Club Dub (Evan Hecimovich)

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General info:

  • Type of Lore: Customary, Dances
  • Language: English
  • Country of Origin: United States
  • Informant: M.A.
  • Date collected:11/8/2021

Informant Data: M.A. is a member of the class of 2021 at Amherst College where he plays football. He returned for the 2021 season after the Covid-19 Pandemic cancelled his senior season. He is originally from Cheshire Connecticut where his father is a high school football coach. Being the son of a football coach, the sport has always been a huge part of his life and upbringing.

Context:

  • Cultural: Being a division 3 school, there are no scholarships for athletics. The athletes on these teams are playing primarily for fun and their love of the sport. M.A. plays for this reason and believes many of his teammates share his passion. Amherst is a competitive school in their collegiate division.
  • Social: A handful of individuals on the team are from Illinois and therefore fans of the Chicago Bears. In 2018 the Chicago bears started a tradition where they would hire a DJ, have colorful lights set up, and have a dance party amongst the team following wins both home and on the road. Videos of these celebrations were often posted to the internet and spread widely.

Item: Following a victory, Amherst celebrates with their own version of “Club Dub”. Someone on the team, typically a senior or captain, takes control of the speakers and plays music in the locker room. Another individual (or a few) will flip the lights in the locker room on and off rapidly to create a sort of strobe light. Others will take their phones out and flip the flashlights on and off to add to the light show. In this environment the teammates dance and celebrate their win together.

Transcript: “We do a sort of celebration after each of our wins. We call it Club Dub and it’s based on the Club Dub that the Chicago Bears are known to do. It started in 2018 when the Bears started doing it and someone on the team brought it up and thought it would be a fun way for our program to celebrate victories. We obviously don’t have the same funding as an NFL team so we just have one of the old guys take aux and create the light effect by flashing the lights on and off in a strobe and using phone lights. “

Informant’s comments: It is a fun way to celebrate a win and let loose with teammates after a hard week of preparation and game.

Freshman Conditioning (Evan Hecimovich)

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General info:

  • Type of Lore: Customary, Initiation Rite
  • Language: English
  • Country of Origin: United States
  • Informant: E.W.
  • Date collected: 11/2/2021

Informant Data: E.W. is a 2/021 graduate of Butler University where he played football from 2017-2019. He played running back and was transitioning to cornerback before Covid-19 cancelled the season

Context:

  • Cultural: Butler is a private university in Indiana. While the Basketball team is well known for its national success, The football plays in the FCS non-scholarship Pioneer Football League.
  • Social: The item serves as a rite of initiation that every upperclassman had gone through at one point. It enables bonding through shared experiences and humor. It is done with harmless intentions and everyone has a good laugh about it afterwards.

Item: The upperclassmen would tell the Freshman they were going to run sprints early in the morning. As a rite of passage, the Freshman had to go to the locker room and put on all their pads and gear. Everyone would line up to begin the sprints, and as they began, the upperclassmen would fall behind and leave the field. The Freshman would continue running downfield for up to 100 yards before realizing it was all a joke.

Transcript:” So during camp each year we convince the freshman we are going to do extra conditioning led by the upperclassmen. This is during camp when the days are very long already. We get them early in the morning and tell them they have to go into the locker room and put on their pads for it as a sort of initiation thing. Once they come out, we line up for sprints and start. At the start of the sprint we all just go kind of slow and then stop and let the freshman continue to sprint as we all just leave the field and go back to our rooms. Some of them go the whole field before noticing we’re gone. “

Group 6 Introductory Post

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For our group’s project, we decided to focus on football locker room traditions across the country. With the majority of the group members being football players themselves, this topic was particularly important to us. We made sure to focus on locker room traditions for both current and former football players. We made sure that we found folklore that was performed by two or more members of a team in a locker room because a defining characteristic of folklore is that it is shared among a group of “folk”. Our group had six total members and collected thirty pieces of folklore from thirty different sources. We interviewed both current and past football players from across the country. The interviewees spanned from 18 to 37 years old from a variety of schools across the country. Our interviews focused on specific locker room traditions at each school along with the potential meaning behind the tradition.

