This seat is taken

It sits in the corner of the Solon football locker room. Rust bleeds through the flaking tan powder coat, peeling like old bark. Steel is warped and thinned from years of abuse. Its legs wobble. One rubber cap is gone, the others cracked and frayed. The air smells of sweat and turf dust.

On Friday nights in Solon, this chair awaits its fate. Lifted high. Pummeled into the cement floor. The sound ricochets, echoing off cinder block walls. A moment of chaos. And a ritual that binds a football team together.

It sounds like a professional wrestling stunt. That’s because it kind of is. Picture the referee dramatically lowering a mic to the mat, and you’re halfway there. For reasons nobody can quite explain, Solon football’s most enduring tradition isn’t a pregame chant or a postgame prayer. It’s that folding chair. After every home win, players, and sometimes even coaches, hoist it above their heads and slam it to the ground with all the subtlety of a WWE cage match. Ridiculous? Absolutely. But for this program, it’s become sacred.

“It’s intense fun,” head coach Lucas Stanton said. “And it means the world to these teenagers.”

The first chairs weren’t meant for celebration. Three years ago, Stanton dragged a few from his basement when the team room needed more seating. Trainers sometimes used them to tape ankles. At the time, they were just chairs.

Milo Ashbacker saw them as more.

Ashbacker, a scout-team grinder who doubled as the heartbeat of Solon’s morale, turned an ordinary piece of furniture into folklore. After a 34-7 loss at Assumption to open the 2023 season, the Spartans returned home, desperate for joy. They found it in the chair.

“That day I was like, ‘Huh. There’s this chair here,’” Ashbacker said, laughing. “Let’s see if we can throw it on the ground and release some of this positive energy.”

That’s how every great tradition starts, right? Just see it and slam it. Or stomp it.

Most players thought it would be a one-off, a goofy postgame moment to lighten the mood. But Ashbacker had other ideas. The following week against Central DeWitt, he scored his first varsity touchdown. With 34.7 seconds left in the third quarter, positioned to the left of the quarterback, Ashbacker took a handoff and barreled into the end zone. The sideline erupted. Lineman Trevor Myers scooped him up Superman-style, holding him in the air as teammates swarmed.

“I knew we had to bring it back,” Ashbacker said.

And so they did. Every home game that season, they slammed the chair. Solon never lost at Spartan Stadium.

By Week 6, after a double-overtime 16-13 homecoming win against Benton, Stanton grabbed the chair himself and slammed it to the concrete. Players went berserk. Weeks later in the quarterfinals, after a 36-35 playoff win over West Delaware that punched Solon’s ticket to the UNI Dome, Stanton let loose again. And nobody slams it harder.

Stanton has always believed in traditions.

“Back in high school, we’d buy a pizza and eat it on the field after a win,” he said.

Whether pizza or chair faceplant, it enforces a positive culture. That same philosophy carries over today.

“People don’t realize that winning is actually very hard to do and it’s not necessarily normal,” Stanton said. “Why not enjoy it?”

The ritual snowballed at Solon. Eddie Johnson, a standout senior last fall, remembers his first time wielding the chair.

“I just really wanted to break it,” Johnson said, chuckling. “That floor ain’t taking no damage.”

After a stellar career with the Spartans, Johnson received his own version of the tradition. Solon linebackers coach Tory Hackert gifted him a metal folding chair for graduation. It’s black, not tan. But it means the same thing. And it still rests against a wall in Johnson’s bedroom.

By the end of that season, the chair slam had evolved into a reward system. Big plays, big games, big performances. Slam the chair.

Eli Kampman, the Spartans’ senior quarterback and defensive back, estimates they’ve gone through at least “double digits” worth of chairs already. He admits sometimes he’s thinking about it before the clock even hits zero.

“Once in a while somebody lets go early and the chair just goes flying. Pieces break off,” Kampman said. “When there’s two minutes left and the game is secured, that’s when I’m thinking about the chair.”

Forget kneel-downs. Kampman is picturing the postgame suplex of a solitary steel seat.

For linemen like senior Kyler Jensen, the slam carries a special weight. It’s a chance to commemorate the often-unnoticed work up front.

“We like to celebrate as a team before we celebrate with everyone else,” Jensen said. “It’s not about one guy. It’s about all of us.”

And when all the coaches join in? That’s when it really pops.

“They act like they don’t want to do it at first,” Jensen said, grinning. “But I know they do.”

This fall, first-year offensive coordinator Bryce Pierce got his chance. After Solon’s 35-20 win over top-ranked rival Mount Vernon, players sprinted to the locker room. Kampman yelled, “Bring me the chair!”

But there was a problem. Nobody could find it.

Panicking, some linemen started smashing cardboard boxes instead. Desperate times call for desperate furniture. But finally, the chair appeared. Kampman grabbed it. And slammed it. And the room exploded. Pierce got his turn. The tradition lived on.

That’s the beauty of the chair slam. It’s absurd and sacred. Violent and joyful and serious all at once. Pieces break off. Paint flakes away. The sound rattles the walls. Players laugh. Coaches grin. But every slam carries weight. It says: we earned this.

It all started with a scout-team morale man, chasing joy after a lopsided loss. It carried through a playoff push, graduation presents, and double-digit replacements dented beyond use. It survived overtime thrillers and top-ranked rivalries. And still, it sits there every Friday night, waiting. Not always the same chair. But always the same purpose.

Battered. Beaten. Nameless.

And ready to fly again.