What’s On My Mind: “If You Build It…” by A.J. Kohlhepp
photos courtesy of Michael Hayes at Berkshire School
March 27, 2017
This
past November, just in time for the interscholastic squash season,
Berkshire School opened a new facility. With ten beautiful Court
Tech courts in an airy, well-lit annex off of the main gymnasium, we
suddenly found ourselves one of the premiere venues among New England
schools. The construction, undertaken at dazzling speed over a
6-month period, put us in a new position to compete with our peer
schools, literally and figuratively; our new home also opened up
challenges and opportunities, many of them unforeseen, that came into
focus over the course of the winter campaign.
The Host with the Most
In addition to our normal slate of interscholastic matches at the
varsity, junior varsity and thirds levels – we now have six teams in
total -- Berkshire hosted a handful of new events over the winter
season, none of which would have been possible under our old
configuration of four courts with limited viewing.
In December, to break in the new facility and introduce it to squash
players from prospective feeder programs, we hosted a Pre-Prep Showdown
with three middle-school teams in the region: Indian Mountain,
The Rectory and the Albany Academies. The goal was to give prospective
high school competitors a look at our facility (and school) and to
provide coaches and parents a chance to network with our coaches and
admissions personnel. In terms of preparation, I had to invest
time and energy on planning and logistics at a time when my own team –
the girls’ varsity side at Berkshire – was just beginning our
season. In effect in this instance, I traded the current moment
with my own team for the future possibilities of teams to come.
In early February, toward the end our season, we hosted a very
different kind of program: an exhibition between former world #1
Jonathan Power and former Trinity College standout Gustav Detter,
coinciding with the school’s dedication of various named spaces within
the athletic facility. The former came to us via a connection
with our primary benefactor in the athletic renovations; the latter was
connected to Berkshire via his cousin, an alumnus who currently works
in our advancement office. Power hoped for a quick outing against the
plucky Swede; Detter, who had consented to a full training with
Berkshire’s varsity players the day before, hoped for a good showing
against the legendary Canadian; and our advancement office hoped for a
compelling spectacle for the various constituents in attendance.
All three parties achieved their objectives. A couple of hundred
spectators marveled at the devastating accuracy of Power’s shots, the
impressive athleticism of Detter’s retrievals, and the marvelous
aesthetics of the new space, which Power referred to as “the finest on
the East Coast” on his way off court and onto his next
obligation. (Given that we can boast of ten adjustable tins, we
could have hosted ten simultaneous professional matches. Perhaps
we will make that a reality in the indeterminate future. Stay tuned.)
My own involvement in the exhibition was modest beyond a dozen or so
emails to nail down details. I served as an informal handler for the
competitors and was also tapped to provide color commentary for an
in-house simulcast of the event but, given challenging sight lines and
an inability to get close to the iPad being used to film, I had to
forego that opportunity and enjoy the event courtesy of one of our
large monitors. (See a later section for a technology update.)
Last but by no means least, Berkshire School hosted the girls’ B-level
championship for the New England Interscholastic Squash Association,
which is the culminating event of the season. (The executive
committee of the NEISA ranks teams from first to last several times
throughout the season, with the top sixteen contending at the A
tournament, the next sixteen vying for B-level honors, and the final
ten to twelve – this numbers varies a bit based on location and timing
of the tournament – competing at C.)
Logistics for this particular opportunity were extensive. In
addition to meetings with the custodial team and the maintenance crew,
I had to line up an athletic trainer for both days and arrange for two
extended lunches for competitors and coaches. I also worked with
Nick Lloyd from Dana Hall to set up the tournament desk and wrangled my
own team members to ensure continuing coverage of this same desk
throughout the tournament. Once play began, I frequently
found myself tethered to this same desk as sixteen teams of seven
players did battle on the courts, sneaking away as often as I could to
counsel the Berkshire squashers. (My readers may recall
that Berkshire won the C tournament in February 2016; promoted to the B
level this year, the girls fought their way to a highly respectable
sixth place finish, thus completing a leap of eleven ranking spots from
last year to this.)
As with the other events, it was lovely to be able to share our space
with the multitudes; as I had during the other events, I felt the pull
of my attentions and energies away from my own team toward the
exigencies of the respective events and to the needs of those who came
to share in them. But no aspect of my hosting duties caused as
much strife and strain as a handful of new squash technologies.
You Are Experiencing Technical Difficulties
When you walk into the all-new squash annex within Berkshire’s Soffer
Athletic Center, you will see many screens. There are large ones
by the entryways that show either a continual feed of images and
updates from the campus and the world or, on game days, scorecards from
the varsity matches being played. Likewise on game days, you will
encounter medium-sized monitors mounted over each court; last but not
least, you will notice a designated iPad for every single court.
