Noah Walter @Tyrannoahsaurus [Staff Writer]

Riding the pine, warming the bench, keeping your spot hot, all of these terms describe the life of a benchwarmer. Being a part of a team is a special bond. Athletes get to practice together, play together, go to team dinners and have fun, and sometimes even pull a few jokes on the coach. The star of a team gets all of the praise but nobody really knows the story behind the benchwarmers.

One who sits on the bench and does not participate in the game, match, any form of competition, and is still on the team, is considered a benchwarmer. These kids are obviously not playing for a reason, but warming the bench is never fun. These athletes do just as much as the starters, the only difference happens on gameday.

Gameday is supposed to build a lot of hype up to the game, and get the athletes pumped and ready for the competition. This isn’t true for the benchwarmers. All this hype that gets built up at school and on the bus are all used up in the routine known as, warm-ups. This is the common benchwarmers prep to get ready for the gruesome work of placing their rear end on this hard wooden bench that isn’t even comfortable. On top of being uncomfortable the whole game, the pine riders need to try and motivate their fellow teammates and get the team a win.

Every once in a while the team will be up or down by quite a bit, and the coach wants to keep their stars healthy and not risk getting a player injured in a game that’s already over. So they point down the line of athletes sitting down and pick the very last athletes on the bench and decides to give them what is considered, “garbage minutes”. These minutes mean nothing in a game. If the team is up, the coach will most likely tell the benchies to just stall and get the game over with. If the team is down, they will do anything not overcome the large amount they are down by.

Benchwarmers are still important in the act of practicing. In practice, they will play with the future opponents characteristics. This prepares the starters for what they will see on game day. So no team can go without the benchwarmers. If they didn’t have benchwarmers, the players who participate in the game would not know how to exploit all the cracks and wrinkles in the other teams’ strategies. A team without benchwarmers isn’t really a team, but being a benchwarmer isn’t very fun.