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| Photographer unknown, from Fort Worth Star-Telegram |
Whether I've developed credibility as a writer or not in the couple years since I started COAS or not, I did play competitive sports for a few years when I was younger. Those days are over, but the lessons they taught remain, and always will. And, like almost all athletes, the defeats my teams suffered taught us more than any victories ever did.
Between T-ball, basketball and soccer for the Fox Valley Park District, soccer and basketball for St. Paul's, and basketball for Aurora Christian, I played in a lot of games. My teams won our fair share, but we also lost plenty. And amongst those games were plenty of blowouts. I remember one season in Park District basketball where Nathaniel and I played together on a completely stacked team. We won our first two games by combined scores of 52-6 and 46-0 (how I remember these when I was like 10 at the time, I'll never know). And it's not like we kept the starters in the whole game. We had a 10-kid roster, and our coach rotated between two 5-man lineups over the course of the game. It's not like he was trying to run up the score; our team was just flat out better than everyone else.
I've been on the other side plenty of times too. My freshman year at Aurora Christian, I was one of about 10 or 11 guys. And we got our butts handed to us plenty of times. I remember in our first game we didn't score until midway through the third quarter. It was bad. But the other team didn't taunt us, and they did eventually call off the dogs and bring in the end of the bench. But we learned from it. Eventually, we got better as a team, and while we still weren't that great, we weren't that awful team that needed almost 20 minutes of game time to score.
All of this is a long-winded way of saying that, when I heard news coming out of the Dallas-Fort Worth area yesterday... I was offended.
