A Game of Inches

written by Nan Plummer

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I grew up in That State just south of here and could see The Horseshoe from four yards up in the maple tree in our front yard. I played tackle with my brothers and their friends until my mom wouldn’t let me. I took a mini-course on the game—half classroom, half “lab”—as a freshman at Mount Holyoke (yes, an institution of higher learning for women), in which I improved my play-calling and passing skills. I have three degrees from the University of Michigan and spent about a decade as a member of Razorback Nation. My current hero: UM’s great running back Blake Corum. I think of myself as a runner and identify with the shortest person on the field.

My playing days are over, but I’m still a fan, mostly of the Big Ten. New Year’s weekend was a feast of both pro and college games. I watched Detroit vs Dallas, Wisconsin vs LSU, and, most memorably and significantly, Alabama vs Michigan.

At this stage, football inevitably provides me (and a whole lot of other people) with metaphors for life. “A game of inches” is the concept that leaped out during this end-of-season watching binge. A  characterization that applies to many sports, and many lives. But right now, it especially resonates with our work at the Treeline.

It’s astounding how difficult it is to thread a 10-foot-wide trail with 2 feet of clearance on either side (that’s 168 inches) through even a portion of a city that is just slightly too large to qualify as small. Buildings are within inches of each other. A formerly major waterway is buried only inches underground. Railroad tracks run within inches of that waterway, those buildings, and many roads. Property lines abut, zigzag, and occasionally (by some measurements) overlap by segments of a few inches here and there. As in football, some of those measurements were made by a couple of guys with two poles and a chain. The alignment for the Treeline will be like a Blake Corum run through the Tide defense—looks easy till you think about it.

More to the point, the margins of error are tight. A first down is 10 yards, not 359 inches. The edge of a pedestrian trail must be at least 16 feet –not 191 inches—from the center of a railroad track. A sideline, a property line—can’t stray over either. The goal line—you cross it, or you don’t, whether in football or fundraising.

But inches add up. On the football field, you can get to a first down with a long pass reception, but also by a gain of a few inches. Then a few more. And a few more. Even if you started on your own five and earned as little as four yards at a time, eventually you could get “and inches” to the goal. On the Treeline, every time a stakeholder takes a meeting, every time a property owner says “yes,” every time someone sends in a check, we’re closer to our beautiful, continuous path from the river to (approximately) the Big House.

A game of inches.

174,240 inches, to be precise. It’s going to take a while. It can’t take forever, but there’s no actual game clock ticking on the construction of the Treeline. So we’re running with our heads down, running layered pass routes, getting three yards and a cloud of dust, launching Hail Marys—all of it, with what Coach Harbaugh might call “an enthusiasm unknown to mankind.”  He has also observed,  “you win as part of a team effort…if everybody does a little bit, it adds up to a lot.”  

Thanks for being a member of the team. You’re getting us a few inches closer every day.