What is really interesting about life at these schools is how your perspective changes as you go thru the years at the school, and how it will change again as you graduate and look back on your time at the school.
Truer words have rarely been spoken about the military college experience. I feel like I understand the beauty and the ugliness of the VMI system far better now than I ever did as a cadet, and I've only been out for a year and a half. I didn't know what it meant to love VMI, until I graduated... and I didn't know what it meant to hate VMI, until I graduated.
Whether or not the freshmen on NCAA athletic teams
worm out (the VMI term for finding a way out of stuff) of the "freshman orientation" of their respective SAs/SMCs seems to be primarily left up to the individual team.
At VMI, the rifle team is notorious for smoking their rats throughout the Ratline. When I was a First, my BRs who were the co-captains of the rifle team decided at one point not to let the Seconds and Thirds run the rats for PT during practice, because they were being too unprofessional and the Firsts were afraid the rats were going to get injured due to stupidity. (The training didn't get easier at that point; it just got smarter.)
For the swim team, their championships are normally two weeks after Breakout. In order to train, the coach destroys the whole team two weeks out and then they use the week before the championships as a recovery period. So the coach is destroying the team every afternoon during practice at the same time the upperclassmen are destroying the rats in barracks right before Breakout.
Coach Reid was the head football coach my rat year, and we saw him standing on the corner of JM Hall every morning as we marched down to BRC, making sure the football players were in step. I remember Coach Reid addressing the Corps at BRC one Saturday morning. All of us non-football rats had just returned from a rifle run after having been woken up early by the RDC. Coach Reid made sure we knew that our football Brother Rats had been woken up even earlier by him, and that he smoked them in the weight room before game day. It wasn't the same experience as the rifle run, but it's not like they were sleeping in or something.
For the past few years, the first women's soccer scrimmage has taken place during Matriculation Week. I don't know why they schedule it that way. Talk about an intense amount of pressure on the rats, since they know that if their Cadre doesn't come down to watch, they'll be grilled about it as soon as they get back up on the stoop. And then all hope of being a ghost rat slowly fades away.
However, one of the other athletic teams at VMI is incredibly notorious for not caring about anything. My rat year, one of the First Classmen on that team complained to us that her rat year was the first time in several years that the coach didn't get them out of Breakout. She told us that it really sucked that they
had to Breakout with their class.
And I can honestly say that I don't know how I would have made it through the Ratline without some of my BRs on the basketball, football, soccer, and rifle teams--even though they rarely came to Cadre Training Time.
Go Keydets!
Jackie M. Briski
VMI Class of 2009
four-year non-athlete
(and then GoArmy- Beat AF & Navy!!
