Buy Raiders gear and lift rusty weights

I’m a San Diego native, so this is about to be sacrilegious. Know that up front.

Some of my fondest memories are of watching Chargers games with my dad during high school. When my brother and I left California for college, we often stayed in touch with our parents by texting about Aztecs football and basketball. When I deployed with the military, I brought a Padres hat to rep my home town around the world.

As a teacher and a coach, I’m constantly looking for insights into ways to make students stronger, more confident, and kinder, because I believe it makes our communities better places to live. And I think in education we too often get the concept of “community” wrong.

I spent years getting it wrong until a coincidental naming convention and an offhand comment nudged me to see what was right in front of me all along. I’m a proud local of San Diego, sure. But as a teacher? I’m a Raiders guy. (I can almost feel my friends loading up their cars with eggs to throw at my apartment window now.)

Here’s the prelude, if you’ll allow for some meandering: when I started coaching, my classes were bad. Not bad in a way an administrator would notice, necessarily, but bad in the sense that I could feel a pointlessness to the lessons. I was copying what I imagined other teachers were doing (years later, with a larger sample size, I can confidently say I was pretty close), which meant team-sports units, “run the mile,” dress-out-for-a-grade, and so on. I didn’t raise any eyebrows, I don’t think, and I was giving the students about what they were expecting, so we subsisted for a time. But we were going through the motions, getting credit for attendance and participation, and certainly not getting any fitter.

We were missing something fundamental. We were missing the Raiders attitude.

Backing up a second for context. In college I got injured running (my primary sport), so I started lifting weights as cross training. My approach was casual at first, but the local spot to lift in Bloomington, Indiana, was called “The Iron Pit” and was serious indeed; simply put, I could stay weak or get stronger, and at the Iron Pit it felt like I really only had one choice. There were two clocks on the wall: one with the local time, the other with the time in Moscow - a reminder that someone was always lifting harder than you were. Below those clocks was a handwritten quote that said something like, “Never forget that somewhere, a 12-year-old girl is warming up with your max.”

The Iron Pit had a newspaper article on the wall about another gym that didn’t allow grunting or yelling - hung haughtily in defiance of that sort of new-age approach to fitness. There was chalk everywhere, posters of the classic strongmen, and thousands of pounds of rusty weights. It was paradise.

Patrons of The Iron Pit had a way of being. People dressed a certain way, talked a certain way, obviously lifted a certain way. There were weird superstitions, like not stepping over a barbell on the ground - things you wouldn’t know until someone told you. It would have been intimidating, except for one thing: everyone was rooting for you. Guys were willing to show you how to use a hook grip (which hurts like hell at first, though you wouldn’t want to complain), tell you how to unlock the better Olympic bars stored in the back, or coach you through your first purchase of expensive weightlifting shoes.

I got stronger because I absorbed the Iron Pit. Just by breathing the air in there you’d put five pounds on your bench. I went from a kid walking in wearing cushy running shoes to an athlete with a gym bag, a lifting belt and a disdain for leg extensions and elliptical machines.

By becoming part of a strong culture, I did the things that made me stronger. (Truth be told - still not that strong! But working on it…) I didn’t have to fight myself to make good decisions in the Iron Pit; in that environment, you just become the type of person who makes good decisions. You warm up a little sharper, you lift a little snappier, you try a little harder when you’re surrounded by strength.

Back to teaching, then. The delta between my expectations for myself and my expectations for my students became too large to defend. I had left the Midwest for California’s Bay Area, and found in my new school a run-down and under-funded weight room. It has since been beautifully remodeled, but at the time the dearth of equipment made it borderline unusable. If not for the sneaking suspicion that nothing else I was doing was working either, I probably would have ignored it.

Instead, I brought the Iron Pit mentality to PE. It wasn’t perfect, and of course my teaching still isn’t, but I’ve never looked back. We did biceps curls with 45lb. plates, we did overhead walking lunges with 45lb. plates, we did jump squats with 45lb. plates - we did basically everything with 45lb. plates, because, well, that was all we had. To this day, when teachers ask me what they need to start a weightlifting club or course, I’ll tell them: a stack of rusty weights in the corner of a room with some floor space. That’s it.

The harder the workout, the more the students leaned into it. We yelled “Light weight, baby!” when someone did something strong. Things got sometimes comically out of control, like when we did a workout that involved pushing a plate across the football field like a sled. (It’s really hard - try it some time if you don’t mind puking.) But the kids were still laughing, even though playing a game of softball had seemed like too much effort just months prior.

