“Chap, knock on this wood RIGHT now!”
Seth’s tone was serious and had every right to be. His Virginia Cavaliers had gone up four with 40 seconds left in the national championship game and their first title on the line.
“That’s game!” I had yelled without thinking. I had just broken one of the cardinal rules for a superstitious sports fan: don’t call it over until the clock hits zero. Fortunately for the Cavs, I did knock on wood and the college basketball gods forgave my trespasses. Seth might have killed me if Virginia lost.
I think any sports fan can relate to having some type of superstition they hold to religiously at best because it gives them consistency in their escapism and at worst because they’ve actually convinced themselves that if they don’t do their jobs as fans, somehow the team will lose because of it. I have well over a dozen superstitions I cling to in the sports world, including universal things like not saying the game is over to very specific things like still wearing the Vanderbilt practice jersey I won when I was nine every Saturday in the fall (Vandy has had some of its best years while I’ve been in that jersey, and you couldn’t claw me out of it if you tried).
All of these crazy fan superstitions have bled over into the athlete realm over the years, though, and it seems like every sports team on Union’s campus has at least some degree of superstitious behavior that is important to know about before watching the teams.
If there’s one thing consistent about Union athletics over the last several years, it’s that you’re guaranteed to see a bunch of well-dressed men any day the men’s soccer team has a home game; the whole team dresses up in full suits for the entire day, including morning classes. The cross country teams have a similar, though less subtle tradition of wearing flannel every day they leave for a tournament.
Union’s sports traditions cross sharply into superstitious territory when you get to Fesmire Field. Baseball and softball both come with a history of superstition that stems from players spending over half of the game in the dugout bored with nothing to do and coming up with crazy ideas.
One of the main superstitions the softball team has started near the beginning of the season when a coach brought Mini-Snickers for the team, which went on to sweep its first conference series. Since then they’ve made it a tradition to eat a Mini-Snickers before every game.
[It’s] definitely more of a fun thing we kept doing,” Haley Barnette said. “But one time we lost and we didn’t have a Snickers before because we forgot, and we jokingly blamed it on that.”
Go to the other side of Fesmire Field, though, and there’s a strict code on what you can and can’t do on the baseball field. On top of things like “you can’t step on the foul line” and even “eating the grass in the outfield is good luck,” Union’s baseball team has a sacrificial process to plead with the baseball gods to end their losing streak.
“Last year we were on a losing streak, so one of our teammates offered up a department store mannequin he had bought as a sacrifice,” Cooper Thompson said. “Late one night the entire team collectively held a ceremony where we burned the mannequin for good luck.”
Union went on to win its next game by a season-high 13 runs.
