Joe Kline/The Bulletin Culver players celebrate on their bench after Culver won the 2012 2A State Championship game against Days Creek at Ridgeview High School in Redmond.

Jamie Brock has no idea when it started. All she knows is that it works.

Brock is well aware how unprofessional it may seem. But the Summit girls soccer coach also makes it clear: She ain’t stoppin’.

Why would she? Since the routine began early last season, her team has never lost any game when she has remembered to keep it. She and the Storm have a state championship to show for it. And Brock’s players feed off it. Funny, seeing as how Brock must first feed herself during the first few minutes of each match.

If you follow Summit girls soccer, perhaps you have noticed. Maybe you have looked at the Storm sideline and witnessed Brock and her assistant coach, Kourtney Parks, eating a burrito or a sandwich or a slice of pizza or, in the case of the 2013 state final in Hillsboro, Cajun tater tots.

“We just started eating,” Brock recalls. “And we did it again. And then we were like, ‘Oh, something’s going on here, clearly. We’ve got to keep doing it.’”

This is her ritual. Her superstition, really, even if she says she does not consider herself the superstitious kind. Brock HAS to eat. Because when she doesn’t, well, the team loses — as the Storm did in their season opener, their first setback in 36 games, and again two matches later.

It was after that second loss, at North Medford, that Parks, who was away for the first four games of the season, made an observation. “Where’s the food?” Brock remembers her assistant asking. Brock did not understand what Parks meant — until a superstitious light flickered on in the Summit coach’s head.

“I got back to it (early-game snacking),” Brock says, “and we started winning.” Dominating, actually: eight straight games without a loss, including seven wins, six shutouts and 43 goals scored while allowing just two.

Something has to be said for Brock’s ritual. And she agrees. But how much stock does she invest in it?

“Enough stock that you don’t not do it,” she says. “You’re like, ‘Really? Is it the food that’s going to do it?’ I’m not that crazy. But at the same time, I do keep getting food.”

Other prep coaches around Central Oregon have their own superstitions and ritualistic tendencies.

Staying at Summit, boys soccer coach Ron Kidder wore the same green suede Adidas sneakers throughout his Storm’s 16-1-2 season last year, including the program’s first state championship. Kidder retired those shoes; he now sports green suede Pumas. “They achieved their goal,” he says of the Adidas. “I didn’t want to go to the well too much.”

But one ritual that has not changed, one that began sometime last season, Kidder has stuck with. And it has paid dividends.

During warm-ups before each game, Kidder will walk around the field by himself, touching each corner flag along the way. The Storm coach is unsure how the routine started, though he says he needed to change his luck after his team lost in the state semifinals two years in a row.

Regardless of its origin, that ritual has allowed the tightly wound coach to ease his pregame nerves.

“That’s what’s hard for me as a coach is that I still get pregame jitters,” Kidder says. “I’m going to say it helps me a lot. It’s doing something for me. I don’t know what it’s doing. … It certainly gets me to kickoff a little bit more peacefully.”

Kidder admits that he has a track record as a superstitious competitor. Maybe that is why he disappears before matches, to go on a relaxing walk around the field. Sure, the stroll helps tame the butterflies in his stomach. But he has done it so many times that it has become a superstition, that he HAS to take that walk to ensure positive results.

At Sisters High, members of the Outlaw boys soccer team circle up before each match and “harmonize,” as coach Rob Jensen describes it, a ceremony begun just this season. It starts with one player finding a musical tone. He is joined by his teammates as Sisters finds the right pitch on the pitch. The result: a 9-2 overall record and the Outlaws’ fourth straight Sky-Em League championship.

Culver coach Randi Viggiano has worn the same outfit and shoes to volleyball matches since early September, the Bulldogs’ last defeat. If her squad loses, she says, she will change to a different ensemble and repeat the process. Before each set, Culver players always go through handshakes with one another in the same order. Viggiano also has a secret superstition, one she is unwilling to share with anyone.

“Some things are sacred,” she says.

Fair enough. After all, under Viggiano, the Bulldogs have gone 51-6 in league play with four straight conference titles and are seeking a fourth consecutive Class 2A state trophy — and possibly a second state championship in three years.

Whatever the superstition, whatever the ritual, one thing is certain: It works for Central Oregon coaches.

Come time for Summit’s much-hyped matchup against Bend High this afternoon, one that pits the fifth-ranked Storm against the No. 1 Lava Bears for the Intermountain Conference title, Brock will turn to her trusty ritual — as unprofessional as it may seem.

“I’ll have something,” Brock says through laughter. “I just don’t know what yet. It’s like eating for sport.”

—Reporter: 541-383-0307, 
glucas@bendbulletin.com.

Before each set, Culver players always go through handshakes with one another in the same order. Bulldogs coach Randi Viggiano also has a secret superstition, one she is unwilling to share with anyone. “Some things are sacred,” she says.