From the moment you slip on your shin guards, grab your stick, and throw on your helmet in your freshman year of high school -- something changes. Before then, you considered yourself a friend, a son or daughter, a student, but in that moment, your identity changes. You become a high school athlete, a member of a community that, for the next four years, will be essential to your identity. But one day, four years later, you’ll wake up in your dorm room and realize that this part of your identity no longer exists -- rather, it remains a part of who you were.
It’s 7:00 a.m. and your alarm is blazing.
It’s 7:00 a.m. and it’s a time you haven’t seen since the last time you got out of bed to meticulously put on your two pairs of white game day socks, black spandex and the nylon uniform that so proudly boasted your hometown’s emblem.
It’s 7:00 a.m., but you’re getting ready to face the business that comes along with being a college student -- not the business that comes along with being a high school athlete.
It’s 3:00 in the afternoon and you’re staring down the clock on the wall like it’s going to give you all the answers in your life.
It’s 3:00 in the afternoon, a time you haven’t longed for like this since you knew 3:00 p.m. was the time you boarded the bus to the away game -- the time you claimed your spot in the second row on the right side of the bus. 3:00 p.m. -- the time you put on your right cleat first, lacing it so it would withstand the trials of an away game at your rival school. 3:00 p.m. -- the time you would thread your ear buds through your jersey, place them precisely in each ear, and blast that song. 3:00 -- the time the captains would roar, the time the coaches told you what needed to be done, the time you and your best friends would give each other the look, the kind of look that gave you reassurance that today would the day you’d be able to do it all.
It’s 3:00 in the afternoon, but you’re sitting in calculus attempting to grasp the hard principles of math and the harder principle that you’re not taking the field; you’re taking a quiz.
It’s 7:00 p.m., but you’re not surrounded by the pizza, pasta, and cookies that come along with team bonding. You’re not all wearing gray sweat outfits displaying your high school’s name, hair in a bun, and you’re certainly not daring each other to see how long the other one can go without shaving their legs.
It’s 7:00 p.m., and you’re sitting in your college dining hall, making small talk about the exhaustion that ensues after a hard day of class, how annoying it is that you have two exams tomorrow, and how you can’t believe the RA cited those people down the hall for alcohol.
At the end of the day you put your head on the pillow, stare at the ceiling and think to yourself how everyone was right, the four years of being a high school athlete would be the best and fastest four years of your life.
You don’t play sports, they play you. They work their way into your identity, your heart, your friends, your family, you.
So hold on tight, because one day you’ll wake up with nothing but the memories, the awards framed in your childhood bedroom, and your dirty cleats sitting in your hall closet.
