Lately my social media timelines have been full to the brim of women's basketball, and I'm like 90% sure March Madness ended this past weekend, so to celebrate I'm going to outline my not-so-brief history of sports. Now, I am not a sports gay. I was raised in a sports household, where the Red Sox and the Patriots were predictors of my father's and brother's moods, where if a Boston sports team was playing, it was on one TV or another in my house. I did not share the enthusiasm for sports as many of my fellow Bostonians. I would watch games with my dad just to spend time with him sometimes, but I only rooted for the Red Sox because my dad did. (He didn't bat an eye when I came out to him but he DID get upset when I bought a Yankees hat when I first moved to New York.) I just...never got the sports bug. When I meet men now (an activity I do my best to avoid) and they find out I'm from Boston, they often ask if I'm a Red Sox fan. My canned response has become, "I was raised a Red Sox fan, but I'm no longer practicing."
But the truth is, I was never very passionate in the first place; when the Red Sox "reversed the curse" in 2004 and won their first World Series in 86 years, my high school declared school optional the day of the parade. I went to school that day. (It was one of the most fun days of high school. There were like 5 people in each class and we got extra credit for being there, it was great.)
All that said, I did play a few sports growing up, so I thought I'd go through some of them with you, just for fun.
Soccer
I played soccer for a few years from ages like 4-8. Up until last year I would have sworn I played for one or two years max, but I found photo evidence I played for at least four years. I didn't love it. It was a lot of running and kicking, things I'm not a fan of. I played "defense" which means I was one of the two kids planted at the corner of the white chalk box around the soccer goal. (I don't think this position exists in grown-up soccer. No one but the goalie seems posted up in those games.) The last line of defense before the goalie. Our team spent a lot of time on the other half of the pitch though, so I would often just...sit down. I would play with the chalky grass and daydream until I saw the blur of tiny feet coming back to our side of the field. I don't remember much about practices except that my one teammate once wore one of the little orange cones on his head so we called him, creatively, Conehead for the rest of the season.
One year, our team made it to the championship and my coach took me and my friend aside and told us that the way we could help them win is by cheering really loudly from the sidelines. That sounded just fine to me, but when our parents caught wind of it, they were none too pleased. Our parents' very valid point is that we were just little kids and we were all supposed to have equal playing time because it was an intramural team not a competitive one. Also, apparently it was insulting to be told "our best shot at winning is if you don't play" but frankly I agreed. I don't remember if that was the instigating incident that got me out of having to play soccer or if I was just asked between seasons one year if I wanted to sign up again and I said no, but either way that ended that.
Ice Skating
Maybe I should have waited until I was in Boston to write this so I could ask my parents more questions about these younger years but maybe also it's better if I just tell you what I remember. Because I don't remember how old I was or why I signed up (or was signed up) for ice skating, but I did exactly one ice skating season's worth of classes. I was also not great at this. I remember so distinctly the sweaty smell of the rink, the time and energy it took to lace up the skates, the wobbly feeling of trying to balance on the skates, the cold hard ice as I fell butt-first over and over again, and the hot chocolate I'd get when practice was over. I also distinctly remember that during the very last class I was so proud of myself because I had finally gone the whole day without falling one single time...and then the teacher had us all sit down on the ice to watch a skating performance. That was the beginning and the end of my ice skating career; I still don't consider myself able to ice skate to this day. (Or roller skate, for that matter.) I blame my permanent turnout.
Cheerleading
I didn't include dancing on this list because I'm not sure it counts as a sport, and also since I danced from ages 2-18, it would have to be a post all on its own. That said, I do consider cheerleading a sport, even though it's dancing's uptight, really intense cousin. I was a cheerleader for the Pop-Warner football team (the Huskies...my uniform had a cute doggy on it!) for a few years. I remember feeling very young on that team. I think because the girls I knew the best were my mother's best friends' kids who were all a year older than me (and sometimes treated that fact like they were a whole generation older than me) or if it was just how my shyness was manifesting but I was very intimidated by that whole situation. It is, however, where I learned enough about football to be able to watch the Superbowl with friends or Patriots games with my dad and not have to ask too many stupid questions. While on that team, I took exactly one gymnastics class; it was a six-week intensive where we were going to learn how to back handspring. I only went to the first four classes, so I could do a roundoff and a backbend, but I sure couldn't put the two together. I don't remember why I stopped cheering in this league in particular; it's very possible it got to the age where you got cut if you weren't good enough (read: couldn't do a back handspring) and I didn't make the team. Or maybe the schedule interfered with dance classes. I don't remember, clearly I wasn't too pressed about it either way.
I went to the same elementary school from Kindergarten through 8th grade, and at that school there were exactly two sports you could participate in as a girl, and only starting in 4th grade. You could be a cheerleader, and/or you could play basketball. There were only 12-16 girls in our grade in any given year, so most of us did both. I was great at the cheering and dancing portion of cheerleading. I was also a really good base and backspot for stunts. I had strong legs and a strong motivation to catch my friends as they fell. I continued to be not good at tumbling. I could do a cartwheel in a pinch but honestly even somersaulting in a straight line was a bit of a crapshoot. My small Catholic school was also more risk-averse with time, so in our last year we weren't even allowed to do full stunts, only half. But we had fun. And on Saturdays, after we would cheer for the boys' basketball team, we would all sprint to the bathroom and change into our basketball uniforms.
