Steps
Step. Step. Ouch. Step. Step. Ouch. Step. Fast-step… Ouch.
So this is what it feels like to have your body betray you. This is what it feels like when your body finally stops putting up with all your mental gymnastics and quits. Quits like my brother when he’s losing a Monopoly game: enraged and without remorse. My body doesn’t give a shit that it only had to endure four more months, my senior year, one season.
“When was the last time you took time off?” I’m asked.
Time off? Time off? You expect me to take time off? If anything I should be practicing more. I need to shoot more, work on ball handling, increase my strength. Don’t get me started on my shoulder flexibility. I barely bench more than I did a year ago. I haven’t practiced that new defensive warm-up drill. I haven’t run the Kenyon stairs this year, or lifted in three days.
And you expect me to take time off?
Let’s talk time on.
My time on is the 6am wake-up to sprint a mile and get in a lift before taking hundreds of shots and working on abs (because of course I need abs). My time on is the twice-a-day treks to the gym because that’s what’s needed to push my body to its physical limits, to be in peak performance shape, to be athletic.
The problem is I am not athletic.
My mother is 4’11”, generously. One of my brothers has never exercised a day in his life. The other stands lonely in right field, and my cousins chant “we don’t do sports” while playing cards around the Thanksgiving day table. I am not athletic. Not a bone in my body was destined for this sport, for any other.
I am not tall. I am not lean. I don’t have a wingspan longer than my height or fingers shaped to the curve of a basketball. I don’t run fast. I don’t jump high.
I love men. Tall men. Athletic men. Men basketball players — particularly NBA players — because they are everything that I am not. Naturally athletic and monstrously tall, their wingspans stretch past their often lanky frames with waists and legs so skinny I’m fascinated that they don’t snap when they re-enter the atmosphere. Yet they’re strong and muscular despite their fragile first appearances. They’re unstoppable in the paint. They make the ball seem like a grapefruit, sail from the three point line in one graceful stride, and slam it through the net like child’s play.
They are men. They project ease and confidence and natural ability. And that makes me feel unworthy. Imperfect. Not enough.
It is not easy. The 6am treks, the practices, the triple day workouts are not easy. Eating right isn’t easy. A long weekend trip on a bus when I have school work to complete and heartbreaks to cry about isn’t easy. It’s a sacrifice to my academic and personal lives. It’s a grind, work that I have to constantly maintain.
I used to thrive on the 6am treks. The perfect diet — sugar free, dairy free, gluten free, alcohol free. The perfect sleep: in bed by 10pm so I could get a full eight hours. In my “spare” time I completed school work, added extracurriculars for my resume, applied to jobs. While I was being perfect for my athletic career, other parts of my life were also calling for my attention — my perfection.
My body has put up with the bullshit. It has thrived on that perfect. It has run its fastest, has stayed its leanest, and has radiated healthiness.
It’s been my perfection.
High school ball was different. It was entirely a choice. I could’ve quit whenever I wanted to. Sometimes I thought about it, threatened it even. Wasn’t that the big joke of my senior year of high school basketball: “Has Rachel threatened to quit yet this week?” Yet I would always return to the court, because that’s where my friends were, that’s where I had fun, and it’s where I wanted to be. I loved playing, and I was good at it. Our team kicked ass. It was work, but easy and natural work.
I hated the recruitment process, when suddenly the game I loved became a spectacle, and I the entertainer. Suddenly I wasn’t good enough or fast enough or strong enough or outgoing enough. My emails to coaches didn’t hold the same weight as my teammates’ calls and visits. Why, you ask? I was indifferent to whether I’d ever play again.
After my senior high school season, I thought I was done. No spring ball — AAU teams shut down once everyone committed to college programs, and my friends left in July and August to start their D1/D2 programs. I had applied to Middlebury, not even considering basketball, and knew that’s where I’d be starting in the fall. I had talked to the coach, she had come to see me play once, but her feedback and interest in me seemed vague. I hadn’t heard anything from her since February, and it was August before I knew it. I sensed that I didn’t have a chance for the basketball team. I shrugged it off.
