First published in the Tri Town Transcript Feb 26, 2019
By Esther C. Baird
Well, basketball season is almost over. It’s been four month plus a few days, but who’s counting? Thanksgiving and Christmas were forever ago, but our basketball season reaches even further back.
Two girls on two teams with two schedules. It’s been all consuming, but sometimes the most consuming things are the hardest to reflect upon.
“I need to write my column about basketball at least once this year,” I said to my fellow bleacher moms.
“Tell them about all the driving, about how we’re a regional school so our games are flung all over,” one said.
It’s true. But where was the plot line?
Last night, I drove to Winchendon. I’m pretty sure at one point I crossed the land bridge to Russia on my way there. Some of my friends were in the tropics posting February break pictures. I was driving, endlessly, in a wintery mix. It was a tough game but we proved ourselves to be formidable against a higher class team even if we didn’t clinch it in the end. When it was over, I chose the longest podcast I could find and drove home. I mean, that’s the whole story, beginning, middle and end. You’re all caught up now on that riveting story arc.
My girls chimed in.
“Tell them the story about the terrible ref, the one you nicknamed Fabio!”
“I can’t write about bad referees,” I replied. “Even if Fabio was the worst ref of all time, and I wanted to chop his flowing locks off with a hacksaw, it’s just not appropriate to complain. Plus what’s the story? Bad refs exist.”
But there are great referees who call clean and safe games, while managing to keep their hair under control, and they are wonderful. There’s no story there that parents haven’t been telling since dawn of time when the first rough play was overlooked. No one likes a whiner. No one likes Referee Fabio either… just saying.
“You could write about our season and how we made it to the championship even though it’s our first year in our new class,” said our older daughter.
She’s in ninth grade and plays varsity. She’s 5′11′′ and has ambitions of 6 feet, but so far all the avocados and steak in the world are not producing that final inch. This year she began getting mentioned in the town paper that covers our school.
My mother texted me, “you need to make a scrapbook for her!” My mother-in-law said, “you need to save those!”
My husband pulled out his high school senior year basketball scrapbook. It was full of photos and scoring sheets and little annotations he and his mom had written.
It told a great story. There was just one problem.
“Girls. I never filled out your baby books. The best I have is your baby calendars which came with pre-made stickers for your milestone. I myself, you may have noticed, have been writing a column for twelve plus years and only managed to scrapbook about six months of them. Good luck and godspeed on a basketball scrapbook.”
There was no story there. Trust me.
My youngest suggested I write about her first year of playing. “No one knew how I’d do, but I’m super aggressive and fierce!”
It’s true, she’d surprised us by coming out of the gate like a tornado on her sixth grade team. She had a way of setting her jaw that we called her “come at me bro” face. Frankly it was somewhat scary, but also awesome, given her otherwise sweet and artsy personality.
“But I mean, there’s no real middle to the story, sweetie. It was your first year. Maybe after a few seasons your toughness will form a plot-line.”
Every day for the last four months has been the same, with a slight upward trajectory that is not noticeable in the moment, but only when you look back and remember where you started.
It’s a story with wins, losses, laundry, carb loading, protein dinners, sheets of baked cookies and drives to practices with teenagers piled in cars sometimes silently lost in their phones, sometimes cracking up about the latest thing. It’s the story of bruises, blood, concussion scares, lost tempers (ahem) and the moments of beauty when teenagers of all ages are in the zone and can’t miss or make a mistake.
Last night my friend waved her arm across the gym. “This is the story. It’s the story of our life as sports parents. This is what we do.”
I laughed, “and the crazy thing is, we love it.”
End of story.