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Assessing Gretchen Cammiso’s level of devotion to Bristol Township right now — or, to be absolutely accurate, assessing it on the morning of Sunday, Nov. 11, not even 48 hours after the winningest football season in the history of Harry S Truman High School came to a heart-jolting, gut-wrenching, tear-soaked end at Downingtown West in the District One quarterfinals — you would never believe for a second that there ever was a second that she wasn’t all in.

You’d never believe she ever felt overwhelmed by the demands of her job, coaching, training and mentoring students and athletes in a vibrant, diverse, and yes, challenging Lower Bucks County school community. Because Gretchen Cammiso circa 2018 is about as immersed in Truman culture as a non-Truman grad (she went to Pennsbury) who’s only been on the planet 38 years, and working for BTSD for less than 15, can possibly be.

Her heart is so tied to the Tigers that students call her “Mom,” and she has, in fact, become a bona fide foster parent to current and former athletes who needed a home. She’s so proud of what the football team was able to accomplish this fall, going 10-2 and winning the school’s first playoff game under coaches Mike LaPalombara and Galen Snyder, who were hired in 2017, Cammiso’s second year as athletic director, that she gets choked up discussing it.

But Gretchen Cammiso circa 2015 did up and move to California, taking a yearlong leave of absence from her job as a Truman physical education teacher/varsity softball coach/department chairperson/senior class advisor/big sister/mother figure/you get the picture… Continue reading “Coffee Convo #3: Investing heart and soul into AD job yields historic success for Truman’s Gretchen Cammiso” →

One of the bartenders at The Stone’s Throw at Shady Brook Farm on Friday was wearing a Christmas sweater with a “Home Alone” reference stitched into it, and since the two-mile course for the annual “Dashin’ Thru the Lights” run that I “took the night off” to partake in was marred by mud puddles due to Thursday’s weather debacle, I decided the title of this blog was clever. I’m sure you agree.

Except, here’s the thing (and we’re just going to gloss over the holiday greetings, given that Thanksgiving is still a week away): I’m, technically, not that much of an athlete anymore.

In fact, as I sit here writing this, I am supposed to be competing in a CrossFit event in Phoenixville. I registered as a team with my husband, mostly to support my friends who are organizing the thing, and not because we are competitive CrossFitters anymore, but I decided to pull out after pulling up lame — get this — trying to catch a football out in the yard last weekend. I tweaked a muscle in my back, or something. I can’t roll over in bed without yelping in pain, so I clearly am not going to drive an hour to squat clean barbells and push weighted sleds through parking lots all day.

Nothing like a dumbass Weekend Warrior injury to make you confront your mortality. Continue reading “Merry Christmas, ya filthy athlete” →

It can be difficult, if not impossible, to see ourselves as others see us. But the other day, before starting my shift at Shady Brook Farm, I was milling around in the eating area with a few friends, and I laughed at something humorous that passed between us. I might have slapped the table for emphasis…the details are fuzzy. But I do remember for certain that a woman sitting nearby turned her head and gave me a look, as if I’d disturbed her lunch.

I had an epiphany in that moment: Girl, you have a loud, obnoxious, annoying laugh. You are one of those people.

It’s not really surprising that it took me until age 40 to figure that out. I mean, I’ve always had a sense of humor coded into my DNA (thanks, Dad!), but as the Type-A, overachieving, successful-at-everything-until-I-hit-the-real-world, deathly-afraid-to-fail firstborn daughter that I am, I did not loosen the #$%^ up enough to let my wacky side truly run wild until middle age.

THANKS, DAD…

I take after him as much as any child ever has taken after a parent, so he can’t deny the credit and/or blame. While he made me an artist, musicophile (it’s in the Urban Dictionary so it’s a WORD!) and occasional misanthrope who’s brutally hard on herself , my father is also one of the funniest people I know. Finds a joke in everything and everyone. Looks at any situation and sees the absurd or the ridiculous. Never takes himself, or the world around him, too seriously.

That’s me right now. And boy, am I ever thankful for that. Continue reading “Laughter is the only medicine” →

The other day, while training to work at the bar at Shady Brook Farm, I heard Tom, the regular weeknight bartender, say he was planning to give up drinking because he was tired of feeling tired, and a bunch of complicated memories came flooding back.

I stood there in ill-fitting jeans, which had been loose on me about six months earlier, and now were only a wardrobe option because I HAVE to wear jeans to work and don’t own anything larger, and I had a major gut-check moment.  Continue reading “Wanna make a bet?: Going sober for what’s left of October” →

I’ve been working at Shady Brook Farm for two weeks, and I have, without question, worked harder overall than I did in a month at my previous job. On this precious off day, while trying to avoid watching the Bears-Dolphins score on the crawl — we don’t get games like this on TV in Philly, and apparently, it’s looking like my football team’s “Super Bowl run” (eye roll) could suffer some high-degree burns in the Miami heat — I thought I’d write a little about my vocational experience thus far.

Long story short: Holy shit. 

As the cliché goes, if you had told me 20 years ago, or even much shorter ago, that I’d be pouring draft beers, and doing mental math, at a patio bar at age 40…I would have given you the stink eye. (Ha, wait, I mean, I’d give you my normal facial expression.) But that’s not because bartending/cashiering is a dishonorable pursuit, but because I pretty much thought I’d found my lane on the highway of life and was going to ride it, all night long.