The folklore that we collected spanned a wide range of customary, material, and verbal folklore with a majority of items collected being fight songs and post-win traditions. Overall, there were a few interesting findings that our group took away from the collection process. The first takeaway is that despite the wide range of ages interviewed, traditions did not seem to change very much. Most of the traditions that were collected had been in practice for as long as anyone on and within the team remembers. Additionally, we found that most of these traditions were learned upon each interviewee’s arrival to their university and it was primarily the job of upperclassmen to continue to pass the tradition. Football is the ultimate team sport in which many times over one hundred individuals come together to achieve one common goal. Each player’s job is unique in and of itself but it’s the culmination of all the players that allows for a team to be successful. Therefore, some of the common overarching themes that we took away from the collected traditions were to invoke school pride, foster comradery, and take ownership of the locker room. In addition, football is both a mentally and physically taxing sport so some more themes that we found included providing motivation to compete and initiating an individual into the team.

As a group, we really enjoyed the collection process and hope you both enjoy and learn something from our collection. See the attached file for the presentation we have in class on 11/10/21.

Folklore-Collection-Presentation-1Download

“The Brick” (Jake Guidone)

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  1. General Info
    1. Locker room tradition
    2. Informant: Andrew Irwin
    3. Place of Origin: Cambridge, MA
    4. Material Tradition
  2. Informant Data:
    1. Andrew Irwin is a twenty-two year old male who plays football at Harvard University. Andrew was born and raised in Altoona, PA, where he attended Bishop Guilfoyle Catholic High School. Andrew is currently a senior linebacker on the Harvard football team, and has resided in Cambridge, MA for the past four years.
  3. Contextual Data:
    1. In recent years, Harvard has always been at the top in terms of Ivy League football. But it wasn’t always like that. Back in the 1980’s and most of the 1990’s Harvard football was a disaster. They were not playing well, and it was like the program had hit a roadblock. The coaching staff and players were unsure if it was just their time in history to be average, or if they were cursed. Something had to be done in order to get the program back on track. In the year 2000, after having lost to the Ivy League champions (University of Pennsylvania) by just one point, things seemed to be trending in the wrong direction. However, things changed after a team trip to the local swimming spot nearby. 
  4. Item/Tradition:
    1. No one is sure of how this tradition started, or by whom, but on that trip to the swimming spot, a Harvard football player picked up a brick in the middle of the lake. He began throwing in the air as high as possible, and everyone had to run away before being hit. Apparently, the team was enthralled by the brick since there was nothing to do at the lake besides swim. They ended up bringing the brick back to their football locker room. As a joke, the player who found the brick brought it to the team’s first game. They pumbled their opponent by 35 points. Since that point, the team brought the brick to every game, and would make sure to safely return it to the locker room immediately after. That year, Harvard went 9-0, and was one of only two teams to ever go undefeated in the Ivy League. Now, the brick resides in the Harvard Locker room, and is brought to every game for good luck.

“Friday Night Locker Room Watch Party” (Jake Guidone)

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  1. General Info
    1. Locker room tradition
    2. Informant: Callum Flanders
    3. Place of Origin: Providence, RI
    4. Verbal and Customary Tradition
  2. Informant Data:
    1. Callum Flanders is a twenty-two year old male who plays football at Brown University. Callum, who goes by Cal, was born and raised on the south shore in Braintree, Massachusetts. He attended Xaverian Brothers High School where he developed his love for sports. Cal currently resides in Providence, Rhode Island, where he has attended Brown and played division one football for the past four years. 
  3. Contextual Data:
    1. College football was a lot different than Cal had expected. At Brown, the football team is not the focal point of the university (like many serious division one colleges), where attendance and the perception of football are at a low point. This was due to a continually losing football program at Brown. Players were not getting excited when their teammates were making big plays. They were not celebrating like other winning programs would, and it showed.
  4. Item/Tradition:
    1. In order to change culture, a few seniors (who graduated in 2010) began the “Friday Night Locker Room Watch Party”. No one knows who exactly started the tradition, but the players get together as a team on Friday night before the game, in the locker room. There, they watch the Ivy League Friday Night game on tv. They get food catered, bring gaming consoles, and play super smash bros. Players eat, talk and generally spend more time with each other (outside structured time). Friendships and true bonds are built through this unstructured time, and the tradition helps players become more willing to celebrate when their teammates/friends make a big play. 