The court monitors and iPads work in tandem, although the way that they
work is counter-intuitive. Rather than speaking directly to each
other and thus displaying the live scoring of individual matches, which
the courtside officials (i.e. fellow competitors) enter on a point by
point basis, the iPads send their data via wifi to ClubLocker, the U.S.
Squash database. The monitors reach out via the internet (also
wirelessly) for continuous updates to their data stream, then reflect
that new information on their screens. When it all works, this is
an elegant system that provides crowds and competitors a
state-of-the-art experience.
When it doesn’t work, however, the system provides absolutely nothing
except blank screens. As with many “smart” technologies, this
system works really well or not at all. Here are some reasons for
scoring system failure that we experienced this past season:
* We were using the wrong remote controls to turn on the various devices.
* One or both teams had not been registered and rostered on the
official U.S. Squash database. (This prevented us from using the iPads
& monitors with our junior varsity and thirds teams.)
* We were hosting anything other than an interscholastic match between
two teams. (This meant we couldn’t use the iPads & monitors
when hosting a showcase for pre-prep teams, nor when we served as host
site for the NEISA Girls’ Level B championship.)
* Those who had used the devices earlier failed to log out fully from
the Club Locker app., thus locking future users into a Moebius loop of
failed logins and data entry.
* An incorrect value was entered into the Calxo software – designed by
Greg Born, a computer engineer and squash supporter at Bates College –
used to get the monitors looking in the right direction for
updates. (At one point this season, I accidentally displayed a
“scorecard” from last year’s head-to-head match against
Kingswood-Oxford. Our visitors were delighted to see that they
have won the match 5-2 before play even began, but less pleased when we
surpassed them by the same tally after we got the pixelated interface
straightened out.)
The first of these was easiest to remediate, of course. The
second and third frequently prevented us from even considering the
electronic system in the first place. The fourth and fifth, which
generally only became clear in the hours (or even minutes) leading up
to a match, generated massive amounts of gameday anxiety on the part of
both varsity coaches (fortunately, Jasper Turner, my fellow coach on
the boys’ varsity side, has a background in computer science) and a
handful of student managers who had signed on to battle the tech gods
with us most Wednesdays and Saturdays.
Before this new facility opened up, I had a relatively simple “to do”
list leading up to our home matches. I would check the posted
times for competition, confirm this information with the opposing
coach, and share it with my team; I would ensure a sufficient number of
match balls (generally four balls for the eight individual matches); I
would photocopy score sheets and place them, along with sharpened
pencils, on clipboards that I then laid upon folding chairs positioned
by the door to each court; I would supervise my team’s warmup, greet
the visitors, and emcee the official pre-match announcements.
After that, the match would proceed by its own internal logic.
With the new technology set-up, I no longer had to worry about
scoresheets and clipboards and writing utensils, which saved some time
in the run-up. Unless, of course, the system failed, which
occurred several times, in which case I had to immediately revert to
the “old school” methodology of pencil on paper. I usually
wouldn’t know until shortly before the match whether things were on
track regarding the iPads and monitors, as there was no way to do a
“test run” – so the technology generated a whole new level of stress
during moments that I had previously spent attending to the human
elements of squash, including interacting with opposing coaches.
On the bright side, our system looks really cool when it is working,
and it does in fact function successfully, more often than not.
In addition, our direct-to-the-app data entry means that I no longer
needed to enter scores manually into the database after the match. The
tradeoff here: more relaxed Wednesday and Saturday nights (or
Thursday and Sunday mornings) in exchange for more stressful
afternoons.
Three Cs: Confusion, Combination & Collaboration
The other afternoons – we usually practice Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays
and Fridays at New England prep schools – also featured a new slate of
challenges and opportunities throughout the season.
For one thing, we had to dispense with the basic practice schedule that
we had used for the past decade, whereby one of five groups – two
varsity, two junior varsity, and one co-ed thirds teams – had access to
the (four) courts for somewhere between sixty and ninety minutes in a
complicated rotation over the course of the week. The final session
generally concluded between 9:00 and 9:30 p.m., thus creating
additional complications regarding designated study hours for our
athletes. (Study hall occurs each night between 8:00 and
10:00.)
Moving to ten courts, we were able to provide more court time to our
teams and to conclude the practices by 7:30 p.m. But we still
needed some kind of practice rotation, and we had the now challenge of
determining which teams would practice together. For our first
season in the new space, we went with a hybrid solution whereby the two
varsity teams would practice together twice a week, putting the junior
varsity and thirds groups for each sex together on those days (thus
creating three separate sessions); the other two days, the varsity and
junior varsity teams for each sex would share court time, with a co-ed
thirds group taking the third session.
