Teamwork key to many callings

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 26/04/2011 (5479 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

As an athlete in a consummate team game, it behooves you to take advantage of every opportunity to see how others operate in similar environments. It may not be a sport or a competition, but the dynamics and principles of much of what we do on the football field carries over to innumerable industries and professions.

So when the opportunity arose for a ride-along with the Osborne Street Fire Station No. 4 for an entire night shift, to say I was curious to explore the parallels between our industries and see how fire halls work together as a unit was an understatement.

The deal was that I show up at 6 p.m. Saturday and stay for the duration of the shift, until 7:30 the next morning. Right away, I felt a familiarity to football with the nature of the work these men do. Not only is it an unpredictable and fast paced environment, but these guys never know when the calls are coming in and what to expect. The next call on the docket could be a false alarm — which many of them are — or an extremely volatile situation where they will be placed in considerable jeopardy.

To be truthful, the workplace circumstances reminded me of what both excited me and drove me crazy when I was a part-time backup in the NFL. Going into each game, you never knew whether you would end up playing one snap or the entire contest, and you were always only one play away from being forced into action full time. In both professions you have to be ready to work at a moment’s notice and when your number is called there is no time to do anything but react. You can’t afford to misstep or warm up, regardless if you have not played in the first three-and-a-half quarters or gotten a call for the first five hours of the night.

The first call was a fire alarm and by the time I got out of the truck, it had already been determined a non-event-so back to the station we went. The next call sounded right up my alley as it was a possible water rescue in the bloated river, but once again, there was no need to go for a swim. The frustration I started feeling is similar to that of when you practice a play or scenario all week, but your coach refuses to call it in the game or it never materializes. The third call we got caught me right in the middle of a mouthful of roast beef, but no one was waiting around while I looked for a to-go container, so once again, we dropped everything and left the station like a bat out of hell. We didn’t even make it to the call this time before we were turned around.

It seemed like it was going to be an evening of false alarms and overzealous 911 calls until the fourth one came in with a report of a possible medical situation with a woman in an apartment building. Up two flights of stairs we went to discover a woman snoring soundly in the corridor.

After the crew administered a medical exam, I realized this line of work requires more than just technical skills and drilling. Here was a woman who appeared to have simply drank too much and passed out in an unfamiliar building. I was irritated to be spending time on this call about 20 seconds after we got there, but the crew was extremely patient, thorough, and professional in their rapport with her.

When the call ended, I found myself back at the station lulled to sleep by the rather mundane and ordinary events I had experienced, which is when things escalated in a hurry. In a football game you never know which one or two plays will be the one that determines the outcome of the match, which is the reason why coaches stress that players play every single snap to the fullest. As I was soon to discover in the fire and rescue business, if you take a play off or aren’t on top of your game, someone could lose their life.

This time the boys got a call for a pedestrian hit by a car and I won’t soon forget the picture: we pulled up to a motionless man lying face down in a pool of blood in the middle of the road. But like a squadron of cagey, veteran linebackers, this crew calmly and professionally assessed the scene and had the man treated and on a spine board ready for ambulance delivery before I even got over the shock of the brutality of the scene.

Dressed in firefighter gear, I suppose to the onlookers at the scene, I appeared to be one of the firehouse crew. “You guys are real heroes, you know,” exclaimed this man in his appreciation of the job the guys had just done. I chuckled to myself, as that is a sentiment we often hear in the circles of professional football, and told the guy, “Not I my friend, not I.”

 

Doug Brown, a hard-hitting defensive tackle with the Winnipeg Blue Bombers and a harder-hitting columnist, appears in the Winnipeg Free Press on Tuesdays.