An Ex-Mighty Duck and the Trickiness of Invitation

by Dan Masterton

So, Mighty Ducks: Game Changers? I’m in. I appreciate the half-step away from pure reboot, and if the pilot is telling at all, it’ll be a light romp not unlike the Disney Channel classics of yore. And who couldn’t use a bit of one-dimensional flat characters with predictable stubborn growth arcs and easy humor? I’m delighted.

As my wife and I were chuckling through the pilot — especially almost every time Nick (Maxwell Simkins), the lovable sidekick and host of the second-most popular youth hockey podcast in Minnesota, opened his mouth — I was also struck by how Nick and main character, Evan (Brady Noon), tackle the tall task before them.

Game on. #TheMightyDucksGameChangers, an Original Series, starts streaming March 26 on #DisneyPlus. pic.twitter.com/yOVNOzAq5n

— Disney+ (@disneyplus) February 24, 2021

If you’re in the dark, I’ll just say that the Ducks have become so high-powered that their supremacy and obsessive culture has made them the enemy. Evan has been freshly cut, too slow and behind the developmental curve, and he and his mom are starting a new team that will bring back the fun that rec league hockey has lost. In short order, he needs four teammates to join Nick and him so they can register a new team by the league deadline.

As a pastoral minister and as the friend who often feels like I’m doing a lot of initiating and not always receiving quite so many invites in turn, I was struck — and felt seen — by Nick and Evan’s manner of recruiting.

First, Evan invites a few people one on one in conversations. Props to you, Evan! There’s nothing like the retail effect of that face-to-face invitation to mobilize people. Unfortunately for him, he gets shot down each time. Frustrating!

Next, Nick, the savvy preteen podcaster, offers to AirDrop an invite to everyone lunching in their middle school cafeteria. As everyone around them gets the ping on their phones, we see a montage of sneers, as people dismiss the notion. No one bites; the mass appeal strikes out. However, sometimes this sort of low-cost exposure to a new opportunity can help grease the skids toward eventual commitment a bit. Nonetheless, no quick gratification here! Worth a try. Gotta wait and see.

After some more steeling of nerve and a little pep talking, Evan needs to get it done in the eleventh hour. Once more, in the lunchroom, he makes a mass appeal. This time, rather than a passive e-blast, he throws down a lunch tray while standing on a table and delivers a plea from the heart. His appeal to break from the norm and join an oddball crew secures the four yeses he needs. Reinforcement of the initial blast? Effective pathos appeal? A mix of a few things? No matter how, way to go, Evan!

Man is this relatable, in social life and in ministry. Thinking here especially of pastorally connecting people to programs, events, etc. deep temptation is there to rely entirely or mostly on easy, wide-reaching, passive marketing: e-blasts to large existing listservs, posts to social media platforms, printing and hanging flyers, making an announcement over the PA or at a Mass. That stuff is important, helps move the needle, and gives people an easy way to catch on to something. But as much as we’d love for a social post to go viral or get shared repeatedly, it rarely does. We know the retail ministry is what reinforces the passive stuff and personally engages and develops interest. But even then, it just often feels like people are averse, low-commitment apathetics sometimes.

I know among Millennials, my social frustration is frequently that people wait for others to commit first. The frequent response to invitations was “who’s going?” or “who will be there?” And in my snide INFJ-ness, I want to say “you and me”!

Now working with Millennials and Gen-Z’ers, I see a lot of interest in faith and justice, and a lot of desire to come together around common interests and causes. The trouble here is often follow-through, a disconnect between stated interest and the commitment needed to do outreach and then show up for stuff. It’s especially tough, as my job was already part-time and largely remote, even before the pandemic made it almost 100% remote. I don’t have the preexisting relationships or clock time to build and utilize those relationships. Maybe the pandemic has made this extra bad, but I worry that it's become congenital.

There’s always room for outreach, invitation, and inclusion to be more thoughtful, more robust, more thorough. Yet, there’s also a point at which some of the burden falls to recipients. Are you really as interested in community life as you say? Will you take the risk to be a part of something new and unestablished? If you love hockey and love being part of a committed team, would you fall in with a ragtag new group with the right values?

Surely, programs could always be improved, and ministers could be more gregarious. But I also always hope (perhaps naively) that folks will realize their social capital a bit more. We certainly allow ourselves to be inundated with content across so many platforms and media, to an extent that can get overwhelming. Yet, it's all content that we’ve self-curated and invited into our feeds and inboxes.

