i don't want to be in a situation for even an hour where i'm not enjoying myself
or: a little story about the time i played soccer and was a bad team player
When we start dipping into the optimistic weather we’ve had recently—fake spring—I think of playing soccer, and the one spring season I spent on my high school’s soccer team.
I was never what you would call an “athlete.” But I was very committed to playing soccer nonetheless. I think in retrospect we can chalk this up to a combination of things, including but certainly not limited to my stubbornness, my competitive spirit, and what probably registered at the time as an unlikely and completely inexplicable obsession with the 2002 movie Bend It Like Beckham and USWNT forward Mia Hamm.
My first team was in a rec league when I was in second grade. Every team in the league was named after a country. We wore yellow jerseys, and were somewhat arbitrarily designated “the Netherlands.” My mom was our coach. I am fairly sure we won zero games (those familiar with my skeeball team will note some similarities in record here). Later I joined a travel league coached by the dad of one of my best friends. We played in the fall, often warming up to the sounds of the high school’s marching band practicing on an adjacent field (this travel team was not related to the school’s girls team, but our fields were adjacent to the high school. Confusing!). Kristen’s dad would make us run laps around the fields, which we were more or less happy to do because a) nobody was especially like, good, or trying to be better than anyone else so we weren’t running fast, b) it gave us time to talk shit, and c) if the boys’ high school team, which played in the fall while the girls’ high school team played in the spring, was practicing we could gawk at them. The Hershey Blast were not what I would call an extremely formidable team, though we did sometimes play well together and even won some games. I ostensibly was there to play defense, but I was (and remain) scared of conflict and confrontation, physical or otherwise, so I’ll let you imagine how this worked out for me. Mostly, though, this was a social event punctuated by trips to the mall during soccer tournaments and Facebook photo albums with 90 pictures called like “LeAn WiT iT RoCk WiT iT*~*~*”. It was a sense of belonging I very much craved. It was a clique, albeit not a very cool one.
Importantly, there were a bunch of “club” teams in our area that girls from our high school played on. Ours was certainly the most…how do you say…recreational among them. The least skilled, let’s say. The other teams won a lot of games in leagues far more competitive and advanced than ours. I do not know if the almost political nature of club soccer teams and their social stratification is a common thing in other fairly affluent suburban areas but it certainly was a thing in south central Pennsylvania in like, 2006.
A few of us from the Blast decided to try out for the high school girls soccer team for the spring season our freshman year. That winter, we attended (and suffered through, for me at least) a few weeks of conditioning camp, which took place at night in the elementary school building. I remember doing a lot more sprinting than I had ever done in my life and also running up and down a lot of stairs. “For what,” I thought to myself, pudgy and 14 and already aware I was not cut out for a life of arduous physical movement. “I am going to grow up to become someone who gets carpal tunnel by typing too much on a computer. This is not for me.”
I had played junior varsity soccer for our middle school team in seventh grade and got cut from the team during tryouts in eighth grade, a humiliating thing I did not know could happen, because it’s fucking middle school soccer. So I had been humbled before this, and decided to try hard enough to avoid facing the same fate in my first high school season. Somehow, the handful of us Blast girlies survived conditioning and got thrown onto the junior varsity team. That spring we dutifully played often-disappointing games of soccer before the celebrated and actually talented varsity team, and then eased into the bleachers at the high school field or, for big home games, Hersheypark Stadium, back into comfortable obscurity.
One night, as the bus rolled back into the school parking lot after an away game, one of the juniors on the varsity team let us know that for the following day’s home game, which was senior night, we were to wear the following: pigtails. A soccer pinnie over our shirt. A denim mini skirt. Soccer socks. I, a 14 year old with the sensible internal dress code of a middle-aged father, thought to myself: That sounds ridiculous. I’m not doing that. I also thought: Our self-appointed dress code police English teacher is going to scream at me in the hallway because my skirt is too short and I don’t feel like being called to the front office to change, this is not a worthy hill to die on. And so I didn’t dress up, and neither did three other freshmen. We would come to find out the next day when most of the JV team showed up in this uniform of humiliation that this was a rite of passage, a bit of light razzing done traditionally every year to the freshmen (which also extended to the sophomores on the JV team, which felt a little rude to them). Ok, whatever. I chose not to participate. This, I thought, was it. I didn’t wear my hair in pigtails, but we had a game later on that day, and that was more important than a little prank, which certainly none of the upperclassmen on the team would notice my lack of adherence to.
Reader, I was so wrong.
One particular upperclassman — we will call her Jane to protect her privacy, though I don’t think this newsletter will make it back to her, in any event — not only noticed, but was incensed by what she perceived to be our disobedience, our refusal to adhere to this very dumb tradition. I had refused the pigtails and inadvertently caused a crisis. I had offended her to the very core of her being. I had disrespected the seniors, or something. Clearly I did not, and still do not, understand the major faux pas I had committed.
Before every home game, we met in the cafeteria after school for a pregame meal, usually consisting of like, PB&J sandwiches served by the moms of some of the girls of the soccer team. On this particular day, Jane made a huge spectacle of handing out candy bars she had purchased to the freshmen and members of the JV team who did dress up. “This is for you! Thank you for following the rules!” I heard her exclaim loud enough so everyone could hear. I rolled my eyes at what was clearly an unchecked 17 year old on a power trip. She also came around with a pen and a paper plate and made a list of the four disloyal freshmen for some unknown future punishment. Was she going to carry around a paper plate for the rest of the night in her soccer bag? I wondered. That’s sort of weird.
She did. How do I know?
The next week, we convened on the field for practice. But it was not practice per usual. Instead, Jane read off the four names she had scrawled on the paper plate at team dinner the week before. We were ordered to stand in front of the goal, facing inwards towards the net, and bend over at the waist and grab our ankles. Everyone else lined up with their soccer balls at the top of the box. This is a little game known as Butts Up, in which players take turns trying to hit you in the butt with a soccer ball, and whoever hits the most butts wins. Some quick internet research indicates that this appears to be a lighthearted game, but in the moment we were quickly made to understand it to be spiteful, punitive, exacting. Jane wanted to teach us a lesson. Our adult assistant coach looked on as Jane set up this twisted display of public humiliation.
But, lol, it was the rest of the team who ended up looking dumb somehow, and not us: they missed every single shot on goal they took, except for when the girl next to me stood up straight for a second and they nailed her in the back, a cheap shot.
After enduring our punishment, I thought: fuck you guys, I’m out of here! That was basically how the season ended, and I never played on the school team again. I was a bad team player, I was probably selfish for not adhering to a simple dress code, but I was free. I was a decade too early to have absorbed the wisdom of Da Share Zone’s Just Walk Out mantra, but I had inadvertently internalized its dogma. Some children are simply born with the soul of a tired, small adult who doesn’t want to be in a situation for even an hour where they’re not enjoying themselves. That day I knew I was one of them.
I, too, was that adult in the little person’s body. Only recently have I embraced the “just walk out” philosophy. I love it. Could have saved me a lifetime of agony.
Really enjoyed this post!
Marie