I was done. Retired by choice.
Two weeks before the first day of freshman orientation, the Middlebury assistant coach reached out to me:
“I hope this email finds you well and enjoying your last couple weeks of summer! My name is Coach Turner and I am the Assistant Women’s Basketball Coach at Middlebury College. I just wanted to reach out, introduce myself, and let you know that I am really looking forward to working with you this upcoming season. Coach Pecsok spoke very highly of you last season and Coach KJ is very excited about having you at Middlebury!”
What?
This email taught me a few things. One, Middlebury had hired a new coach? Two, I had a spot on the team if I wanted it.
I was flattered. The former coach saw one boring New Hampshire high school game in which we won by so much that I hardly played, and yet she had been so inspired (I told myself) by my game, that she had passed my name to the new coach.
Really?
I opened the email at my kitchen counter, on one of the tall stools where I always sit at because someone in my family is always passing through. Luckily, my mother was within ear shot when I told her I had gotten an email from the Middlebury coach, and it looks like I had a spot to play on the team.
My mother turned around just one step before she passed around the corner. She looked back at me quizzically:
Mother: “You mean, you’re being allowed to try out?”
Me: “I guess? She didn’t say there would be a try out process…”
Mother: “Huh. Well. Is it something you want to do?”
Me: “I guess?”
That was the conversation that transformed a questionable possibility into a daily commitment that would impact the next four years of my life. Could I have said no? Sure. I could’ve emailed the coach back and said, “Hey, sorry. I’m not interested in playing basketball anymore and want to focus on my academic pursuits, blah blah.” Maybe that’s what I was thinking. Maybe I didn’t really want to play. On the other hand: there’s no need to burn bridges, I thought. I might as well get to campus, get a feel for it, and decide later.
I remembered rolling into campus, those first days of orientation. I met my roommate first, and felt comforted when I could introduce myself the same way as I had for years: “Hi, I’m Rachel. I play basketball.” Being able to keep that piece of my identity with me as I transitioned into college life was so comforting. Suddenly I was meeting the girl down the hall, who was also a basketball player, who was living with another basketball player. I had connections at a time when I needed connections.
The basketball girls down the hall said there were four of us basketball freshman, or was it five? We knew their names and sought them out. I met the fourth in Wilson, waving to her from across the room over hundreds of faces, recognizing her from Facebook pictures. Another connection.
I was part of something.
When my classmates were wandering around campus looking like lost freshman, the four or five of us strolled to the senior houses and met the rest of the team. We were welcomed with hugs and smiles and excitement. We heard stories as the older girls on the team were catching each other up on their respective summers, and plans were made to start playing pick-up the next week.
I was connected to something, and it felt like that “something” of high school: a group of great friends that was also a team. I remembered the jokes in the locker room, our stops at Burger King on the way home from games, and wearing our jerseys around school on game days.
I kept taking steps and those steps became a conveyor belt of sorts, but one that was different than that of high school. It moved faster and farther. And I helped drive it forward.
That first year was a whirlwind, focused on figuring out a new place with new people. My team was a familiar handhold that I could fall back on when the rest of the year was chaotic, as is typical of freshmen years.
Looking back, it wasn’t much of a conscious choice; college basketball was simply moving faster than I had expected, and I already had one foot on the conveyer belt. So I kept stepping, afraid of what might happen if I fell off.
I thought, by choosing Middlebury, that I had “blazed my own path” — this is a direct quote from my college application essay. Yet my life was once again pre-destined for me, steps on a conveyor belt moving faster, promising more. A stronger group of friends, a stronger identity, more jobs, more prestige, more privileges. Safety.
I pushed the program as much as it pushed me.
The basketball program sucked when I arrived at Middlebury. That first year, we celebrated each win like it was the conference championship, because each victory was a mixture of pure luck and an extreme will to win. The year was defined by how few we were. Pick-up was often 3v3 or 4v4 half court. We didn’t have enough players to even practice properly, but we shrugged it off. At practice, we worked hard and competed. It wasn’t enough — I wanted more.
