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Physical Education


In a family of five siblings, my middle sister Liz was the only natural athlete. She played soccer from the time she was three, but that never caught on as a family-wide pastime. Soccer required entirely too much running for the rest of us. As a group, we were more inclined toward sports where we could stand fairly still and swat a projectile at someone from a safe distance. We liked badminton, which I played using a “finger-gun”-style grip that was completely impractical for most racket-based sports. We also attempted volleyball on occasion, mostly because we already had the net set up for badminton. We figured we could just as easily fail at maintaining a volley with a ball as we could with a shuttlecock.

Had the five of us buckled down on our fundamentals, we would’ve made a mean little basketball team. In an alternate universe, I could picture us roaming around the local parks, challenging people to pick-up games like a low-rent spin-off of the Globetrotters. Unfortunately, we were more of a “H.O.R.S.E.” kind of crew, preferring to take shots, undefended, from stationary positions around the court. Each player earned a letter for every missed shot until someone (more accurately, I) accumulated the entire word and lost the game. We experimented briefly with hitting a baseball, until I hit one with my face. Rather than render my nose permanently parallel to my cheekbones like an ambulatory Picasso painting, I abandoned baseball as an extracurricular option from that point on.

When my uncle was in town, we played Monkey-In-The-Middle just often enough for me to dread being the “monkey”. This meant I remained in the middle of two people as they passed a ball back and forth until I could snatch the ball out of the air and send whoever threw it to the “middle” in my place. Since I could neither throw the ball well enough to stay out of the middle nor catch the ball well enough to save myself, it was basically a game of “Me-In-The-Middle” every time we played.

According to Piaget, children learn through play, by actively engaging and experimenting with their natural environment. By playing in the front yard with my siblings and experimenting with sports equipment, I learned that I was learning disabled in throwing, catching, and any sport involving a ball. At least, that’s how I explained my athletic ineptitude to anyone who attempted to involve me in that kind of play. I knew a handful of kids at school whose learning impairments were specific to math or reading, so it seemed logical that a generalized deficit in sports-related motor skills was equally possible.

Based on that personal assessment, I gravitated toward imaginary play, where mental versus physical agility was more desirable in a playmate, or solitary play, where the rules were mine to rewrite or completely abandon if necessary. Rather than pursue sports, which are dependent on determining a winner, I preferred to play for playing’s sake. Even in areas where I excelled, I didn’t necessarily need to be the best. If someone was better than me, I preferred not to challenge it. My limited experimentation with competition had taught me that it was of no interest to me. I learned to avoid it.

My perception of sports remained largely unchanged until years later, when I met my husband. As a kid, sports were his vehicle for forming relationships, experimenting with teamwork and leadership, and processing life’s lessons. As an adult, watching sports became an outlet for a passion he was now too busy (or too old and slow) to participate in. Through him, I was unavoidably immersed in that culture, celebrating wins, mourning losses, and making memories through elaborate get-togethers thrown in honor of this game or that tournament. I learned the history behind his favorite teams and his relationship to them. I became invested in sports as illustrations of human trial and triumph, with no story more inspirational to me than the infamous championship run of our shared alma mater, NC State University.

In 1983, more than ten years prior to our enrollment, a young Coach Jim Valvano had led his Men’s Basketball Team to victory in the NCAA Championship. Following a strategy he characterized as “survive and advance”, Valvano’s Wolfpack defied heavy odds and a mediocre regular season record to win every game in post-season tournament play. As they systematically progressed through the national tournament in a last-second, heart-stopping fashion, they earned the nickname “The Cardiac Pack” for the near heart attacks they presumably compelled in their fans with every game. True to their nickname, they won the national championship game by just two points in the final three seconds. What followed was iconic footage of Valvano running onto the court, frantically searching for a player to embrace. It’s a clip that would continue to reappear every year around tournament time as sportscasters reminisced about one of the quintessential “Cinderella” stories of championship history. The Wolfpack’s unlikely triumph was the magic that had always eluded me in sports. In learning about it, I fully embraced the underdog mystique and began to understand how a team’s struggle can transcend the game itself to become deeper and more meaningful than individual skills and scores.

In the meantime, I finally learned to play catch. My husband had initially hoped we could one day play tennis, but unfortunately, his enthusiasm did not translate into technique or hand-eye coordination on my part. The finger-gun-style badminton grip from my youth was grossly inadequate for tennis, where the impact of the ball through the shaft of a much heavier racket threatened to snap my index finger clean off its hinge. When I was repeatedly unable to maintain a volley in spite of my husband’s best efforts, we abandoned that dream and moved on to catching and throwing a football. It took several years of marriage to systematically dismantle my mythical disability, but, through his patience and dedication, I finally learned, just in time to welcome my first son.

