We lost our last football game of the season on Friday.
There will be no playoffs this year.
My son is a senior.
After the game, the team carried the graduates on their shoulders to the locker room, and I stood on the sidelines and tried not to cry.
It wasn't that long ago that I disdained people who got emotional over high school athletics. It’s just a game. They’re only kids. It doesn’t matter. True. And also, so very false.
Small towns often have a reputation for taking their high school sports way too seriously. We push kids from younger and younger ages to specialize, and if you haven’t been playing a sport since early-to-mid elementary school, the chances of playing that particular sport in high school are pretty slim. I hate the inherent pressure that comes hand-in-hand with our local football, basketball, and volleyball programs, and I personally know kids who burned out at ridiculously young ages because it was all just too much. Never mind the parents that get so wrapped up in it all that their kids’ sports become their entire identity. It’s pretty ugly when grown adults are yelling at children (their own or their opponents’), and making life so miserable for the refs they quit.
High school athletics definitely have a dark side.
And yet.
I became a “hockey mom” when my oldest strapped on his first pair of skates at the age of three. By four he was playing Termite level hockey, his tiny helmet the size of a melon and his stick not much longer than the length of my arm. I knew nothing about hockey (or any sport, for that matter), but I realized if I wanted to be a part of my son’s world, it was time to learn.
Today, I could probably ref hockey (if only I could skate), and my family would say I’m a bigger football fan than even my husband and my teenage sons. I love sports: the thrill of the “battle,” the pure joy when an incredible play is executed, the teamwork and camaraderie. But what I love the most is the family.
Sitting in the stands, surrounded by people who are all cheering for the same outcome, is a microcosm of something much bigger: we’re in this together, a unified but wildly diverse whole.
We want the best not just for our kids, but for each other’s kids, and we celebrate their victories and mourn their defeats as if their joys and sorrows are our own.
If we could only see that it’s practice—all of it—I’m convinced the world would be a better place. If we could take that sense of unity and community and extend it beyond the gymnasium, field, or ice rink, if we could look at our neighbors and know that deep down we all just want the same things (love, connection, a sense of belonging, a home, a win now and again), it might make our interactions in the marketplace look different. We might treat our waitress with respect, have patience in the school pick-up line, and be filled with compassion instead of contempt when a juicy bit of gossip reaches our ears. Maybe, if we could see each other as those boys on the field, bruised and scuffed and just a little bit heartbroken as we try our level best to win (at work, in our relationships, in life), we would remember that we’re not enemies or even opponents. We’re on the same team.
My son’s football game is barely a pixel in the big picture. As I write this, over 14,000 people have been killed or injured in the Israel-Hamas war. Afghanistan is reeling from a devastating earthquake. The US House of Representatives is frozen and impotent without a speaker. Our world is a smorgasbord of tragedy and pain, fear and uncertainty… And I’m talking about kid’s sports. But maybe, the big stuff springs from the little stuff. Maybe the way we live and work and play and love has a ripple effect that can change everything.
In her 1984 Nobel Peace Prize speech, Mother Teresa said: “My prayer for you is… [that] we will really believe, we will begin to love. And we will love naturally, we will try to do something. First in our own home, next door neighbor in the country we live, in the whole world.”
My beautiful boy retired his #12 jersey on Friday night.
And though it was hard and sad, I’m grateful down to my bones for Friday Night Lights (and puck drop in the barn and tip-off on the court) and the way it reminds me again and again that they’re all our kids.
We belong to each other.
Thanks for reading. xo - Nicole
From the prospective beyond the local school and the "unity" sports provide, it seems not to extend to the very next town or the next community, they are, after all, the "enemy". Perpetuating these sports and this sort of competition brings little to unity in the larger sense. In Germany, the school system has little to do with sports, schools are for knowledge and socialization, if you want to join a sport, you join a club and pay for it. Some of our most basic educational needs are being sacrificed simply to find people who can coach first and teach second. Career opportunities and acceptance into college programs with scholarships are few and far between, often settling on small schools that extend that scholarship for a limited time and transfers of credits can be challenging. So suggesting this is an opportunity for poor kids is rather meaningless to get an education beyond high school. Wouldn't it be betteer to get a better education at the high school level and equip people better with an understanding of the things that need to be taught that do bring unity and understanding to us all, civics, history (real history, not propaganda) and basic living skills. These are the sorts of basic educational classes that are filled with coaches first and educators second. Probably the reason most don't find these classes give them what they need, which make them unimportant and obviously "un-neccessary".
I understand that feeling, even me, a non-parent. That feeling of community and purpose. I think that's why I keep volunteering for various things even though I'm terribly busy. I'm a couple of decades away from high school and yet when SE Polk wins a game I still celebrate. Then I cheer even louder when the Cyclones win. Even better, I love when a SEP player joins the Cyclones! Oh man, I could go on and on, but I think it is my way of continuing on with sports even though I'm not an athlete any more. In body, anyway.