The tradition
March 14th, 2008, 2:59 am · Post a Comment · posted by itsonlyagame
There’s only one team in Jacksonville that can truly be said to have a real tradition of winning.
The athletes apparently all get along with one another. They all get to play. Their coaches are supportive, yet demanding (it wasn’t so long ago that they were out on the court themselves). The parents even dress up funny and perform at the team’s final practice.
And the Jacksonville J’ettes — yep, the J’ettes — have qualified for state competition 25 years straight. They’ll be competing at the finals this weekend at the Assembly Hall in Champaign.
You could argue that what the J’ettes do isn’t a sport. They don’t play with a ball, and they don’t have other people on the court trying to keep them from doing what they do. But you can’t argue that they aren’t athletes.
I had no appreciation for that until I saw the J’ettes practice at the JHS Bowl Wednesday night. I watched them perform lots of times during halftime at JHS boys’ basketball games this year. The J’ettes and the Jacksonville High School jazz band make basketball games fun to go to whether the team wins or loses. People who didn’t go to the games because the team had a bad year missed out on a great show.
But, back to the practice. For two solid hours, the J’ettes performed and performed and rehearsed and rehearsed, with barely half a dozen breaks for water. Girls who didn’t bring their own water bottles marched in a slow procession up the stairs to the water fountain on the main level. Five minutes later, they were back down on the court, kicking and dancing, over and over again, striving to perfect their routines.
Try doing deep knee-bends for 15 minutes straight, and you might get an idea of what the first five minutes of practice is like for these girls.
How do you explain 25 straight appearances at state competition? You don’t. You just sit back and enjoy the performance. They’ve already done all the work. Twenty-five years’ worth.