Basketball
I'm sure this will come as a shock, but I also wasn't very good at basketball. Despite my strong dancer legs, my weak, asthmatic lungs meant running was far from my strong suit. Basketball is also very overstimulating! You're running around with girls on all sides of you, balls whipping through the air, you have to make split second decisions and also have the hand-eye coordination to throw a ball across the room and into a hoop that is barely bigger than the ball you're throwing?! All while people are screaming in a very echoey room! We had a lot of fun as a team but I was simply not good at it. The only thing I was good at (and I was VERY good at it) was setting picks, so that was our secret weapon. Our point guard would get the ball and give me the signal and I would go full statue mode. She would dribble past me, tight to one side, and I would stay firmly planted so the girl chasing her would slam into me and our point guard would have a clear path to the basket. In our last season when the coach was handing out awards, I got a special award that was "best pick setter" that wasn't a trophy or a medal, it was a strange plastic tree that I swear Coach just grabbed at the gas station or something because he wanted to give me something last minute. It made me laugh.
Softball
I think I was okay at softball? To be clear, I definitely wasn't GOOD at softball. But I think I was passable. Again, I wasn't a strong runner, but there is significantly less running in softball than in basketball or soccer. The first few years I played (the "minor league") I was on a team called the Lightning and my dad was the assistant coach. I learned a lot during those years, and we had a lot of fun. I didn't know it at the time but in retrospect I absolutely had a crush on the coach's daughter, our star pitcher; once I went over her house and we sat on her bean bag chairs and watched Indiana Jones and my heart was in my throat the entire time. Anyway, my batting average, if anyone had been keeping track, would have been hilarious. Because I very rarely struck out - in fact, I think I struck out less than five times in my entire softball career - but I also rarely got a hit. Occasionally I would hit a pop fly someone easily caught, or just a grounder that was scooped up faster than I could get to first base. More often than not I walked. I was very good at not swinging the bat if I didn't like the pitch. Also I am quasi-ambidextrous so my coach sometimes would make me swing left-handed just to psych the other team out.
When I aged up to the majors, my team was called the Mudhens and we were legitimately good. I still was mediocre at best, but the team itself was good, which could be stressful. I was still very much a walker, and my teammates would tease me because I had what they called a "dancers slide." Instead of going into a full, on-your-back slide, I did more of a sliding lunge. (My coach would call me out every time but couldn't get bad because it worked.) I was pretty good at catching the ball, but I was not always as good at throwing it. But I liked playing softball the most of all the sports I played (except dancing) because my dad was really into it and I liked practicing with him and my Papa Leo came to see me play and there was a significant portion of time I could not be playing but just be cheering on my teammates and eating sunflower seeds. I did once get popped in the eye by a practice pitch so hard I still have a scar from it but I played in the game that day because it takes more than a pair of broken glasses and bleeding from the eye to get me to let my team down.
All of these sports ended when I went to high school. I had done the week of cheer camp they had before tryouts but I don't even think I made it all the way to tryouts before I realized the whole not-tumbling thing was going to be a non-starter, which was fine by me. It also turned out that my school (a "college prep" school) only allowed students to participate in one "sport" per "season" to try to emphasize a focus on education, and drama was considered a "sport" for this particular rule, and dancing/theater was where my heart was. This rule also kept me from trying out for volleyball, which is for the best since I only wanted to play because I had a crush on my friend who was on the team. (It also meant I got a varsity letter, if you can believe it.)
As an adult, I only care about sports insofar as the people around me care about them. I had Notre Dame and the Lady Vols going as far as I could get them to go in my just-for-fun women's basketball March Madness bracket because they're my friends' Bridget and Heather's favorite teams. I did get really into women's soccer that one time in 2019 when the USWNT was the 23 best friends that anyone could have. I was then devastated to find out that actually those 23 best friends play on different teams for most of the year, and would also the USWNT wouldn't even be the same in the next World Cup. How am I supposed to enjoy this TV show if they keep recasting the main characters??? It's chaos! So now I just enjoy soccer via my friends, aka reading their tweets about gay drama. Of which there is plenty.
So while I am not a sports gay, I don't HATE sports. I just don't care about sports. But not in a "ugh I don't care" way, in a "i am genuinely apathetic to this thing" way. It's just not how I want to spend my time when I’m alone. That said, I'm more than happy to watch a game with friends or even go to a (cheap enough) game. Once my friend really wanted to go to a Brooklyn Nets game, so I went. I was inside my sweatshirt with stress because of how close the game was in the end, I developed a crush on the lady referee, I had a great time! I know enough about sports to make them fun for myself to make my friends happy if that's what's happening. It's just not my go-to diversion.
I am genuinely happy for my friends who wake up at 3am to watch an international soccer game or who get riled up about women's basketball or who live for WrestleMania or unironically enjoy the actual game portions of the Superbowl. Just like they are happy for me when I get to play D&D or go see Broadway shows that they have no interest in seeing. And I think that's something that's missing in the way a lot of men experience fandom, specifically sports fandom: the mutual respect for differences in opinions. But that's an essay for another day.