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Wednesday, September 17, 1997

Coaches lunch on ritual

By CHRISTINE LAUE / Corpus Christi Caller-Times

INGLESIDE, Texas -- The cooks prepare for the ritual as the smell of chopped onions and the sound of sizzling hamburger fills Dairy Queen.

Waitress Rosie Alvarado tapes ticket 101565 to the three tables pushed together -- a warning for others to stay away and an inspiration for those who soon will come.

"Reserved," the ticket reads. "Go Blue."

The Blue enter.

The nine Ingleside football coaches, a few hiking up their elastic-waist pants and most donning the school color, pay for their phone-ordered meals and walk to the table, carefully selecting a seat this Friday.

They must not sit where they sat the Friday before, when they lost to George West.

"Here come the food, here come the food," chants Jack Woodard, offensive line coach.

But not the food they ate the Friday before.

For four or five years, the coaches have feasted here during game-day lunches, ordering the same food and sitting in the same seats if they win the week before; rotating seats and ordering different meals if they lose.

It is tradition. It is superstition.

It is the Wizard of Oz phenomenon.

The Cowardly Lion wasn't really cowardly, the Scarecrow wasn't really stupid and the Tin Man wasn't really heartless, said Robert Schlesser, professor of clinical psychology specializing in sport and performance psychology at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. They just needed to be given tokens to prove it, or to be reminded, Schlesser said.

"What happened is that these coaches have the abilities all of the time, but when they have this lunch, it reminds them that they have this ability. If they don't have that lunch, for whatever reason, at an unconscious level, they may be less certain about winning," Schlesser said. "And they are less likely to win because they are not going to do the things they normally would do, like motivating the players and aggressive coaching."

Head coach Larry Peel downplays how seriously the coaches take the lunches, saying it's more of a gathering of comrades than a compulsion.

"(It's one of the) few times that we can all get together and discuss the small things we need to talk about that night," Peel said. "A lot of times it's just a lot of nervous talk. Gameday gets your butterflies going."

It's butterflies and chicken fingers in his stomach this particular Friday.

"I was over there last week," Peel said, pointing across and down the table to defensive coordinator Art Arguijo.

As Peel, Arguijo and the other coaches had walked to the table after paying and getting their self-serve drinks, Alvarado and Dairy Queen manager Mary Dearsan were already there, unloading the paper baskets of burgers and chicken fingers. "I need a Hunger Buster with cheese, no onions," Arguijo ordered to his co-coaches who are sorting the baskets.

The nine coaches -- the 10th had to meet a girlfriend elsewhere -- chat about the junior varsity game the night before, tease each other about big bellies, and remember lunch the previous Friday.

"Our defense didn't play very well. So it's my fault. If it doesn't work this week, I'll be there next week," Arguijo said, pointing to offensive backs coach Rick Moore, who, like the others, is eating quickly because they have only 30 minutes for lunch.

They fly in, chow down and get out. But the lunch is so important. And so are the little details, like finishing the ice cream cone before leaving, said Moore, who shoved the ice cream cone stump into his mouth just a few feet from the door as the other coaches threw away their trash and exited.

And there are those little details such as chocolate or vanilla. The coaches order what they want for dessert, discarding the rule of changing foods if they lose. But this Dairy Queen stopped carrying chocolate ice cream recently, possibly jinxing secondary coach Curtis Woodard's personal superstition of having that dessert after every Friday meal last year, he said. Remember, they lost their first game this season.

So he has switched to chocolate-dipped vanilla ice cream cones. "If we lose, she'll start having chocolate ice cream again," Woodard joked of Dearsan, who stood nearby chuckling with the group.

Looks like Dearsan might have to pull some strings at DQ headquarters to get the chocolate back. Tuloso-Midway beat Ingleside, 41-14, on Friday.

Dearsan will do her best, as she had for the past four or five years, because she knows they take it seriously, she said. Moore agrees with Dearsan more than Peel that the tradition is taken pretty seriously.

"I don't know if it's just for fun. We're all coaches, and we're competitive. We hate to lose, and we love to win. It's an athletic thing," Moore said. "It seems somewhat serious. We plan on it. Mary plans on it."

And the one time she wasn't planning on it, thinking that the scrimmage game last year meant they weren't coming to lunch because they were basically playing themselves, she learned her lesson.

"They were just unhappy," Dearsan said with a laugh. "They just politely reminded me to reserve the table."

She understands. She said everybody has rituals, or superstitions. Schlesser agreed, saying that many people discount the seriousness of them.

"That's the left side of my brain saying it's not important, but the emotional right side of my brain is saying it is. Because if I don't have it, I'm uncomfortable," Schlesser said, referring to a wristband he put on every day. "In the back of their minds, they are going to say, ÔWe didn't have our lunch. We're jinxed. We just didn't have our ritual.' But it's very subtle. This is actually pretty basic psychology."

Whatever the case, Aubie Glover, defensive ends coach, thinks it is good for the coaches and the student athletes -- who, by the way, knew that the coaches did something superstitious but weren't aware of the Dairy Queen ritual, said Wesley Moncrief, the team's 17-year-old quarterback.

"It's sort of a brief respite before the battle," Glover said. "Whether it helps or not, it really doesn't matter. It's just the way we are. We just do it."

While he calls it a respite, it appears to be a hurried meal by moderately hyped coaches suppressing those butterflies. The respite for Alvarado and Dearsan comes when the bunch leaves. What Dearsan described as "an air of excitement" when the coaches are in the Dairy Queen returns to a calmness more like the pace of the churning soft serve machine -- vanilla, that is.

And Alvarado takes off the reserved sign and pulls apart the tables. Until next week.