In September of my freshman year, the eleven members of my high school cross country team—seven varsity, four junior varsity—lined up on a concrete dock next to a pond.  The seniors said it was for a group photo, and carried with them a disposable camera.  Once we were all in place, one of them let out a banshee shriek, before yelling, “Whoohooo!! Now we throw the freshman in the pond!” They turned toward me.
“Ha! Good one,” I said.
    I can’t account for the next three seconds of my life, but our conscripted  photographer seems to have captured it perfectly. In his snapshot, I am airborne, bent slightly at the waist, legs splayed,  arms akimbo.  I’m grinning fatuously,  as if I’ve just said something obvious—“Golly, gee, water!” or “Look! A fish.” I look like the biggest dork in the world.
 Only as I was extricating  myself from the pond, to my teammates’ raucous  laughter, did I realize I had been pushed by six or seven pairs of hands. I struggled onto the embankment,  wiped the viscous scum of algae off my face and thought two things: I would be captain in three years. And when I was, freshmen wouldn’t be hurled into the pond like fishing tackle.
    Three years later, I was indeed captain, and my benign  leadership came as a disappointment to my teammate Adam VanWeelden. He was our #3 runner and had also been thrown in the pond the previous year. “You remember how much you hated it?” I asked,
    “Shoot—that was funny,” he said. “Please?
    “No. No freshman-tossing.”
Adam obeyed—kind of. Instead of pitching our novices into the pond, he stealthily  ran up behind them every day in practice and threw them into hedges, pine trees, or oncoming traffic—whatever was handy.
It was actually my second year as captain. I had taken over the previous September, following the suspension of our old captain, senior Brad Groff. Brad was gifted: a three-time conference champ, fourth in the State meet his junior year, physique like a Greek god. He cultivated  our team’s eccentric  side. Once, he bought a jumbo variety-pack of polyester holiday socks from Target, which had pumpkins and hearts and Christmas trees printed on them, and sported a different pair at each meet. He wore war paint. He ran stoned. While we stretched before meets, he blasted his favorite band, Psychedelic  Surfer Groove, a Hawaiian reggae group, on infinite loop on his boom box.  His favorite song was “Build It Up,” a languid number that was, in fact, comprised  entirely of the phrase “Build it up” (“Build it up / Ja, man, just build it up. / Build it up (ja) up (ja) up (ja) / Ja, man, build it up doodley-oh-oh-oh-oh. / Build it up.”) Then he knocked down some kid in a fight, and all the Build it upping in the world couldn’t save him from the principal.