Admittedly, I was driving all the way to the right, stuck behind a beater with blinking hazard lights, given that I was a local journalist making less money in 2018 than I did in 2002. But it was what I knew, and what I was good at — had made myself good at, because that’s how I roll — and WHAT THE HECK DO YOU DO WITH YOUR LIFE IF YOUR WHOLE CAREER PLAN LOOKS LIKE A DEAD END? Continue reading “Things will (finally) never be the same” →

 

“What is your proudest accomplishment?”

It was a pretty amorphous, definitely cliché question, thrown out near the end of the very entertaining hour I spent with Pam Rosanio at Einstein Bros. Bagels in the Summit Square Shopping Center.

But with it, we finally got to the heart of her story.

Pam — I’m going to refer to her on a first-name basis, because even though I only know her via two journalistic interviews, 10 years apart, I feel like she’s my friend, or my sister, and I guarantee that the young girls she works with as a basketball trainer understand what I mean — is one of the top women’s basketball players ever to come out of Bucks County. She played her way into the Archbishop Wood High School and University of Massachusetts record books, then traveled around Europe playing professionally, well into her late-20s. She earned a spot on the Italian National Team in 2015.

She’s obviously proud of all that. But when asked to single out a highlight, she pauses, then goes in an unexpected direction.

“I’ve had agents, or people, tell me I was too fat to play in Italy,” she says. “They said they like this (gestures to her face) but my body wasn’t in good enough shape. And I’m like, ‘I’m playing 40 minutes a game! I might not look super fit, but I will shove you across the floor!’ It’s stuff like that, being told you’re not good enough, and that’s constantly what my career was. I was never the first one of my friends to sign a [professional] contract every year. I was always a late sign. Mentally, it was like they were saying I wasn’t good enough.

“I think with stuff like that, I can relate to girls in the sense that, it’s not super easy, if you don’t have a chiseled body. It’s a thing: people telling you you don’t look a certain way…”

She doesn’t come out and say this, but she lived it: By believing in herself and the abilities she worked so hard to hone, and never letting doubters or perceived obstacles stand in the way of her success, Pam Rosanio created for herself a stellar career in basketball. It’s what makes her, now, a perfect role model for her sport’s next generation. Continue reading “Coffee Convo #2: Rosanio returns to roots as a well-rounded, worldly role model” →

Well, I got up this morning – at 5 a.m., after maybe 3 hours of restless sleep on the couch – and went to work at a job where I can’t sit down and make $13-an-hour less than the more-or-less lifelong job that I voluntarily left.

So Winston Churchill would, I guess, be proud.

He allegedly was the source of the quote in the title. He did a harder job than I ever have done. And he probably didn’t give a sh*t about sports — or, if he did, he didn’t let the outcome of a baseball game, a failure of epic proportions by the best team in the National League, record-wise, all year, move him to tears once, let alone multiple times in a 12-hour span.

But I care too much about my sports, and about pretty much everything in life, so I felt like a big bag of stinking failure walking into work this morning at 6:45. I had cried already for the end of the Cubs’ season, immediately after the Rockies recorded the final out of the NL Wild Card Game, in the bottom of the 13th inning. Several hours later, my second full day working as a cashier in a busy farmers market left me feeling like an even bigger bag of stinking failure. And I guess all the deep-seated emotions, piled on top of the lack of sleep, just got the better of me.

I suppose no one should cry about a minimum-wage job. But as is the case with any breakdown of any degree, it’s never about one thing. It’s a compilation. You’ve spent a long, long time bottling up the pain, anger, sadness, fear, regret, doubt, fatigue, and yes, the actual failure — or maybe even the emotional roller coaster of both successes and failures — that explodes one day when you least expect it. Continue reading ““Success is not final, failure is not fatal; it is the courage to continue that counts.”” →

I had to change the channel briefly after the final out of 163. I don’t know how much of the Brewers’ celebration, on the hallowed grounds of Wrigley Field, ESPN actually showed before switching to the other National League tiebreaker game on the West Coast. But I could not watch a single second of it.

I’d just been on my feet, wildly smacking my hands together in my trademark “Wielgus Clap” that infamously once moved an old woman sitting in front of me at a Cubs home game to rip off pieces of napkin and stick them in her ears. Javy Baez — my favorite Cub, whose quest for NL MVP is effectively over, given Christian Yelich’s recent trajectory for the (cringe) Central Division champions — had just battled his ass off against (bigger cringe) Josh Hader to get on base after an awful, strikeout-filled stretch, and the game’s lone offensive hero, Anthony Rizzo, was up with two outs, representing the tying run in a 3-1 game.

I knew that expecting Rizz to go deep a second time against a (cringe cringe cringe) All-Star hurler (can you tell I’m a Hader hater?) was foolish. But, b*tch please. I watched these guys rally from a 3-1 deficit in the WORLD SERIES in 2016, to win the whole damn mother-effing thing before my very eyes on a (thankfully) rainy night in Cleveland. I also watched David Bote hit a walk-off grand slam earlier this year to turn a Max Scherzer gem into the Nationals’ Death March. And I’ve been a baseball fan for 40 years. Amazing sh*t happens all the time. You gotta believe. Continue reading “Tiebreaker Heartbreak: My tumultuous love affair with the Cubs continues” →