Rats! Episode 07 – Let’s See Some Spirit!

Ah, football. How I hated that sport.

The Virginia Tech Cadet Corps was required to attend every home football game when I was a cadet. I’m sure they still are. The year I became a freshman at Tech was the year after the university had been involved in some sort of recruiting scandal, and as a result they were forbidden to recruit for the next four years. Or something like that. Remember, I didn’t really care for the game so I wasn’t paying attention to the details.

But even I had to notice that the Hokies lost more games than they won that year… And the year after that… And the year after that… And that was a problem for me and every other freshman cadet who came along. You see, we were required to cheer for our team, and if the Hokies didn’t win, it was because we didn’t cheer hard enough! Yes, folks, this was the kind of logic I was dealing with in college. And whenever the Hokies lost a football game, we rats lost privileges like weekend pass. No weekend pass meant we didn’t get to go anywhere but the dining hall and the toilet that weekend, and let me tell you, that kind of sucked.

What also sucked was the uniforms we had to wear to the game. The one I’ve drawn here is the dark blue blouse with the white ducks. The blouse is that heavy hips to neck thing, made out of wool. The white ducks are the pants we were wearing. The blouse sucked because in the fall, the weather could go anywhere from freezing to “OMFG! I’m dying of heat prostration here!” And the blouse wasn’t really adequate clothing for either end of that spectrum. Plus it had a really stiff collar that chaffed like nobody’s business. The white ducks were bad because they had to be pressed and starched just so, and because they got dirty if you even so much as looked at them. Seriously. I’d put my pants on and before I got out to formation, they’d go from white to grey. I got into a lot of trouble for that, let me tell ya.

The cup chain incident really did happen, by the way. One of the ways we rats could show spirit was by collecting the plastic cups everyone got their drinks in and stacking them into a chain that ran up and down the stadium. We never had enough cups so we always had to beg the civilian students for them. Well, one time the civilians got a little too enthusiastic with the giving and the next thing you know, the stadium pretty much exploded with plastic cups. They were coming at us from every which way, and a lot of them still had soda in them. We got into a little bit of trouble for that one.

I’ve been getting feedback from some former cadets of the good ol’ VTCC. Thank you all for the kind comments. I hope you are all enjoying the cartoons. I got plenty of ’em!