Written in spring 2017 for "Sportswriting," taught by Prof. Jon Readey at Brown University
People often write about how their sports triumphs taught them an important life lesson – how, through all the hard practices, physical pain, teamwork, and ultimate victories showed them something eye-opening about the world and how they fit into it. These pieces are often heartfelt and inspirational, and claim to demonstrate the true value of athletics in our society. This essay isn’t one of those. Instead, I’ll be taking you on a tour of the corruption, struggles, and general athletic ineptitude that plagued my short-lived basketball career, and how, even through enduring an experience that was pretty all-around horrible, I ended up in a place that, in some small way, helped me survive the perils of high school.
* * * * *
Recreational basketball in Melrose, Massachusetts during my childhood was a heavily flawed institution. Leagues existed for everyone from first graders to high school freshmen, and everybody played on Saturday, resulting in cramped court space and semi-frequent 8:00 AM a.m. tip-off times. The quality of refereeing was questionable at best, as were the mangy uniforms that got passed down year after year. But by far the most egregious facet was the method in by which the league held team selection drafts. In a typical structure, each coach picks one player per round, sometimes with the drafting order reversed each round to ensure an even more balanced distribution of talent.
But that made far too much sense for Melrose Recreational Basketball, no no no. In Melrose, the team that came in first the season previous picked their entire team before anybody else took a single player. The reigning runner-ups would then pick their 12 players, then third place, and so on and so forth. This meant that after the first season, whoever finished first would be able to easily maintain their top spot by retaining their best players and plucking the top talent from other squads as well. It’s like how big tech companies simply buy out any rising competitors, or how the Yankees simply buy out any expensive free agents; the rich get richer, and the upstarts hit a wall.
All of this made the very first season of rec basketball – first grade level – the most important, as the final standings that year would premore-determine the pecking order for each subsequent season. As it just so happens, in first grade I wound up on the last-placed team. Which, of course, meant that I wound up on the last-placed team every year. One year we were so bad that I, at the time a five-foot-nothing, sub-100-pound awkward mess who shot 20% from the field on a good day, was named team captain. In my six years of rec basketball, my team won a total of four games. And I remember every single one of them clear as day. Two came in the somewhat-balanced first grade year, before the higher finishers ripped away our two decently good players in the draft. One happened in third grade, when the perpetually-flopping Nate Horne got “injured” with thirty 30 seconds left and us up by one point as the clock operator forgot to stop the timer. Fifth grade brought one more after only three members of the opposing team showed up for the game, and had to play the match with our two worst players on loan filling out their lineup. (Even then, they still outscored us; we only won by a technical forfeit.)
Needless to say, by the time my final year of rec basketball – sixth grade – rolled around, I had lost pretty much any hope of playing on a competitive team. And I was right to, too; even with the top-level players leaving rec behind to play middle school ball, my team paled in comparison to every opponent. Game after game went by with us considering a loss by a single-digit margin a success, and a loss by less than 20 points “not that bad.” For some reason, our coach thought having us run sprints all practice would somehow make us score more than 13 points a game, or give up fewer than 35.
The consistently soul-crushing nature of my rec basketball career reached its pinnacle with my final game. It served as a microcosm for the entire experience, a fitting conclusion to a hapless era. Knowing this would likely be my final game – finally fed up, I didn’t plan on signing up for another year of this – and I managed to get myself hyped up. I’m gonna give them a performance, I told myself. (Of course, by “performance,” I meant “score more than one basket.”) As I strolled into the gym at 2:52 for our 3:00 start time, the sounds of squeaky shoes echoing throughout and the walls streaked with an aggressively bright red paint, my heart dropped: on the far right side of the gym, I spotted the unmistakable dandelion Tt-shirts my team wore during games; they were already running up and down the court. Unbeknownst to me or my parents, the game had been pushed up to 2:00, but my coach had failed to send out an email. I rushed over to our bench to see that, in a role reversal from our “win” the year previousbefore, this time we were the ones borrowing players from the other team. And the best part? We were only down by one with about twenty 20 seconds left – enough time to snatch a highly-coveted win. Even though it would technically go down in the books as a forfeit for us, the chance to actually outscore another team – even with their own players – seemed magical.
But I was missing it. As I got to the bench, my coach looked at me with surpriseI lied to my coach and said I had already warmed up and was ready to go in. “I’m ready, I can go in,” I lied, voice trembling. Coach Morris raised a single eyebrow. “I… I warmed up out in the hall!” (Another lie.) I shouldn’t have been allowed into the game according to the rules, since I hadn’t been there to check in at the start of the quarter, but the opposing coach didn’t care enough to protest. We got the ball back, still down one, with eight seconds left, and coach subbed me in for one of our loanees. Truth be told, my eyes were welling with tears from the knowledge that I had missed pretty much all of what was supposed to be the big finale of my basketball career. But I had one final play to make my mark, and I wanted to take it.
