Player of the Game Helmet
General Information about Item:
Genre: Sports Tradition – Postgame Tradition
Language: English
Country of Origin: United States
Informant Data:
Jack Mascali is a 20 year old Italian/Irish male who was born and raised in New Jersey. He is a Junior at Dartmouth College, where in addition to playing Club Hockey he is the Social Chair and Rush Chair of Phi Delta Alpha Fraternity. He has been playing Club Hockey at Dartmouth for three years, and has played hockey for 15 years of his life. He first encountered this tradition in September 2017, during his freshman fall at Thompson Arena in the Club Hockey locker room.
Contextual Data:
Social Context: The following tradition occurs after a club hockey game. The tradition is led by the previous game’s player of the game. Transmission of this folklore comes from being on the club hockey team and observing the tradition performance in the locker room. Receiving the player of the game helmet is an honor.
Item:
After every club hockey game, the previous recipient of the helmet chooses a player to bestow the helmet upon. The previous recipient is the sole decider of the new recipient, and may choose the player of the game on whatever grounds he deems appropriate. He gives a quick speech on why he thinks the player in question deserves the helmet. The helmet is then transferred to the new recipient and he gives a short speech about the game they just played. He then carries the helmet with him in his bag until the next game, when the ceremony is performed again and the helmet is transferred.
Collector: Robert Hopkins
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Rookie Night
General Information about Item:
- Customary Folklore: Sports Custom
- Language: English
- Country of Origin: United States
- Informant: Robert Hopkins
- Date Collected: May 19, 2020
Informant Data:
Robert Hopkins was born in Chicago, Illinois and has lived there his entire life. He is 21 years old and is of Irish, Scottish, and Welsh descent. Robert has played hockey for 15 years, including three years of club hockey at Dartmouth. He also played baseball before coming to Dartmouth and plays golf in his free time. At Dartmouth, he is a member and co-treasurer of the club hockey team, the treasurer of Beta Alpha Omega fraternity, and is involved in the political economy project.
Contextual Data:
Social Context:
After Robert tried out for and made the club hockey team, he and the other new team members were still not fully integrated into the team. First, they needed to go through an initiation to understand what it meant to be part of the club hockey team. On a Friday night at an off-campus house, the entire team gathered and the new members learned about the traditions of the team. Robert believes that this night helped him to become extremely close with not only his class, but also the upperclassmen. He was glad that this night gave the upperclassmen a chance to get to know him and his comedic personality. Robert enjoyed the fact that he could learn about the team and spend time with his teammates outside of a hockey setting.
Cultural Context:
Sports teams (specifically in college) usually have some sort of initiation for players that they have to complete. The initiation usually includes some kind of education about the team’s history, traditions, and current players. These rituals are meant to teach the new players about the team and to integrate them with the older players.
Item:
The older players are waiting at the off-campus house and then the younger players show up in hockey garb. All of the new players give a 100-word speech in hockey jargon about what a team means to them. Next, there are a few tasks that the new players perform, which teach them about the team’s traditions and introduce them to older players. They compete against older team members to foster chemistry between the new members. Finally, the new players get to remove their helmets and ceremoniously join their team.
Collector: Jack Mascali
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End of Year Banquet
General Information:
Informant = Ty Teodori
Country of Origin = United States of America
Date Collected = May 20th 2020
Informant Data: Ty Teodori was born on December 31st and is from Fulton Maryland. He grew up playing hockey, lacrosse and golf and continued to play all three of those sports into high school. While he was always a superior lacrosse player, hockey was his favorite sport and he decided to join the club team at Dartmouth, which Ty admits to be far more competitive than the hockey he is used to. Ty is currently a senior at Dartmouth College, studying engineering, he will be returning next year to complete his BE degree.
Contextual Data: The club hockey team only recently made a commitment to becoming a more serious sports team, officially joining the ACHA (American Club Hockey Association) and hiring the previous Hanover high school hockey coaches to take over the team. Ty is now a senior, but he remembers his freshmen year when there was a good deal of hockey talent on the team, but the commitment to the group was lacking and the mentality of the team was less about winning and more about having fun. Ty relates, that the changes in the group came about almost entirely due to student leadership and cites this newfound tradition as part of the changes. End of year banquets are typical of most sports teams, both at youth and college level, and the idea was only incorporated to Dartmouth Men’s club hockey two years ago. Ty’s freshmen year there was no banquet, but he got to experience the first and second annual banquet which occur in early springtime after the entirety of the season is completed.
Item: The banquet consists of a team congregation at Murphy’s restaurant in Hanover, where the team reserves the back room for dinner and a few activities to cap off the season. The banquet consists of only the players and no coaches and the players spend the majority of the meal eating and socializing with fellow teammates. According to Ty, the club hockey team is one of the closest teams on campus and he has developed a lot of his closest friendships in college through the club hockey team. Near the end of the banquet, there are a few ceremonies which serve to honor the graduating seniors on the team, a speech about each senior is performed by a prominent team member. Next, each individual player is honored with a “Most likely” award, these awards have been brainstormed in preparation for the banquet and range from serious to inside jokes. While they are rarely mean, they are more often designed to poke fun at each player on the team. For example, Ty’s most likely award was, “most likely to have silky mitts.” Silky mitts is an ironic callback to Ty’s instantly recognizable (to all who know hockey) inferior skills at handling the puck.
Collector: Matt Armstrong
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Avalon
General Information:
Informant = Emerson Mahoney
Country of Origin = United States of America
Date Collected = May 21st 2020
Informant Data: Emerson Mahoney was born and grew up on the island of Martha’s Vineyard,. He grew up playing club hockey around the Boston area, he is a senior on the Dartmouth club hockey and will graduate shortly. He is also the one responsible for bringing this folklore to the team and is the only person on the team who knew the rules to the game before teaching the rest of the team and passing it down to the younger players.
Contextual Data: The club hockey team only recently made a commitment to becoming a more serious sports team, officially joining the ACHA (American Club Hockey Association) and hiring the previous Hanover high school hockey coaches to take over the team. Travel has always been a fairly large component of the commitment to the team. Each year, the team goes on two or three road trips where they will stay overnight at a hotel. This is a result of tournament play, or simply multiple league games scheduled in the same city, or neighboring locations. Because few league teams are based near Hanover, the scheduling of the team (which includes half of the games played away) involved significant travel. Away games accomplished in day trips are located at minimum an hour away from campus. The prevalence of travel, increases team camaraderie and forces social time to be spent, when team members are looking for weekend breaks from rigorous Dartmouth academic life.
Item: This ritual consists of a congregation of the entirety, or majority of the team as Avalon player limits are capped off at around 6 in one hotel room. Hotel rooms are small, financed by the minimal club hockey budget and are suited for four maximum people in two beds. Typical for a game of Avalon, around 15 people are gathered in a room, either to play or to watch and socialize. The rules of the game are difficult, but the premise of the game is that some players are assigned as “good” (minions of merlin) and some as “bad” (“minions of modred”). The caveat of the game is that no one knows the true identity of the other plays and your skill and ability to lie determine your ultimate fate, the good try to defeat the evil whereas the evil try to pass off as good and remain after the game is completed. The nature of the game creates a wild scene where players often yell or interrogate intensely other players and in the end no one knows what to believe. While gameplay is intense, the overriding atmosphere is one of goodhearted fun. Many rounds are played over the course of a couple hours before team members retire back to their own hotels rooms for the night
Collector: Matt Armstrong