If you’ve ever played sports, then you know how important they are. They’re like the mood of the athlete. When things are going well, the superstition is working. When things aren’t going well, it’s time for a new superstition. They are the athlete’s secret lucky charm. Superstitions are like the “extra man” on the team that players believe help them perform well, and makes the team feel special.
As a former baseball player, I had a few superstitions of my own. If our team scored in an inning, I would sit in the same exact place until we did not score. While playing, I always wore my right hand batting glove in my left pant pocket when I was pitching until the other team scored. The biggest superstition I had was that if my team won, I did not wash my uniform. It was my thing, not washing away victories. My teammates hated me when we went on winning streaks.
For the Quakers this past Saturday, their inspiration came from the mustache. Well, their coach’s mustache. Men’s basketball coach Tom Palombo sports a truly impressive mouth sweater and the team draws inspiration from it. No one knows why, but if a team believes in something it usually achieves success. The team wears a mustache logo on the sleeves of their warm-ups, which includes the words, “Fear the Stache.”
The fans are inspired by it as well. On Saturday, when Guilford played host to undefeated Virginia Wesleyan, fans lined up to get their stache’s hoping it would give their team a boost. Many fans took advantage of the free lip garments. I saw Guilford student athletes Zach Daw and David Thomson rockin’ the stache during the game in support of the team. Even junior center Justin Stafford donned a stache to support the cause.
The superstition lived up to the hype. The 11-6 Quakers held their own against second ranked Virginia Wesleyan the whole game. While, leading scorer Josh Pittman only had three points, but that did not matter. Senior Tobi Akinsola had a career-high 26 points and T.C. Anderson had two key steals to subdue Virginia Wesleyan.
This was an intense game. Coaches were screaming at the referees for calls not going their way and players were getting feisty. Every loose ball was a brawl and every foul was hard. Emotions were high. Anderson even dove into the scorer’s table to save a ball from going out of bounds.
The game came down to the last 6.7 seconds. Ragan-Brown Field House was the loudest I’ve heard it in my four years at Guilford. Everyone was pounding their feet into the bleachers, chanting “let’s go defense,” while sporting their stache’s in full force. No one was sitting down to witness the last seconds of the game.
The Quaker’s needed a final stop on defense to win the game. Virginia Wesleyan moved the ball around well, but T.C. Anderson partially blocked the last-second three-pointer to seal the deal. Ragan-Brown erupted in elation as the Quakers chest-bumped for the hard fought victory.
As fans were filed out of the gym, they were still wearing their staches with pride. The magic of the stache had worked again. Too bad Stache Day only happens one day a year because on Saturday, it was all about the stache.