The only thing I remember more clearly about my basketball career than my four wins is how the final play of it went. We were inbounding the ball from the sideline in front of our bench, just ahead of the halfcourt line. I stood near the center circle; another player stood at the three-point line, with two underneath the hoop and one inbounding. The other team had elected to leave me free and to cover the areas within actual shooting distance of the hoop via a zone defense. The inbound pass came to me; before I could dribble, the inbounder – a third-grader who had forgotten to sign up for the league in time and was added to our squad because his brother was on the team – ran out uncovered, and I dumped the ball back to him. Almost immediately, he threw up a three-point from the top of the arc. The buzzer rang as the ball was in mid-flight. I clenched my teeth as it approached the basket… and then nothing. He had airballed. Time was up, we had lost in both the technical and literal sense, and my career was over. The sport that had beaten me down more than any other had managed to fit in one more twist of the knife. At this point, all of the childish frustration I had pent up – six years’ worth of anger over a game where you put an orange ball in a basket – over six years of a game where you put an orange ball in a basket released. I collapsed to the floor and wailed in a manner unfitting for a young child, much less the 12-year-old that I was. I sobbed through the post-game handshake and the entire ride home. Despondent in the back seat of my mom’s Ford Freestar, I told myself I was done with basketball forever. As it would turn out, my self-imposed retirement was a bit premature; my ventures into the world of basketball, and the lessons I learned them, weren’t quite finished yet.
Or so I thought.
* * * * *
One month after my final basketball game, I received an acceptance letter to Belmont Hill School. Five months after that, I was walking through the doors for my first day. The all-boys prep school just outside Cambridge, Massachusetts was a new world to me; all of a sudden I was surrounded by wealth, tradition, Vineyard Vines, boat shoes, and a level of academic rigor I had not been exposed to before. Belmont Hill was a school of some notoriety, with a history of consistently sending students to top-level universities and a reputation for strong athletic programs. The grassy campus devoted about half of its acreage to its fields and gymnasium, and the other half to its brick-based academic buildings. Part of the way Belmont Hill maintained its athletic fortitude was by requiring every boy at the school to play sports all year long, one for each season other than summer. For me, choosing a fall sport was easy enough; I was a decent soccer player, and was definitively not cut out for football or cross country, the only other two fall options.
When winter rolled around, however, the decision wasn’t as clear-cut. I couldn’t ski, so that was out. Hockey was a non-starter as well. I had been told by the middle school wrestling coach that I could be an asset due to my slender figure, but I had neither the muscles nor the willpower to roll around on the floor in hopes of pinning another boy to the ground. That left two sports: squash, new to me but with an intramural team where I could dip my toes, or basketball. Despite knowing that I likely wouldn’t make the basketball team (one of the few 7th-grade teams to have cuts), I decided to give the sport one last shot, for old times’ sake.
The first day of tryouts came just before Christmas break. I stepped into the gym, this one painted navy blue and maroon but with a ceiling and acoustics on par with that of Melrose’s, with my basketball under one arm and water squirt bottle in the other. I wore oversized soccer shorts (I didn’t want to invest in new basketball shorts if I didn’t need to) and clunky white New Balance sneakers. Some of my classmates also trying out definitely looked more prepared: ankle tape, sport-appropriate shorts, Nike swoosh tees, and shiny new sneakers. Belmont Hill wasn’t known as a big basketball school, but it seemed they were trying to change that as there were some strong players in my year. There were 17 of us at tryouts; the max roster size was 12. I looked around and counted who I might have a shot at beating; I was the second-shortest, and from what I knew about the others, probably the least athletically-inclined as well. In short, I was intimidated; before the first drill even began, my already faltering confidence was shrinking even more.
After a few minutes of us shooting around to warmup, Coach Brodie arrived. Coach Brodie was an older man who also worked at the school as an English teacher. He was exactly the kind of teacher and coach you imagine a near-retirement prep school faculty member to be: stern, blunt, and old-fashioned, with a firm belief in meritocracy. Outside of school, Coach Brodie was rumored to breed race horses, and students often gossiped about the small fortune he had amassed over the years. On this day, like almost every other one regardless of season, he sported a baseball cap atop his head, his Einstein-like gray tufts of hair pointing out from the sides. He also donned a gray tee, blue checkered shorts, white knee socks, white sneakers, and a whistle around his neck.
