Crunch Time
This time of year is always a bit nostalgic for me. It’s the long, slow slide from spring into summer when the sun is just starting to soak into the grass, and the smell of spring in the air that makes you want to drive the long way home and keep the windows down. I guess it reminds me of innocence, and of the magic the season seemed to have in my youth.
When I was a child, this time of year meant it was almost time for my sibling and I to get tossed outside for the all-important “fresh air” my mother insisted we have. And now that I’m an adult, I see fewer and fewer kids enjoying one of the staples of that time — neighborhood pickup games.
It’s rare nowadays to see kids grab a ball and some sort of friends from down the road for a game with a minimum of adult supervision or oversight. Over the years, sports have become more and more organized and the habit of parents to let their children wander the neighborhood until dark dissipated. Much of this is for good reason, but it robs kids of the joys of running back home with a pack of their peers, basketballs in hand, as just as the ground starts to cool and the night bugs begin to waft through the air.
Sports can be so rigid — endless hours of repetitive training in an environment where your coach’s authority is eclipsed only by God’s. To be good at organized sports, kids jump into the pressure cooker younger and younger with the goal of beating the next up-and-comer — who started earliest, who trains hardest, whose schedule is the most jam-packed.
But the coaches and parents who drive organized sports can have much different goals than the players, and the organic nature of pickup games dissolves.
Don’t get me wrong. I have so much respect for competitive athletes — heck, I was one for nearly two decades. But there’s something about the lazy days of summer that makes me reminisce about soccer in the park with strangers where the score was abandoned in favor of making friends and kickball played in dusty fields where the only pressure we faced was to go when mom called us for dinner.
I always think there’s a special quality to this time of year, and you can see that reflected in the relaxed pickup games of our youth. No bench time, no drills, no lengthy explanations of strategy. Something about the simplicity of getting outside and moving with no express purpose other than to enjoy, to be, taps into the deepest part of who we are.
So this week when the spring day is slanting into a summer evening and the sun hasn’t quite dipped behind the horizon, grab a ball, hail some neighbors and find a patch of grass. And maybe, don’t keep score.
Shannen Talbot can be reached at [email protected].
Reader Comments(0)