Watching her former team compete against Stanford for the national championship last Saturday, Carolyn Ford saw something familiar. The 2005 ACC defensive player of the year noticed all the Blue Devils had markings on their arms.
Now in her second year at the Fuqua School of Business, she was astounded because players began putting messages on their arms in 2004, her junior year.
“I was watching the game and you could see the writing on their arms,” Ford said. “I was thinking to myself, ‘I wonder if that has actually continued since when we were there.’”
The tradition began when Ford, and the rest of the defense, wanted to find a way to all get on the same page. They marked the phrase ‘Pride in Zeroes’ on their forearms. And, after registering nine shutouts in 2003, the unit put together 12 clean sheets in 2004, one shy of the school record at the time.
This year’s defenders recorded an ‘X’ on their arms for every shutout they earned. They had their arms full by the end of the season, shattering the school record by holding their opponents to zero goals 16 times.
But, it is no longer just a defensive tradition. This ritual has been passed down to each year’s new crop of players, evolving each step of the way.
“I remember when I was a freshman seeing people writing things on their wrists or on their arms and I wondered, ‘What does that mean?’” senior forward Chelsea Canepa said. “It’s really just a motivator and a ritual. It’s a tradition that once you figure out what it is that speaks to you, you usually do the same thing every single game.”
For Canepa, what spoke to her first was writing ‘know,’ a reference to how, as a forward, she cannot second guess or overthink her actions on the field, but rather must instinctively know exactly what to do. Since then, she has added ‘do’ because offensive players also need to execute.
While Canepa’s practice is ritualized and consistent from game to game, sophomore Kaitlyn Kerr has taken the tradition and run with it, writing unique messages for each game she plays. As a freshman, she saw then-senior Meaghan FitzGerald write the ‘X’s on the defenders’ arms. Since then, Kerr personalized the custom, tattooing messages specific to a cause or memory.
Against Stanford, she scrawled the name “EBO” in giant letters down her forearm. Ebo is one of her brother’s close friends and was recently diagnosed with bone cancer in his femur. When Duke took on UNC Greensboro this year, and recorded its fifth shutout of the season, it was the 10th anniversary of the attacks on September 11, 2001. The message on her arm read, ‘9/11 never forget.’
When a very close family friend, a police officer in her hometown of Philadelphia, was shot, Kerr inscribed his badge number, ‘5649,’ on her arm for the game his wife—the daughter of her club soccer coach—attended.
“Every time I write something, the people seem to really appreciate it,” Kerr said. “[Ebo] said he was watching the game with a bunch of friends and family and he saw it, sadly when I was crying after the game.”
Although a simple tradition, the writing helps the team rally around causes that focus both on and off the field. Earlier this season, when Ashley Rape tore her anterior cruciate ligament for the third time in her career in a win over then-No.1 Notre Dame, the team wrote her initials on their wrists and tied ribbons around their shoes in her honor.
Regardless of what they write on their arms or the messages they carry onto the field, though, the inscriptions are important for the team because in their final minutes of preparation before games, it helps bring them together.
“What I’ve noticed is I don’t write these on myself, I always have someone else write it on me,” Canepa said. “I think that speaks to the team camaraderie—it’s about getting people excited.”
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