If it’s fall, then the College’s athletic equipment room must be humming.
By Tim Etchells ’74
So it’s just after four in the afternoon on a Friday in the bowels of the Peterson Athletic Complex, and they’re arriving in a steady stream at the equipment room window: the varsity student-athletes who’ll wear the blue and white tomorrow on fields and trails in Middlebury and points east, west, north, and south.
Impossibly fit young men and women are picking up their travel bags for tomorrow’s cross-country meet, the Purple Valley Classic in Williamstown, Massachusetts. On his way to a light Friday practice, football quarterback Tiger Lyon ’07 shows up in cleats, shoulder pads, helmet, and practice shorts, looking for a spare wristband into which he’ll insert the offensive plays for Saturday’s home game against Wesleyan.
At the window this afternoon, as he has been for nearly 18 years, is Bob Whitman, assistant equipment room manager, with help from Bryan Merrill, his boss, who’s completing his first year in charge of the equipment room. Whitman and Merrill greet the students, often by name, and have a good word or two for each, wishing them luck in their weekend contests. Whitman had a long career in the aerospace industry at the Simmonds Precision plant in Vergennes before coming to Middlebury. Semi-retired now, he works each weekday afternoon from 3 to about 6:30.
“My work was pretty stressful,” he says. “Now it’s like heaven. I love working with these kids and their coaches. They’re great people.”
You get that a lot from the folks in the equipment room. And the feeling’s mutual. Says men’s hockey coach Bill Beaney, “The equipment room has developed a reputation for being first class in every way. You hear nothing but praise for the quality of their work, and they always figure prominently in the senior speeches at the end of the season, how they’ve played a vital role.”
Erin Quinn ’86, the onetime Panther football captain and longtime lacrosse coach who just became athletic director, calls the equipment room crew’s contribution invaluable. “And their role is not behind the scenes,” he says. “They have day-to-day, hands-on contact with students. In addition to being professional and competent, they enrich our students’ college experience.”
That’s the kind of operation that Merrill, a 17-year veteran of the crew that maintains the athletic fields at the College, inherited from Jerry Sodano in October 2005. Sodano left Middlebury after 18-plus years for a job at the Pinehurst golf course in North Carolina.
In addition to Middlebury resident Whitman, Merrill’s crew includes Shelley Payne, associate manager, an Addison County native who’s been at Middlebury for more than eight years; Chuck Martin, assistant manager, now in his 20th year at the College; and Janet Lizotte, the longtime laundry operator.
Fall is the busiest sports season for these folks, and Friday is one of the busiest days of any week. Some of us know what it’s like to keep two or three youth or high school athletes in cleats, sneakers, pads, helmets, jerseys, socks, T-shirts, etc. The equipment room staff knows what it’s like to outfit close to 300 varsity and B-team athletes each fall.
A typical day in the “ER” begins before dawn, at 4 A.M., when Lizotte, “the laundry lady,” fires up three industrial-size washing machines and four huge dryers, beginning the eight-hour task of plowing through the mountains of dirty clothing that have accumulated from the previous day or, on Mondays, from a full weekend of games. Athletes are responsible for organizing the clothing that’s been assigned to them using a “laundry loop,” a short length of fabric with a numbered tag and plastic clips on each end.
By the time Merrill, who lives in Starksboro, arrives at work around 7, “Janet has a pretty good start on all that,” he says. As the loads of clean and dry laundry emerge, the crew uses the numbered laundry loops to make sure the clothing gets into the correctly numbered “cubbie.” Hundreds of the metal bins line floor-to-ceiling racks in the equipment room, each assigned to a student-athlete. They typically hold not only an athlete’s clean practice gear but also, when games are coming up, gear bags packed by Shelley Payne and Chuck Martin for each team athlete.
This process verges on the miraculous for many of the coaches. “I always remember my first visit to Middlebury in 1985,” says soccer coach David Saward, “and nearly fainting when I heard that athletes not only had their game jerseys washed, but also got training outfits that were washed and dried—by someone else! In good old England, that was a rotating duty for a member of the team, to wash the ‘kit,’ so I was amazed at how efficient and helpful everyone was.”
And there’s more to it than just doing the laundry and passing out gear bags. Women’s lacrosse coach Missy Foote singles out Martin as one who will tuck good luck notes for players into their travel gear; Martin, in turn, cites Payne’s expertise at repairing just about any tear or gash in a uniform; and Merrill, well, he spends his Saturdays each fall on the sidelines at football games—home and away—keeping track of balls, headsets, whiteboards, water bottles, etc., and making any equipment repairs called for during the action.
With the rest of the equipment room crew, Merrill is also responsible for managing uniform purchases. All the varsity sports are on a four-year rotation, with different sports staggered so that the College never needs to replace too many uniforms in one fiscal year. In addition, Merrill and his crew handle all of the general lockers in the field house that are used by students, faculty, and staff. And yes, they hand out towels—exactly one per customer—to staff and faculty who use the field house facilities. The frugality of the equipment room crew has been the stuff of legend. Just ask any staff member who has asked for another towel, when one already hangs in his or her field house locker.
Perhaps it should come as no surprise at a place like Middlebury that the equipment room provides its share of teachable moments. On a hectic Friday afternoon in September, Whitman helps several first-year students who have arrived at the window and left with all their gear, despite some confusion about how the system works. “We go out of our way to help out the freshmen,” Whitman says. “We try to give them a little leeway.”
“But just a little,” adds Merrill. “We still try to teach them accountability.”
“It’s a learning opportunity for students,” Beaney says. “They are held accountable. If they’re supposed to return something, they have to return it. There are lots of places where that’s not happening, but here it is. If you lose something, you’re responsible. The equipment room team always deals with this in a positive manner. And it dovetails nicely with what coaches are trying to teach their teams and their players.”
Tim Etchells '74 is director of interactive communications at Middlebury College and has exactly one Middlebury-issue towel in his field house locker.