Flashes of Panic

This is one of those things that’s going to seem so trivial you’ll wonder that it’s worth writing about. It is, because it gets the thoughts out of my head and makes room for others.

I don’t think many people picking uniforms for cross-country teams are thinking about it much. Why would you, though? Not very important, right?

Well, pick a white uniform, and they will be showing mud after the first season. Yet so many teams do it; I remember a year when nine out of eleven teams in our conference had white singlets and solid-color shorts.

This leads to the next issue: uniforms are about teams, and one of the positive functions of uniforms is to help teammates find each other in the pack. If a runner is looking up at a pack of runners and just seeing plain white singlets and shorts which are shades of black and mud, they might as well be alone in there. Colby has often decorated the backs of their singlets with a big blue C, which is very useful in this regard. Trinity, on the other hand, has gone recently to navy blue shorts and white singlets with “Bantams” in masthead-type on the front, which makes them difficult to pick out on a starting line.

Admittedly, it’s not easy. You could go with a solid-color scheme and discover that another team in the conference with similar colors looks too much like you. (I remember the year in which both Nike and Adidas independently decided to outfit their athletes in blue singlets and black shorts, leading to at least one race in which sponsorship was quite indistinct.) More often, I think, these decisions are made in basement equipment rooms, a long way from the colorful fields of the fall.