When we lost that first round of playoffs, losing to our opponent by thirty on the road, I had already committed wholeheartedly to the program, to the team. My Promise Land was wins: regular season upsets and conference titles and an NCAA tournament bid. The Promise Land was healthiness, being in peak physical shape, strong and fast and lean. Lastly, it was about me — with a narrative. Leading. Leading a program from the bottom rung to the top.
I started putting in the extra work, lifts, shots, and runs in the off-season. I was the poster-child for Middlebury women’s basketball. I advertised it: “This is what Middlebury Women’s Basketball looks like. We work hard and then we win.”
The next season, my sophomore season, was tougher because half our team had graduated. We didn’t have rising seniors. Concussions and broken discs and torn ACLs in our rising junior class left us with just underclassman on the team that year. Our new freshman had something that had previously been missing from our program: talent — a ton of talent. Yet with the loss of our seniors, we had lost any semblance of experience, and we were left, a bunch of twenty-year-olds on a path toward who-knows-what.
Meanwhile, I was pushing forward, finding my voice as a leader, encouraging extra work, motivating us on and off the court. Playing more.
The full force of my impact wouldn’t happen until the next fall, in the preseason of my junior year. Another class of talented freshman meant our team could compete, if we had the right mentality. Finally, we had the right mentality. We were all putting in the work, the extra drills, the extra shots. We wanted to win, and we were working to get there.
We also had a lot of freshman. A lot of freshman and no seniors. We lost too many games that shouldn’t have been lost.
We weren’t there yet.
I stayed with it, with the other fourteen girls on the team. We had one more chance together; with no graduating seniors, we would all return for one last season, my senior year. Hence a continuation of those 6am treks to the gym for lifts and sprints and shots. Hence the continuous need to be perfect and athletic. Hence my injury. (It’s not even a good injury. Shin splints are just annoying. Part of me wishes I had been forced out with something more significant like an ACL, as terrible as that sounds. Instead I’m sidelined with just an ugly MRI and too much pain when I jump).
Finally, my senior year, we were good. Really good.
I was limping only sometimes, mostly when it was cold and my muscles were tight. I had just been told I had been playing on a stress fracture for a few months, as confirmed by the school doctor. I had just learned that there was really no scenario in which I could have finished playing my senior season. I was transformed from a player into a an end-of-the bench cheerleader. It was a new role, foisted upon me by bad luck. The team kept practicing, and I was still there, watching, waiting. The conveyor belt moved forward. It didn’t need me to drive it anymore.
Sitting on the sideline during practice, watching the girls work, and seeing them put in extra work after practice, I saw myself out there. I saw the mentality that I have driven into this program and this team. I believed we could succeed, meet those goals we set for ourselves four seasons ago. Playoff wins and a tournament bid. We deserved it, we had earned it. That was the narrative.
I was wrong. This wasn’t a movie. We didn’t succeed. Like the past three years before us, we lost our first game of playoffs, and with it a well-deserved tournament bid.
I can no longer introduce myself: ““Hi, I’m Rachel. I play basketball.” It feels like an assembly line worker just pushed the red “emergency stop”. It’s over. Full stop.
I still haven’t processed the failure. It’s still too fresh. Only a few days old.
I’ve spent the past few nights lying in my bed, listening to sad songs, and questioning everything. Was it worth it? Was it worth this intense pressure to be perfect? To fulfill the narrative? To work so hard and to give so much and then to lose? What am I left with, now that it’s all over?
It’s an isolating sadness. I stare into space a lot with regret. I regret not working harder, not pushing my teammates forward faster and further. I regret focusing too much on school work, when I could have been watching game film. I regret anything that ever felt like a distraction, a distraction when I could’ve been taking steps.
I’m not taking steps any more. I’m here. Going nowhere.
I regret. Then I question my regret.
I can’t lie in my bed for long. Because — despite it all: injury, loss, retirement. — I still get texts from my team. And I care.
We’re here in this moment. In this grief. Together. Getting through it. Living.
Step by step.
