Pink Football Locker Room

I read an amusing ESPN article online today about how in 1979 Hayden Fry, the Iowa football coach, had the visiting teams locker room painted pink.  He said it calmed the team down and made them more passive.  Over the years the University of Iowa has remodeled the locker rooms and now have pink showers, floors, sinks, carpeting, metal lockers and urinals.

A male Univ of Iowa professor is demonstrating this weekend protesting the pink color in the locker room.  He's done other protests in the past other than the pink locker room so he isn't new at this.  The school is going to honor Hayden Fry this weekend and the professor picked this time for his demonstration to get the maximum coverage.

I don't see any big deal with the pink locker room and I'm sure it wouldn't affect my play as a result of it if I were still playing football.  During my 4 years of playing high school football, basketball and track we always used the girls locker room at the school we were playing that day/night.  Some schools always went out of their way to leave some articles laying around in plain sight to distract or disgust us.  

Some of the locker rooms were filthy and it looked like that was standard procedure for the schools.   One school always left the windows open the night we played them in basketball in January or February.  I grew up in South Central Illinois and let me tell you it was cold there during this time period.  One night it was so cold that we didn't shower after the game and just boarded the bus for the return trip.  We did the same thing for the one school that had a filthy locker room.

The schools would do anything to get an edge on the visiting team.  As far as I can tell my school's girls locker room didn't fit into either of the categories above.  But then, I never was in there during the middle of the winter.

We played East St. Louis High at their school one year and beat them when they had a higher ranked team than we had.  As a going away gesture they threw rocks and stuff at our team bus as we were pulling out of their driveway.  They did take their basketball seriously and didn't like to lose to a school with a much smaller attendance.  At least they didn't shoot at us and set the bus or fire. 

We've had some nice weather at the cabin the past couple days.  It is drying out somewhat and the dehumidifier hasn't run non stop like it had been doing the past few weeks.  I guess I will have to watch it and fill those gallon jugs with distilled water pretty soon or I won't get them filled.

Other than that, it has been quiet up here on the mountain.  I hope you all are having a great summer.

They are calling for temps in the high 40s tonight.  We aren't ready for cold weather so soon.  What's next, snow in September?