Everyone has moments in life when you feel the passage of time, when you realize you’re a long way from where you once were. I had one this week when my oldest son played his very last high school lacrosse game. I actually didn’t make this one in person, since it was about an hour away, but I did watch the live stream and saw his last home game in person just a few days prior. This final game was in the playoffs, a game they expected to lose and did convincingly, so the ending came with no big surprise.
To be clear, my kid largely rides the bench – and I say that will full admiration. He only picked up lacrosse in his sophomore year, and it served as a lifeline when he got cut from soccer to start his junior year. To his credit, the kid stuck with lacrosse when it could have been easy to pack it up and throw a pity party, and after getting some decent minutes on JV as a junior, as a senior on varsity he was mainly on mop up duty at the end of lobsided games. But he stuck with it when a whole lot of other kids didn’t. And, and this is important, he was a team favorite and got probably the biggest ovation of the year when he scored his one goal of the season at the end of a blowout win. As he said, he knows his job, and I can proudly say he did it well.
And with that, his career in organized youth sports is official over. It started, like it does for many kids, with youth soccer at age five, then meandered through a series of club teams, junior high, and eventually high school sports. There was track, baseball, basketball, cross country, and soccer and lacrosse. And as it does for all but the exceptional and dedicated few who continue in college, that period comes to a close. As we know, time passes.
When you hit a moment like that, it’s nearly impossible not to try a put some meaning to it all, everything that happened on the fields and courts over the past 13 years. The easy mark is that you’ll have a lot fewer things to do on weekends and after school, when you figure out how to leave work on Tuesdays and Thursdays by 4 to make it to the bleachers by gametime. And even though you spent a lot of time complaining about weekend drives to Philly or Westchester or why they would play a soccer game in 40-degree rain, it’s not hard to realize you’re going to miss it a lot. Probably more than they will.
But beyond the personal, after all that time and, well let’s face it, money, what did it all mean. And was it all worth it? It’s a loaded question, because any answer is filtered through the context of life as parents and kids, where you don’t so much make decisions but rather try to keep the train on the tracks without causing too much damage. For a lot of us parents, sports was a well-worn cart path complete with smooth straightaways and a few wrong turns. But at no point were we ever breaking new ground. So was it worth it to play 13 years of sports, time that could have been spent on other things, good and bad, or on nothing at all.
It's impossible for me to give a coherent answer. But I’ll say this. Sports brought our son, and in turn our family, some great highs and a decent number of lows. He learned to not to quit, evidenced by sticking around for senior lacrosse, and how to be somewhere on time every day – even if that wasn’t homeroom. He made a ton of friends and lead a bunch of sideline cheers. All that plus a lot of exercise, something I hope carries over into adulthood. Over all, I’d say not bad.
My kid ended his organized sports career on the field, as the coach made sure he got in the game for the last few minutes as a senior. The game was effectively over, but he gave a lot of hustle until the final whistle, even fielding a tough pass downfield. He seemed happy, far more content in playing the game than worried about the season ending. It may not have seemed like much, but I couldn’t have been more proud. And I could feel, all at once, the passage of time.
Keith Strudler is the Dean of the School of Communication and Media at Montclair State University. You can follow him at @KeithStrudler.
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