mikeburke934@gmail.com. Follow him on X @MikeBurkeMDT