Creating the new schedule illuminated new questions. Did the fact
that teams were practicing at the same time entail some obligation
toward collaboration between the coaches (and thus combination among
the athletes)? In what ways would our own outlook as coaches change as
a result of this configuration? How different would our teams’
experiences be given their new “neighbors” at practice? Would the
usual obstacles – lack of planning, poor communication, differing foci
– impede these opportunities?
Having made it through a full season, I observe that the efforts and
the results were mixed. Among the varied configurations of
coaches, teams and schedules, we experienced everything from seamless
integration – two separate groups practicing as one cohesive body, with
two coaches supporting the range of athletes equally – to utter
separation – two separate groups training as if the other weren’t even
present in the same space, with coaches attending exclusively to their
own squads. What I conclude from that wide disparity is that
although our new facility provided continuing opportunities for
coaching collaboration, our functionality was entirely dependent of
clear and timely communication.
Squash Out of Season
In the autumn months, before our squash center opened, we faced a
problem that was new to us at Berkshire squash: demand for court time
with no available facility. The majority of our returning players
were generally content to enjoy their respective fall sports and then,
as they had done in the past, transition into their winter pursuit as
the calendar dictated. (For New England boarding schools, this
seasonal switch comes in mid-November, then again in March.) But
the admission cycle last year had rendered up more squash players than
we had seen in previous years on both the boys’ and girls’ sides,
yielding a total of five starters among the top sixteen, and many of
them wished to train as soon as they got to school. As a result, the
coaches and I offered semi-regular Sunday service to Salisbury, the
closest school with squash courts.
Fortunately, the opening of our new facility coincided perfectly with
the official changeover from fall to winter sports. Once the
courts were opened, our athletes had more court access than ever
before, and they made full use. In fact, droves of uninitiated
fans and players spent time in the squash annex throughout the
winter.
We have seen another uptick in admissions this year, and with half a
dozen targeted student-athletes, the coaches and admissions team have
to be on our “A game.” Part of that involves being able to offer
out-of-season development opportunities for our players. Since
NEPSAC guidelines prevent coaches from holding training sessions
outside of their designated seasons, neither the boys’ varsity coach
nor I can put anything formal into place outside of the winter. A
lack of offerings in that regard puts us behind other programs that
have access to off-site coaches, from both a recruiting and development
perspective. As a result, we are strategizing ways to get outside
coaches here, to our rather remote location, or transporting Berkshire
kids to outside coaches and clinics, so that they can continue to
pursue the sport that they love even after our season has ended.
I fully expect prospective parents and students to ask, on or around
our admissions revisit days in April, what we can offer squash players
by way of out-of-season support. Although we don’t have a single
simple answer to that important question, we can at least say
(confidently and honestly), “We are working on it.”
Takeways After a Season in the New Squash Palace
I am aware, as I consider the entirety of this reflection, that the
challenges I have shared here are of a very positive nature – the very
first-est of “first world problems.” Indeed, the moments of
crisis revealed herein seem prime for satire – “Oh, no! You
couldn’t use electronic scoreboards when hosting junior varsity squash
matches in your new ten-court facility?!”
I am also aware that most of the tribulations I have enumerated herein
have been borne by myself, and to a certain extent the other coaches
(especially the boys’ varsity coach) involved with Berkshire School
squash. And most of those difficulties fall into the category of
“challenge by choice.” In other words, I brought a lot of it upon
myself.
Both of those objections are accurate. We are dealing with a very
rarified set of challenges here, almost all of which impact a very
small number of individuals. For the vast majority of
constituencies, whether internal (members of the Berkshire squash
community) or external (parents and alums, other schools and athletes,
and the wider world), the opening of this amazing new facility provides
a massive increase in availability and quality of the experience.
As it should be.
My goals in reiterating these themes and recounting these experiences
are two-fold. First, I have used the praxis of writing, after the
fact, to understand my own experiences along the way and prepare for
future efforts as one of the leading voices of squash at my school.
My second goal, and the one which may bear fruit for my readers, is to
use this set of experiences as a way to illuminate that old adage: be
careful what you wish for. We wished for new courts at Berkshire and,
having seen that wish come true (and how!), we inherit myriad
unforeseen challenges to using that new facility to its ultimate
extent.
Or working from the iconic (and often misquoted) line in Field of
Dreams: “If you build it” -- a new squash facility at a New
England boarding school – a whole new set of challenges and
opportunities will come. After a single season in our new home, I
have a better sense of both and feel well positioned to negotiated them
in the years to come.
