WINNERS NEVER HAVE TO QUIT
the banner-shaped posters deLint used to have D. Harde put up each fall over the senior-locker sections of both locker rooms that had WINNERS NEVER HAVE TO QUIT
Context
The academy's win-ethic in its crudest signage. deLint hung banners reading "WINNERS NEVER HAVE TO QUIT" over the senior lockers each fall — an "anxiety-fest" so raw that other prorectors got Schtitt to make him take them down. The slogan freights the developing body with a binary of triumph-or-erasure, and even the institution's own staff recognized it as too much pressure to stack onto kids already terrified of the "purgatorial fate" of the low-ranked. The body must win or it is nothing; the poster said the quiet part out loud.