Eighty percent of the time the heat hardly worked at all, and the St. James courts were almost as cold as the outside air. Squash balls bounce much less when they’re cold, and although they get warm mainly by being hit, the temperature of the court determines the pace of the game. Cold courts make the ball slow and so it’s easier to win with drop shots but harder to win with power. SJS players wore long underwear and wool sweaters, and they learned to scrape every ball off the floor, pry every shot out of the back corners, and get the ball deep in the court by hitting it high on the front wall.

When the furnace woke up, though, the air quavered over the radiators, and players would set balls on top of them until they were almost painful to pick up. When the court is hot, the ball bounces higher and is harder to kill. St. James players learned to run and run and run, to be patient and not try to force the end of a point, to play for reliable shots instead of outright winners. They learned to lay the ball into the nick—the seam where the wall and floor meet—in order to keep their drop shots from bouncing up too high. They learned to lob gentle balls over their opponents’ heads and let them die in the back corners.

People began calling the furnace the Dragon. Because of the Dragon, SJS could play anywhere, but opposing players could almost never play the game dictated by the SJS courts.

Price promised five hundred dollars to any of his players who could beat the slowest member of the crew team in a 2,000-meter erg piece (“twenty-five cents per meter”), and twice he had to pay. No other school brought players into that kind of fitness, and the kids who couldn’t tolerate emergency signals singing through their nervous systems dropped off the team.

Success begat success, and the best players from Brooklyn Heights and Philadelphia wanted to play for St. James. Price recruited in a way that seemed to other coaches ruthless and a little pathetic. It was just high school squash, after all.

Price seemed to hover over the school, outside the dull interchange of classes and homework, something more elemental to the school’s enduring idea of itself and its cold-water New England beginnings. When people mentioned him, he seemed more like the chapel or library than like a private citizen.

By the mid-eighties the team started calling itself the Tide. Before matches they would huddle together and chant over and over, “You can’t stay dry, the Tide is rolling in, the Tide is rolling in, the Tide is rolling in. You can’t stay dry, the Tide is rolling in…”