February 07, 2023 | Read Online

Air Schafer

In the summer going into my junior year, I wanted to jump higher.

Cole Schafer
February 07, 2023

In the summer going into my junior year, I wanted to jump higher.

So, I started training with the football team.

We'd gather at my high school in the early morning hours––when it was still so dark that we could barely see our tired feet on the asphalt beneath us––and we'd train like gladiators preparing for the Colosseum.

The weight room in those days sounded like a warzone.

The air rattled as lungs heaved violently for oxygen over the noise of an industrial-sized box fan. Over-sized aluminum trashcans echoed like snare drums as vomit painted their insides. Coaches and team captains bawled and howled like speed-crazed dogs, urging flagging comrades to dig deeper, squat lower and keep form.

And, every two to three seconds a crash that sounded like the hull of a Tiger Tank being scalped and left to die would reverberate within the four concrete walls as hundreds of pounds of Olympic plates and all of gravity's wrath would come crashing to the floor.

To my soft, sensitive ears that had grown used to the faint squeak of sneakers on hardwood and the satisfying swish of a basketball falling through a perfectly still net, football strength training was like suddenly and very cruelly exposing a meek, soft-spoken, classically-trained violin protégé to Pantera.

It's impossible to overstate just how horrified and intimidated I was stepping into that weight room whose auditory violence could have easily been the soundtrack for a Robert Eggers interpretation of Dante's Inferno.

But, I wanted to jump higher for the approaching basketball season and I knew, deep down, this was the only place to do it.

The hell hole's commander-in-chief was Coach Johns, an offensive coordinator who probably should have been a Staff Seargent for the Marines.

The football team he was tasked with getting into fighting shape for the upcoming season was the worst in the entire state of Indiana and this infuriated him to no end; infuriation he unleashed in our training with the power of a thousand pissed-off suns.

Nobody talked back to Coach Johns not out of respect but fear.

While he only stood five foot eight inches tall, he was built like a warthog. He weighed somewhere in the neighborhood of 275 lbs, his head and neck were as sturdy as a fire hydrant and his chest as round as an Oak.

One of the younger football players on the team––a kid so translucently white he could catch a sunburn sitting underneath a porch light––once saw Johns bench 225 lbs for 25 reps and talked about it like he had witnessed Perseus hack off the head of Medusa, his enthusiasm causing saliva to foam in the corners of his mouth.

At the end of practice, Johns would lay us all down on the black horse mat that covered every square inch of the weight room. Our backs would grow cold in the wet puddles of our own sweat while, for three minutes, we had to stick out our legs and hover them above the ground at precisely 6 inches.

Anytime Johns saw one of our heels hit the ground he'd shout, "You're lying to yourselves just like you're lying to your girlfriends. That ain't six inches, boys. Get your goddamn heels up."

Johns was an asshole by any and every stretch of the word. But, for the development of my athleticism (and to some degree my mental toughness), he might have been the best thing to ever happen to me.

Because I wasn't a football player––nor had any aspirations of being a football player––there was a part of Johns that despised me for showing up to weight training and taking up space. He ignored me for as long as he could until he noticed that I kept showing up with all the other football players at the same time each day.

Over the remainder of the summer, Johns introduced 17 football players and 1 basketball player to all the different ways you could pull, push, yank and heave iron from the ground: power cleans, deadlifts, squats, jerks, etc.

Most days, I'd leave the gymnasium unable to bend my knees, walking straight-legged––as if I was forced to live out the rest of my existence on stilts––to my truck where it took everything that was left in my tattered spirit to hoist myself up into the cab, slam the door and gun home.

(Sitting down to take a shit in those days felt like taking a Louisville Slugger to the ass, hips, hamstrings and calves...)

But, I kept showing up.

A couple of months later, I was "kicked off" the team because weight training was over and football practice was ready to commence.

It was around this time the basketball team held the first open gym of the season.

(An open gym, for those not privy, is like organized pick-up basketball where guys who plan to try out for the team have the chance duke it out with one another in front of the coaches...)

While I warmed up on a side goal that looked like it was stolen right out of the movie Hoosiers, out of the corner of my eye, I saw Coach Johns talking with Coach Speer (the head basketball coach at Harrison High School at the time and one of the greatest mentors I've ever had).

Up to this point, while I knew the weight training had helped me jump higher, I didn't know by how much. So, to test the new springs in my legs, I tossed the basketball toward the top of the square painted on the backboard, took two ferocious steps toward the goal, leaped, caught the ball in my outstretched right hand and threw down a tomahawk dunk that scared the living shit out of me.

(Years later, after adopting a sweet pitbull named June, I'd have a flashback to this moment when, one day, she got so overwhelmed with excitement that she jumped three feet in the air and squealed in fear as gravity brought her back down to Earth; it took her several dozen jumps at this height before she got comfortable and started trusting her legs...)

I turned around, looked at Coach Johns, he smirked, he gave me a nod and then he walked out of the gym.

There's a lot about sports I hate: toxic masculinity, chauvinism, verbal abuse (that many times becomes physical), hyper-competitiveness and constant unhealthy displays of anger.

Still to this day, nearly a decade after hanging up my sneakers, I'm still rewiring parts of my brain from the toxic love affair I had with basketball, constantly noticing bad habits conditioned in me.

But, for all the bad I picked up from sports, I picked up a lot of good, too.

One of them being...

I can jump higher if I want to, badly enough.

By Cole Schafer.

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