It was interesting in this show to watch a pair of 12-year-old protagonists attempt to walk the outreach tightrope, and I was rooting for them to make it across to a positive end. I think we could all do well to acknowledge the power we have as recipients of invitation. Part of it could be filtering down the breadth of our feeds and inboxes a bit; maybe we're each due for a little spring cleaning of unsubscribing to e-blasts or unfollowing a few accounts we don't keep up with. More importantly, though, most all of us could do to be more consistently responsive, especially to non-generic, more personal outreach, and to place higher value on replying to friends, to ministers, and also to the invitations from God.

Zahm House: Our Flawed and Beloved Home

by Dan Masterton

Over the ten years of our relationship, my wife has had cause to poke fun at me for plenty of reasons. Chief among them may be my love for my hometown. Her barbs are well deserved as I irrationally use superlatives for most things -- the best park district, the greatest rec league competition, etc. What she calmly points out is that there is no way I could possibly know this, and it leaves me to admit that making such claims is pretty silly and delusional.

Over time, I’ve softened. While I still sing the praises of Arlington Heights, Illinois, I also see a bigger picture. Plenty of friends and family members grew up in other towns that were great in their own right, places these folks still have affection for and enjoy visiting. I’ve also realized that my hometown is excessively homogenous, extraordinarily privileged (as am I, and its current white inhabitants), and unfortunately, has recently been the site of hateful demonstrations. I think I appreciate my hometown more because I have come to understand its weaknesses as well as its strengths, and can love it for what it is while wanting it to be more and be better.

I am an alumnus of the University of Notre Dame, Class of 2011. When Domers find one another out in the world, the first follow-up question could perhaps be grad year or major or extracurriculars, but it is most likely “what dorm did you live in!?” Notre Dame doesn’t have Greek life, so the residence halls straddle a middle area between being cold, utilitarian buildings you just live in and being immersive fraternities and sororities.

As an incoming freshman with a brother about to graduate, I had the chance to try to secure a place in Sorin College through him. I thought briefly about it and declined; I wanted to be tossed into the deep end of the random generator, for better or worse. When my assignment populated to my online portal, the code was ZA… for Zahm Hall.

Notre Dame by choice, Zahm by the grace of God, we (and some of our t-shirts) say. Over the coming weeks and months, anecdotes, online chatter, and even the hallowed RedBook that arrived in the mail built up a mysterious and lofty image.

Frosh-O (Freshmen Orientation) and the early community events were a crash course in learning group chants (house house HOUSE HOUSE), basic history (we are Zahm House, whether others called it that or not), and the ubiquitous importance of trying to pick up girls. The early months in the dorm were a speedy immersion into the norms and low-hanging fruit of college social life, from beers that only came in multiples of 30 to beer bears and case races.

Section 2A from freshman year (2007-08)

I was a bit lost, uninterested in all of that. I had found an anchor point with a Church choir; I had gained a small group of mostly female friends through an old high school connection; but a social life founded on sober fun and conversation felt unfeasible, especially in my own home. Then one Saturday night, I was walking the halls and found a few other freshmen guys sitting on a futon, watching college football, and talking about sports. And with no booze in sight. Somehow, I joined them, and they welcomed me. This became a regular occurrence over our four years, with a rotating cast and a gradual inclusion of a few drinks as we got older.

Back in high school, and then also into college, my choice when in the midst of drinking, drug use, and/or sexual promiscuity was simply to opt out and to discourage it to friends, both before and after it happened -- it was the best and most I could muster at that age. Zahm’s “sixers” (enlarged quads for six guys) had blowouts “on the reg”; beer clouds wafted into stairwells nearly every weekend; and occasionally, you’d see girls stumbling through the hall, either before or after parietals required students to be out of the opposite sex dorms. It’s hard in retrospect, even if I never saw it, to wonder what sort of alcohol or drug abuse or sexual misconduct may have been happening just a few doors down.

I think my complicity comes in the way I embraced the chip-on-the-shoulder culture in Zahm. We relished the ire of other men’s dorms and built up the mystique we presumed from other women’s dorms; we perpetuated insular things like the NFS (“no foreign sausage”) rule barring males from other dorms at our parties; we heard the ignorant pep rally chants from other dorms of “Ole, ole, ole, Zahm’s gay” and joined in. Were other men’s dorms similarly dangerous or toxic? Probably, at least to some extent.. But Zahm as a whole, and even me individually, leaned into the tension and inflated it. And that wedge helped paved the road to closure.

