Posted 8/4/25 9:40 pm
“Wow, that’s soooo 8CA — to relaunch the 8CA Blog on the day after summer contact days end in Illinois high school sports!”
True, true. I’m reigniting the 8CA grill on the first day of the sometimes-true, sometimes-hazy “no-contact week.”
I’ll start with this very Norm thought (oh, hey, it’s Norm Ramil here, blog writer and main person here at 8 Count Audio!) — how do you define summer? And yeah, this is the kind of brilliant stuff you can expect here until comp season starts up.
It depends, of course. Most of us operate on multiple definitions of summer, and they overlap both neatly and chaotically.
I’ll save the deep dive of IHSA’s summer contact zone for later this week and on episode 106 of the podcast, but I’ll probably give away my conclusions by recklessly using italics in the next paragraph.
You get 20 days during summer when you can run practices that involve a coach teaching the sport-specific skills of an IHSA sport. Those 20 days start on…well, it’s complicated…but I do know that the last day was Sunday, August 3, 2025.
For extra giggles, you could’ve been running your comp choreo right up through 11:59pm last night!
So in that sense, summer’s over. And it’s REALLY over when you dancers and coaches move through the halls to the choreography of your building’s bell schedule. Some schools crank it up next week and a few squeeze out more summer, opting to start sometime during the week of August 18.
Putting aside IHSA’s definition of summer for a minute, let’s see what nature has to say. Science-y ways of defining summer include:
Astronomical. Summer technically starts with the summer solstice (this year it was on June 20), the day with the longest period of daylight in the Northern hemisphere. Its last day is September 21, when the autumnal equinox occurs.
Meteorological. For record-keeping convenience, meteorological summer runs from June 1 to August 31, inclusive. Clean, simple, and effective — like that solid double pirouette of yours. Plus it makes cultural sense: we think of summer as the warm weather months (on this side of the equator), and June, July, and August are exactly that.
Other hardcore markers of when summer ends:
Older siblings head back to their college campuses.
The park district pool closes.
Registration day at school.
And of course, the first day of school — when you wanna dress for fall but the weather is like 90 degrees.
Scrimmages and then weekend 1 of football.
Whenever it is that Starbucks starts selling pumpkin spice lattes. You’ll probably want the iced version for a couple of months, though.
And there’s no turning back when Labor Day Weekend hits.
But the summer “locker slam” is, no doubt, that first day of school.
However you define summer and its end date, a book definitely closed on Sunday night. But you probably have a few other summer books still open.
Today’s random pic is a screenshot from Carmel’s stunner at their conference comp in January:
And our new podcast episode is up! Listen to #105 on Spotify. We’ve got recaps of our roadtrips, a debate on the merits of different pie flavors if you’re ever in a “pie-in-the-face” charity event, a giggly interview with York, and an uplifting check-in with Nazareth.