“Senior Spotlight” (Jake Guidone)

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  1. General Info
    1. Locker room tradition
    2. Informant: John Dean
    3. Place of Origin: New Haven, CT
    4. Verbal and Customary Tradition

  1. Informant Data:
    1. John Dean is a twenty four year old male who plays football at Yale University. John was born in White Plains, New York, but was raised in Boston, Massachusetts. He attended Xaverian Brothers High School, where he played both football and lacrosse, and was also named to the academic scholar athlete all-star team. Currently, John resides in New Haven, Connecticut, where he has attended Yale for the past five years. John is the current and only captain of the Yale football team, and has played football his entire life. 

  1. Contextual Data:
    1. John decided to attend Yale University out of high school, a wise decision both academically and athletically. He had received offers from bigger and better schools in terms of football, but decided that he wanted an Ivy League education. As a freshman, John was worried about college expectations, and what managing football and academics would entail. College, especially Ivy League institutions, can be overwhelming for new students at times. This is why Yale Football has a tradition that helps the younger players get a feel for college life, and it’s called “Senior Spotlight”

  1. Text/Tradition:
    1. “Senior Spotlight” is a week to week tradition that takes place during every Yale football season. The night before every game, a random senior is chosen to give a speech in front of the entire team in the Yale locker room. These speeches usually last around twenty to thirty minutes, and are about that seniors’ experience with the school, team, and/or their life. “It is meant to be an open conversation”. The significance of this tradition lies in the unity of the team. It gives everyone a senior’s point of view of what they went through. It also helps the young players, bringing them closer to the team as a whole. Yale does this every season to help better the culture of their team, and bring the new players up to speed on what it means to be a Yale football player. The origin of this tradition is unknown, and has been going on since John arrived as a freshman (and well before that), making this a piece of Yale folklore. 

Visualization

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Title: Visualization

General Information about Item:

  • customary lore, personal
  • Language: English
  • Country of Origin: United States
  • Informant: JS
  • Date Collected 10/22/21

Informant Data:

  • Male, 20 years old, Born in New Jersey, Currently living in Hanover, NH
  • JS is a 400 hurdler on The Dartmouth Track Team

Contextual Data:

  • Cultural Context: Track competitions are often as much mental as physical, especially the field events and hurdles. Since track is an individual sport there is a lot of self-motivated pressure on an athlete to do well. Messing up only leaves ourself to blame so mental training is common in this sport. 
  • Social Context: During a track meet unlike the field events, sprinters and hurdlers only have one shot at their race. Hurdles can be mentally challenging as it is easy to mess up the rhythm and get hurt/loose the race.

Item:

  • JS has a certain visualization routine before every meet where he focuses on the feeling of running and successfully timing up each hurdle jump. He claims that it calms his pre-meet nerves and helps boost his confidence for a good race. He said that he learned this method from an older teammate in high school and has been doing it since.

Informant Comments/Quotes:

  • “I always have to visualize myself running the race the day before the meet.” -JS

Collector Comments:

  • Visualization is a common practice among track athletes because of how mentally challenging the sport can be. Although this practice is somewhat personal, I can personally verify, as a member of the track team, that this practice is extremely common especially at Dartmouth.

Collected By: Chloe Taylor