20 years later, here’s what I learned from high school sports

We celebrated my 20th high school reunion this year.

It was a small gathering, but a good gathering. I hope the 25 will be bigger and better.

With high school reunions comes nostalgia, both good and bad. You’re one mental misstep away from being plagued by old grudges and fears and discovering that there’s an 18-year-old in your head who hasn’t evolved. But done right, nothing makes you smile like reminiscing about experiences shared with the only people who can unlock old memories and rekindle inside jokes.

As the calendar prepares to move into a new year, I reflect more on those high school years and what I learned from them.

I always think about my years playing for the Western Harnett Eagles – four years of basketball (including one injury season) and one “sure, why not?” final year experience with tennis.

It was not an illustrious career.

My joke about running when I started covering high school sports was that I was an unofficial NC record holder in two sports. No one will ever have a higher free throw percentage (2 for 2, thanks for asking) and no one will ever win fewer singles matches (0 for anything, I’ve never counted them).

If I haven’t gotten a scholarship, if I’ve never been featured in a news article or clip, if I’ve never had a mixtape, if I’ve never won a championship, if I don’t ‘ve never had this feeling of invincibility after a match… winner over a rival, what exactly did I came out of high school sports, you ask?

I learned to be intentional.

The fear of being cut has always been present in basketball, and so just being on the freshman team or JV team was good enough for me. But as the high school hourglass filled to the bottom, operating out of fear wasn’t going to make my senior year special. If there are things you want in life, you have to go for them, and it was the first time I faced this truth.

I learned that hard work pays off, even if no one else notices.

Off-season work required discipline and work ethic. I got better, but that didn’t translate into more playing time. But I’m sure I didn’t stop, and that will always mean something to me, regardless of context.

I learned to make the best of any situation.

My two sports were diametrically opposed situations. I basically learned tennis at tryouts and was an immediate starter – the fifth best player on a winless team. In basketball, it was more like being the 14th best player on a 15-person team — but it was a solid program, always winning at least two-thirds of its games and making the playoffs. Of course, it would have been cool if I could have both started and been part of a good team, but no situation is ever perfect. I always try as much as possible to approach things with a glass-half-full outlook.

I learned the importance of relationships.

For four years, my basketball teammates and I sweated through practices, off-season workouts, team camps, and then one day we were on a bus going home and our careers were over. I couldn’t handle all my emotions. It was so abrupt. There were no more games to play. I wasn’t ready to say goodbye. So I signed up for tennis because I needed a few extra bus rides with friends to matches, even though those bus rides were a lot less serious. I still don’t like goodbyes, but I appreciate them more than ever now because of how “quickly” it was taken away.

I learned that leadership must be bold.

No need to go into great detail, but my last year of basketball should have ended better. This is not the case because of internal conflicts that ultimately erupted at the wrong time. Sometimes you learn things through negative examples as well as positive ones, and there was a brief moment where a lack of leadership early in the season cost us dearly later. This truth has only been more pronounced as I have gotten older: You must confront conflict head-on as soon as it arises.

I learned the importance of positivity on others.

There was a guy on the tennis team that the others didn’t like to play with. He would mess up at the wrong time and they would yell at him and he would fight back and then he would start playing worse because he was angry, which would make the other player yell at him even more. Our coach, in a genius move, paired us up. I didn’t yell at him. I would tell him things like “good shot” when he hit one. We began to feed off each other’s positive energy. My coach told me, “No one has ever encouraged him before.” So, by the end of the year, we were better together than apart, and we became a tough doubles team (we even won a match!). It’s not that I never told him to concentrate, or that I needed to rein him in some other way. But it’s the purest lesson I’ve ever been a part of: our words matter a lot.

I learned the importance of being a good teammate.

My only superlatives in high school were awards from my peers, and that’s more than fair. When my coach announced me as the winner of the “Best Teammate” award at our end-of-year banquet, nothing else mattered. I didn’t know we had a price for this. The coach said he asked the team one by one and I was unanimous, so there was no reason to ask me, that’s how it was kept secret. I was very comforted to know that I had the respect of my teammates after everything we had been through.

But the truth is, I’m not done being a teammate. We will always have teammates. We won’t get on a bus together or drive down the highway together like we used to, but we will always be part of something bigger than ourselves and we will always need others. In life, you want good teammates and you would like to be someone else’s good teammate.

…20 years later…

These lessons and stories are fresher than ever for me, because you can never completely detach yourself from your own school years while working on them. I returned to high school, this time as a teacher, in 2018.

Sometimes I share some of these stories with my own students. Maybe they’ll get something out of it. Or maybe they’re forging their own path through high school athletics, and they’ll come to the same conclusions on their own.

They won’t be putting my name on any of the courts at Western Harnett anytime soon. If I didn’t write about high school sports, my name would be completely forgotten.

But the lessons learned are the ones that have made me a better (but still very imperfect) husband, father, teacher, colleague, and friend.

You asked what exactly I learned from sports in high school?

You look at him.