“As I’m sure you know, eventually we’ll have to cut this group down,” he told us. “But don’t worry about that for now. We’re going to start with some simple drills to get our footing.” OkayOK, I thought, that gives us some time. Our first drill was, as Coach Brodie promised, pretty straightforward: dribbling up and down the court, switching hands each lap. Easy enough. I managed to navigate the drill fairly well, even getting through a handful of left-handed dribbles (my weaker side) without incident. My friend Liam, however, visibly struggled. Vertically-challenged and lacking some coordination, Liam wasn’t exactly the prototype of a pro-caliber basketball player, but he at least had a good spirit about him. As it turns out, spirit alone doesn’t get you very far with Coach Brodie; mMidway through one lap, Coach Brodie pulled Liam aside and whispered in his ears for a few seconds. Liam nodded, turned, and walked out of the gym. Later that afternoon, Liam verified to us what we feared: he had been cut from the team, right there on the spot, minutes into the first drill of the first practice. Apparently, we did have to worry about that for now.
The rest of the tryouts went manageably well – I shot better than I usually do, played my typical brand of tight defense, and showed off my one true asset as an athlete: my hustle. Still, I didn’t expect to make the team; I was too short, too slow, and simply not as talented as most of the competition. Two days before cuts were scheduled, Coach Brodie came up to me during lunch and confirmed-without-confirming what I expected. “You know what’s a great sport, Michael?” he asked. “Squash! What a game. You ever think about trying it out?” At that point I knew the writing was on the wall. Still, I held out until the official cuts came out two days later, the day before Christmas break. Not exactly the present I had hoped for.
When break finally ended, I set out to find a way to fulfill my winter sports requirement. This scramble to find a new sport would eventually guide me towards one of the major cornerstones of my time at Belmont Hill. Again, the choice came down to squash or basketball, only this time the basketball was also an intramural program. Nervous and risk-aversive, I decided to go with intramural basketball at first; I only lasted a day. The program itself was underwhelming – basically, a half-hour of court time to play HORSE or knockout in between the middle school and Varsity/JV practices. The odd timing of the practice also meant I had to sit through a two-hour study hall before heading to practice, play basketball for a half hour, then rush back for another hour of study hall. I decided this was not how I wanted to spend the next two months, so I finally landed on going for intramural squash.
Squash, despite its odd name and fairly obscure nature, is actually a fairly simple game. It’s basically an altered version of racquetball; you have a racquet, a small rubber ball, and an enclosed court, as and two players take turns hitting the ball off the wall until one fails to properly hit the ball before it bounces twice. Because of this simplicity, I was able to pick up and play somewhat competitively (within the intramural squad) almost immediately. More importantly, though, it was damn fun. Squash is quick and often unpredictable; the ball bounces oddly all of the time, and every now and again a return will land perfectly on the edge of a wall or even a corner, and at that point it’s anybody’s guess where the ball will go. Moreover, a lot of my fellow non-athletic regular people friends had also settled on intramural squash as their winter sport of choice. We played a dumbed-down version of squash called “King of the Court,” consisting basically of rapid-fire one-point matches. If you won the point, you stayed; if not, you got knocked out until everyone in your court rotated through. It was one of the most enjoyable sports experiences I had had in a long time, and within just two days I felt like I had managed to actually find a place where I could fit in and enjoy my winter season.
But we couldn’t allow that to continue, could we?
After two days of intramural squash, me and a few other friends and I were told we needed to speak with the assistant AD athletic director – Mr. Murphy. Mr. Murphy was basically a taller, younger version of Coach Brodie; – he coached varsity basketball, had a stern demeanor about him, worse the same kind of eyeglasses as Coach Brodie, and didn’t mince words. As we waited in the hallway outside his office, a sinking feeling enveloped my stomach. We had noticed that the courts were a little over-filled, and we’d heard murmurs that they would have to trim the team down for safety reasons. All of us waiting had been late to join intramural squash, having tried out for other sports first. After over a half hour, Mr. Murphy came out into the hall to speak with us. “I’m really sorry guys, but there’s too many people on intramural squash right now. You’ll have to find something else.” Cut from intramural squash, I thought, incredulous. I just got cut from INTRAMURAL SQUASH. Just like after my last basketball game two years earlier, I couldn’t handle the disappointment and embarrassment. I had finally settled into something, and it was being taken away. Plus, who gets cut from intramural squash?!? I felt awful, but thankfully it was short-lived. The next day, the intramural squash coach did an about-face and decided to let us hang around after all.
From that day on, I relished every day of squash I had. I ended up playing it for all six of my years at Belmont Hill, never drawn in by another winter sport. Over time I improved my game, and the casual practices allowed me social time to solidify some of the most important friendships of my life. I never expected to end up with over a half-decade of squash experience, but I’m certainly glad that I did.
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