Peter Dyakowski
CFL.ca
While watching the pomp and pageantry of game-day, it is easy to get caught up in the action on the field and forget about all the people who make it possible. Staging a professional football game requires a lot of other people aside from a bunch of guys with limited regard for the long-term medical consequences of their actions. These people include, among others, the officials, the camera men and women, Pigskin Pete, the coaches, the concessions and facility staff, Stripes (though technically a Tiger and not a person), the ticket salespeople, and, the focus of my column this week, the equipment managers.
From the helmets that protect our precious noggins to the shiny spandex short-pants that show off those gorgeous glutes I mentioned a few weeks ago, we wouldn’t have any of the gear that we need to play if it were not for our equipment managers.
The equipment managers take care of almost everything in a player’s ensemble, both for practices and games. We come in every day to find our jerseys clean and hung up in our lockers with our clean mesh laundry bags beside them. When a strap breaks on our shoulder pads, we bring it to the equipment room to be fixed. When we need pieces fixed on our helmets, we bring it to the equipment managers. It’s not so much that we are helpless children and that we can’t clean our own clothes or fix our own pads, but our managers do it so much better than we ever could.
We Tiger-Cats are very fortunate to have Rod Thiessen heading up what must certainly be the best equipment staff in the league. Whether it’s buffing balls the day before the game (brand new footballs tend to be too slick) or unpacking our bio-hazardous game bags after they’ve been two days in transit back from Winnipeg, there is no task our equipment staff does not embrace.
Dylan Atack, Rod’s highest ranking assistant, is one of the most well regarded laundry technicians in the country and Drew Strohschein, Dylan’s personal assistant, will fold any pile of towels, no matter how big, with the same devil-may-care attitude that gets him all the ladies. There are a few other assistants who come by the locker room from time to time and pretend to work but Rod said I shouldn’t dedicate too much space to Daniel, Spencer, that other kid, Vinny, or Gary, even though Vinny does tell an OK joke from time to time.
I’ve always appreciated the fact that Rod, even with his limited budget, goes out of his way to make sure that we always get new gloves, cleats, and other knick-knacks as soon as we need them. We rarely have to resort to begging or nagging. He runs a tight ship and makes sure the locker room is kept clean though I can’t imagine that he is as cruel a taskmaster as Strohschein makes him out to be. We really are lucky to have such a great guy taking care of us, especially one who requires only a very minimal level of bribery to keep up such a high level of service.
