Teenage Musings

Basketball sea­son has begun at

WHS.

The season itself started last Tuesday, but this Sat­urday was our first home game, which means it was the first game the pep band got to play at. Being both in the pep band and out of the sports loop, it was the first game that hit my radar.

I ran in with my flute a few minutes late, bracing myself for a scolding. For­tunately for me, the boy's junior varsity game was running about fifteen min­utes behind schedule, and the band doesn't play until the beginning of the girls' varsity game. So I unpacked my instrument, set up my music stand on the mezza­nine, and prepared to go sit with the rest of the bandies in the bleachers. Unfortu­nately, the double doors into the school had been propped open, meaning that the ground level was freezing. To keep warm, I remained in the balcony for the duration of the game, kneeling on a stack of rub­ber mats with my nose rest­ing on the partition rail.

The band plays four times during each home game - as the varsity girls run out, during the halftime of the girls' varsity game, as the varsity boys run out, and during the halftime of their game. As a band, we were pretty good for the begin­ning of the season. There were the inevitable squeaks in the newer songs, but our old standbys like 'Paint it Black' neared perfection and the fight song was per­formed with its usual high degree of mastery.

At one point during the game, I decided to wander out to the concession stand. The cross-country team had a loaded baked potato bar set up opposite a newly built trophy case that had been stocked with trophies from earlier years, includ­ing a hand-decorated com­memorative football from the 3rd in state Waitsburg team from 1967, the one most people thought would have no equal in the history of our school. Two equals and one surpasser later, they have happily been proven wrong.

Reaching the concession stand, I ordered a caramel apple sucker, my all-time favorite accompaniment to a basketball game. Business was slow enough that the people manning the stand engaged me in conversation for five full minutes before someone remembered to take my order. I gave him a dollar. He gave me a sucker and seventy-five cents. No tax was charged. No receipt was printed. I thanked him and went back to the game.

From my perch on the mezzanine, I could ob­serve not only the players but the audience. I have a tough time interpreting ref­eree signals, but I could tell which team had been fouled by the sections of the audi­ence that cheered. The loud­est spectators from Asotin were mostly congregated in the uppermost rows, directly above where their team sat. The most enthusi­astic Cardinal fans clustered both directly above our team and in a large clump (mostly of high-schoolers) directly across from the team. Before I could es­tablish this, I looked at the cheerleaders for clues- the fouled team would grin, rattle their pom-poms, and occasionally break into whoops, while the fouling team stood arrow-straight, arms limp, mouths pressed into hard lines.

I saw three people in the stands who had been seniors my freshman year. I recog­nized two former basketball aces among them. And I knew that more alumni had traveled to be there that night, fellow Cardinals who thought they had left the nest for good but couldn't resist dropping back in for a little first-game magic.