Some freshmen invited to "come get some" during Torquemada 2008.

For many memories that make me chuckle, a cringy element lurks just behind the laughter. Dorm-wide reply-all emails often were uproariously funny, with many even creating burner Gmail accounts (before burners were a thing) to anonymously send their message. Imagine getting an email uplifting the traditional practice of a whole-dorm streak through the student center during finals week… and it’s from Teddy Roosevelt, who signed it “Speak softly, and carry a big stick”. But you realize in retrospect that it was advocating the continuation of a wholly inappropriate tradition. Around 11:50pm on many Sunday nights, a ragtag gang of guys with trash-can drums, kazoos, spare musical instruments, and off-key singing would lead a “parietals parade” to notify the women that it was time to leave. For as funny as verse two was -- “Boy time! Boy time! Preserve the community!” -- it only came after verse one, which when sang nicely was “Parietals parade, get the (ladies) out!”

Yet, there are the more purely good and wholesome things, too.

For a socially unconfident freshman who didn’t want to drink, and wondered if he needed to transfer out, Zahm is where I found my guys. At first, it was watching sports stone cold sober; then, it was a junior friend who saw in me a sophomore who wanted to enjoy a beer now and then without getting hammered, and talk about more than the weather or football; finally, it became a comfortable dynamic of social drinking while just hanging out.

For a Frosh-O schedule chock full of boisterous chants, painfully awkward mingling with girls, and competitive games, we also showed freshmen how to pray. While night one saw us staff members donning war paint, shouting into bullhorns, and leading the charge running in packs, night two had a solemn candle-lit walk to the Holy Cross cemetery. Freshmen set candles at the graves of the CSCs who went before us. We then gathered them at the grave of Fr. Zahm with our priest in residence to reflect on our namesake, a renowned priest and scientist, whose dorm houses the Chapel of St. Albert the Great, patron saint of scientists. Finally, we sat them down under the dome, where each upperclassmen shared a short story of adversity, stress, and anxiety from freshman year, but added the prayerful caveat: remember, she is your mother, and pointed up to the Golden Dome. This was our small way to ground new students in four years of Marian devotion.

On Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday night, whenever I got the urge to take a shoeless walk down to the chapel for 10pm daily Mass, I never went alone; there was always a roommate or section mate to go with me or a friend already in the pews happy to slide over and make room for me to join them.

Our cheers to four years on the
steps of the Main Building

And last year, when a dear friend and old roommate of mine got married, I saw the most Zahmbies I’ve seen in one place since graduation. I think of all the weddings where various invited guests are no-shows or have a conflict -- not In this case. Here a group of guys with so many different personalities, spanning six years of classes, who had roomed in different combinations and sections, all came. We all caught up, all introduced our wives and girlfriends, and all got to celebrate our beloved friend. I can’t think of another wedding with such a response except for this particular guy who was a hub of our community life in Zahm.

So as our Frosh-O signs had joked, even with the building 84 years standing and still erect, the active community of Zahm House ends in a few weeks. Being ten years out from last living there, I have some realism in my perspective. It probably wasn’t the greatest dorm ever; in fact, we never won dorm of the year awards -- though that’s because we never applied either. The building may be further renovated, ultimately renamed, eventually repurposed. And I think a detachment and surrender helps bring peace -- no name, no building, no tradition, no legacy is, or should be, bigger than student welfare, than a culture of welcome and support, than a respect for just policies. None of us can open the ResLife books and audit the case; I don’t appreciate the abrupt and final manner of sharing the decision in the dark of night; yet, I accept the ruling, and suspect it's well deserved and fully warranted by the exceedingly poor judgment and recalcitrant behavior over history and especially these last few years.

Senior day 2010, on the field

I try to keep processing my memories, straining and filtering the details so that I can relish the good and confront and acknowledge the bad. I hope others find similar perspective -- it's not wrong or weak to admit fault. One of Zahm’s last legacies may be one of a cautionary tale: build an identity; cultivate a community life; but don’t push past reasonable, needed boundaries of student welfare and safety. Or else you don’t deserve to continue. And for those of us who lived it, we can admit complicity in its weaknesses yet also extol its strengths.

Maybe this is a moment to reword and offer an old Zahm toast:

We drink one for the Irish;

We drink one for the Zahm;

We drink one for the 84 years
before they shut it down.

*cheers*