Baseball shenanigans, part 2
Since my first post about baseball shenanigans recounted the time that my buddy Matt put the chalk liner to artistic use, drawing the likeness of one of our competitors, I will pick up where we left off with the infamous chalk liner. Let’s see what happens after the field is lined and the on-deck circle displays a likeness of the nemesis we call Burke.
If you recall, our high school coach asked Matt, Alex, and me to line the fields for playoff games our school would host for other teams. The following weekend we would play a home game, and somehow, Coach asked the three of us to repeat our performance with the chalk liner. Well, not exactly. He requested that we do the job while refraining from drawing any likeness of any kind on the field with the chalk liner. We got the message loud and clear, and we did a fine job lining our field to playoff-quality. But with graduation now just a few short weeks away, we felt we would be remiss in not making a further statement of some kind. The only problem was figuring out exactly what our next artful act would be.
I can’t claim with certainty whether it was Matt or Alex who had the bright idea, but one of them came up with a brilliant plan. It would prove to be our pièce de résistance.
Our school was set on a large property which was a former estate. The baseball field was adjacent to the driveway, and the first thing one saw when encountering the school. The driveway stretched up a winding hill for a few hundred yards to the school building, then recurved to the left, behind the school, and back toward a second exit/entrance. A turn to the right when in front of the school would take you to the bus parking area, and then back out to the main driveway once again. Measuring the distance on google maps, as I just did, the entire roadway within the school campus was just short of a mile.
We loaded the chalk liner into the back of my Nissan 240SX hatchback and readied for the ride up to the supply shed to store it away when I heard Matt and Alex concocting a plan from where they sat in the hatch of my car. Within seconds the mutual decision was made to roll the chalk liner behind my car, leaving a continuous white line behind us as I drove. We left a line from the entrance to the supply shed, but Alex suggested that we keep going around the back of the school and out to the road, while Matt did an expert job at keeping the chalk liner upright and straight. Then, we thought it wise to take another lap up the driveway and leave a line on the road to the bus parking lot to complete the job, but once we did that our lone foul line looked forlorn in that vast lot, so we decided to drive up and down the lot, leaving lines all around it as we went. Curves, zig-zags, heck, we may have even left a hashtag before that was even a thing. When we were done we realized that our foul line around the school may draw the ire of the powers that be. While I am sure that in the moment all three of us thought it looked awfully good, in reality, it looked awful.
At that point in the year, we weren’t fearful of the potential blowback since we would graduate in just several days’ time and be off to college. But there was still a slight tickle of adrenaline as we sat listening to the announcements delivered by our principal the next morning. Many of our classmates were already murmuring about the foul line encircling the campus, with some of them knowing exactly whodunnit.
As the principal read through that morning’s items of importance he came to the end, when he would always announce the scores from athletic events and the upcoming game schedules for all teams. His last item was our playoff game that afternoon, which he urged students to attend thusly; …and the LuHi baseball team will be playing a home game against Staten Island Academy in the conference semifinals this afternoon. Go and root on your fellow Crusaders! And for anyone who is unfamiliar with where the ball field is, just follow the white foul lines, they all lead to the field. Thank you to the crew who saw fit to line our campus as you did, it shows unbridled school spirit and is very clever. Then an audible chuckle. Not only had we gotten away with it, but we were also showing “unbridled school spirit”.
Campus foul lines recreated from a Google Maps screenshot and simple editing.
