Schtitt's enforcer: schedule-maker, drill-master, statistician, gatekeeper of the day

pivotal · STANDING

• When: STANDING throughout the YDAU school year (and still in force in YG, when he ships out with Hal to Arizona)
• What: deLint is Schtitt's day-to-day executive, and the schedule is his instrument of power: he and Schtitt make out the daily drills, matches, and conditioning (including the sub-rosa punitive "Pukers"), and Schtitt, if aggrieved, can have deLint and Thode make a player's life extremely uncomfortable at will. He runs the boys' A.M. drills in person and heads the prorector corps. He is the Academy's numbers man — keeping tallies by pencil and clipboard, filling in performance hand-charts nobody else may see, and teaching the joke-elective "Introduction to Athletic Spreadsheets" — and his authority reaches into every scheduling minutia: throttling down a feverish Troeltsch, capping Hal's late suppers at the Headmaster's House at twice a week, monitoring whether Hal's sudden rise has swelled his head, prescribing (with Barry Loach) fifteen minutes a day of one-foot balance therapy for Hal's ankle, turning on the courts' high-tower lights at dusk, killing the dormitory lights at the main breaker around 2300, and shipping out with all six A-teams to Milan "at the pedagogical tiller." (Even his big brass whistles are campus furniture — Avril borrows one for Wayne.) Schtitt, notably, is not personally close to him, treating deLint and Thode with a formality that's almost parodic; deLint's register beneath Schtitt's metaphysics is a crude coaching argot — the flow state is "Playing out of your head, deLint calls it."