Why?

We talk a lot about community in education, as we should. In physical education, though, the only success I’ve ever seen coupled that concept with a seemingly contradictory one: exclusivity.

The irony of a culture that everyone can be part of is that almost no one cares about belonging to it. What we created in our classes, through instinct at first and later by design, was a culture that was possible for everyone to be part of, but required something of its members. At The Iron Pit, experienced weightlifters cheered even the smallest improvement from the newest lifters - but it did still take effort to make that jump. Such became the mentality of our classes. The cost of joining our little band of pirates is to bite down and sweat through a primal workout. Everyone can do it with effort, but you still have to do it; the cost of entry is a pretty significant willingness to endure physical discomfort.

That also means calling out mediocrity as the thing against we are organizing. So surrounded are we as Americans by mediocre effort that this can ruffle quite a few feathers. I’m ok with that.

Here’s what I believe now: the most sinister decision we can make regarding people we care about is to lower standards for them. I also believe that it’s almost impossible to keep making the right choice over and over again to meet those higher standards. You have to identify - in the depths of your psyche - as the type of person who just succeeds at hard things. And it’s intoxicating to become that person as part of a group. I believe that’s why our students were balking at softball but pressing heavy plates overhead. We were asking them to become the best versions of themselves, not just make a compliant choice.

At my current school, we recently got a donation from the Chargers to revamp our existing weight room. The result was an impressive facility full of factory-new equipment. It immediately made me uneasy. Make no mistake, kids deserve collegiate-level facilities even at urban high schools - but if we become reliant on the new, shiny thing, it’s unreliable at a motivator, because new/shiny doesn’t ever stay that way for long. The goal of our program isn’t to become better at fundraising to keep buying new things. It’s to change outcomes around students’ physicality.

So we took the old weights that were left over from the renovation and spread them out over two new locations, an empty classroom and a shed on our field. The Chargers put their logo on the wall of the new weight room, so we call the space the Chargers Weight Room. (We’re PE teachers; creativity is not our strength.)

Meanwhile we hung a pirate flag in the empty classroom, moved the rusty weights inside, and named it the Raiders Weight Room. It was a joke at first, a little nod to a historic divisional rivalry and the stigmas around the two teams. But I soon realized that I was gravitating toward the Raiders weight room, because we had to get our hands dirty (literally), share a tight space, and keep things tough-but-simple — all the lessons I try to teach anyway.

Then I made an offhand comment at a parent meeting. Explaining that we do have some still-developing coaches on our staff, I said something like, “Be patient with us, we’re not the Raiders yet.” The murmur through the San Diego crowd of parents was emotional and immediate. Someone said “Well maybe we could use a different team.” I loved it. Casting our situation against that of the Raiders - with their clear identity, unapologetic grit and toughness, and “Just win” culture - I immediately recognized our North star. If it mildly annoyed adults accustomed to nicer facilities and higher-paid coaches, so be it.

A sign on the wall in the Raiders Weight Room says, “Weak legs equal weak minds.” And that’s where we hold our after-school weightlifting club, the one where no grades are given, and kids are lifting just to get stronger. Which means, at least on our campus, that they’re part of a community. Kids lift harder in that club than they ever would for a grade.

The Raiders are toughness-concentrate; the shield is like a beacon. Theirs is the only professional team with an identity that’s independent of players or even cities. The Patriots with Tom Brady were a very different team than they are without him and Belichick. The Chargers in L.A. are a totally separate franchise than the San Diego version. But the Raiders are still the Raiders, in L.A., Oakland, or Vegas.

Everything I loved about The Iron Pit? That’s what the Raiders logo says, without uttering a word.

Realizing that is why I gave up my San Diego gear for a Raiders hat. You see the black and silver and it just means something different. Something that makes our students stronger.

Let it be said that none of what I’m writing is dependent upon NFL fandom. My family still follows the Chargers out of habit, mostly. I personally swore them off when they went to L.A., which to San Diegans is a forsaken land of Dodgers fans and traffic jams. All of which is to say that the Raiders, the actual team, are less significant than what they represent. Hopefully that’s clear by now.

…But then again, the Raiders dropped 63 on the Chargers’ heads, positively dismantling the L.A. franchise, and then they officially hired Antonio Pierce, who said after one win, “Remember what I said. I will. We will. I believe. We believe. G—d—-, this is what the hell we do.”

I’m all in.