Before he could crawl, my son learned to toss a ball back and forth with my husband while I washed dishes after dinner. This was encouraging for my husband, who’d been braced for the possibility that our kids would athletically take after me. Before long, our son was walking, running, kicking, and exploring new categories of items to throw. He was unaware that various sets of rules and objectives known as “sports” had already been devised to accompany all the different balls he owned, so he was hell-bent on making it all up as he went along. He possessed all the passion and competitive spirit I had lacked—and it was exhausting. Nevertheless, I learned to accommodate his contrived and overly complicated versions of popular sports, counting the days until he was old enough to enroll in organized athletics.

Having absorbed the palpable excitement from countless play-off parties we had hosted during his young life, our son was also obsessed with brackets and tournaments. From the time he was old enough to copy written words, he had diligently completed his own “March Madness” bracket for all sixty eight teams in the NCAA basketball tournament. He also created imaginary tournaments for games that he played with his brother, populating his own version of a bracket with fictional teams he and his brother would take turns representing. When his parks-and-rec soccer league ended the season with a tournament, we expected him to spontaneously combust from the joy of just looking at a bracket that included the name of his own real-life soccer team. When we printed it off the league website, he held it in his hands like a precious metal, staring in speechless awe at something too good to be true. He then diligently updated the bracket with team names and scores as the tournament progressed, quietly envisioning championship glory with every new stroke of his pencil.

Sadly, the closer his team got, the more cautious we were as parents regarding his team’s chances for a championship win. As hapless NC State fans, we were jaded by the knowledge that our Wolfpack had not won a national championship in basketball since that infamous series of happy accidents in 1983. Unlike the ‘83 Wolfpack, however, our son’s soccer team had a third place ranking and every reason to expect a respectable tournament performance. But as often-disappointed fans, my husband and I were instinctively prepared for a let-down on behalf of our son. In our conversations with him, we played up the idea that he’d already experienced a winning season, and focused on friends gained and skills acquired as more important rewards than the pride of winning a championship. We explained that some of the greatest players in sports history never won a championship, but that failing to do so didn’t diminish their contribution to the game.

All doubts aside, our son’s team kept winning through the weekend and into the championship game, which was tied 2-2 at the end of regulation play. As the referee explained the rules for extra time, I realized that supporting youth sports might be too much for me if I was nearly having a stroke over my 6-year-old’s soccer game. Fortunately, the team’s top-scoring girl chipped in the game-winning goal with about sixty seconds left. When the last whistle finally blew, the assistant coach ran onto the field, presumably looking for his own son, but found ours first instead. He picked our son up and swung him around in a burst of Valvano-esque jubilation he later told us buoyed him into the next week. We had to admit, we shared in that feeling. As parents, we knew it was just a game, that there would be harder fights and bigger accomplishments to come in the little lives of our young kids. Nevertheless, their small success let us bask in that brand of inane exhilaration best amplified by sports, those fleeting moments when ordinary people exceed our most extraordinary expectations.

In the near future, there would be games lost where he’d fight back tears as he shook hands with his opponents. And there would be nights as we tucked him in, that he would relive goals he’d scored and analyze the strengths of his team’s best players. In both instances, in the sincere and innocent gaze of his wide brown eyes, he would ceaselessly inspire us with the tenacious resilience of youth and the type of hope that age has yet to trample.

If we learn through play as Piaget suggests, then through team sports, we toy with the highs and lows of life. We sample life’s unpredictability within the structured context of athletics and gain insight from outcomes both delicious and devastating. We learn to follow, contribute, and lead; to combat considerable odds and rebound in the face of defeat; to align ourselves with something larger than our individual ambitions. We lean on athletics as proof of extraordinary potential in ordinary people and yearn to unlock those qualities in real-life.

Contrary to my natural inclination, competition is now a central feature of my life. Whether it’s who can buckle their seat belt the fastest or who can eat more donuts before the box is empty, my days are spent moderating the endless series of contests through which my sons process their world. By now, I’ve facilitated the front-yard form of every sport from soccer to baseball to football, and I’ve perfected the art of orchestrating a tie. To solve the problem of a one-man offense, I frequently play rotating quarterback to both of my sons’ imaginary football teams. As I throw the ball to one son for a touchdown during his possession, then complete a pass to my other son during his, I often consider the irony of my uncoordinated youth and how seemingly insurmountable obstacles are best conquered by necessity. The same motivation that inspires a mediocre team to excel at just the right moment can also be the catalyst for overcoming inadequacies in basic hand-eye coordination. In sports, you “survive and advance” to remain in competition. In my case, by advancing my understanding of others’ need to compete, I’ve survived the experience of raising two active boys and confirmed my belief that you may never be the best, but you can always, always get better.


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