My Kids Will Never Play Club Sports and Other Lies I’ve Told Myself
By Katie Blackburn
@katiemblackburn
“…She can’t explain why she cares about sports, because she’s learned that if you have to ask the question, you simply wouldn’t understand her answer.”
-Beartown, Frederick Backman
***
“Okay, are you ready, Katie?”
“Ready? For what?” I ask, eyes still damp and swollen from all the tears I just spent the last hour crying.
Allison meets my eyes and gently puts her hand on mine. “Are you ready to keep going?”
***
“Mom, can I try out for a club volleyball team?” my oldest daughter asks me, after playing exactly one six-week session of recreational volleyball.
“No.” This is not a discussion I can even entertain.
“Moooommmm, why not?”
“Honey, there are six kids in this family and one of me,” I tell her and then pause, hoping I don’t have to go further into detail as to why this idea is absurd.
“Even if you made the team, how would we afford it? How would I get you to practice a few days a week with your brother’s therapy? What if the team travels? I can’t bring all of your siblings on the road, and I cannot ask your grandparents to watch them all every weekend. I’m sorry, there is no way we can pull this off.”
I tell her the truth apologetically, and sympathetically, because I played competitive sports my entire life and I know how great they can be—for some kids and some families. But we are not that family right now.
For a moment, I think she gets it, she’s nodding in agreement. I have been divorced less than one year, and along with that came some major life changes for everyone, and it just doesn’t make sense to commit to something this big and expensive and unknown.
But my daughter has never, not once in her life, given up the fight for something she wants that easily.
“Mom, please, just let me try out, for the experience!” she pleads.
I should stick to my guns here, I know. But she really, really wants to try. And I want to raise kids who are not afraid to try. And to be honest, I’m 95% sure she won’t make the team with such little playing experience anyway, so maybe this could be a win-win: my daughter gets the chance to do something new and I still get the outcome I want—that she is not playing club sports.
I deliberate for an hour or so, and then finally tell my daughter, “Okay. For the experience.”
(You already know how this is going to end up.)
My attitude is poor from the beginning, because the registration is confusing and Excuse me what? There is a tryout fee? Listen, I’m a millennial, but it wasn’t that long ago that I tried out for a sport, and you just showed up at the park, got a number, and did your best. Now we have to pay someone for this? Okay, fine, whatever. We are doing this for the experience.
We arrive at tryouts, me with particularly low expectations, and my daughter, who knows no one else there. It’s always a bit nerve-wracking to watch your child in a situation where she has to turn on her courage completely by herself, but she does. She’s passing the volleyball back and forth with someone within minutes. From my vantage point in the balcony above the gym, I look down at the floor at her bravery and just keep thinking, no matter how this tryout goes, it is so, so good to do things every once in a while that scare you, and pull you out of your comfort zone. It builds a muscle she’ll need her whole life.
She’s holding her own well enough during the tryout. My daughter only tried this sport out for the first time a few weeks ago, and she’s just here for the experience, so mostly I’m thinking about how I’ll cheer her up with frozen yogurt on the way home after she doesn’t make it.
Except she does make it.
“Mom! Mom! Mom! Mom! Mommmmm!” she yells, giddily running over to me with a paper in her hand inviting her to join the team. “Mom, I made it!” She has tears in her eyes, and jumps into my arms for an embrace. At this moment, I am so proud of her and so happy for her and also equally thinking, oh shit.
I find it very clever of the club sport organizers to invite our children to join the team and then, at that perfect moment of delirious joy and excitement, attach a small packet of information—behind the letter that is congratulating our kids on being awesome—with the heading “Parent Information.” They wait until we are weak with pride for our child to hit us with the financials (a frustrating, but well-executed practice I have to say, if you're the club owner). Before we even leave the parking lot I scan the letter looking for the number I’ve been dreading since she asked to do this: the monthly club fees.
And it’s silly, y’all. Really it is. Clubs expect not an insignificant amount of money to teach your daughter a skill a few days a week. I’m honestly not sure I can even pull this off, but my daughter is next to me on the phone with her grandma telling her that she made it, so happy and so excited, and this is definitely not the moment I’m going to express my reservations. I keep reading: travel fees, uniform fees, swag shop items, clinic fees, and for at least half the tournaments your own child plays in, you will have to pay to watch them. You drop them off, provide their snacks, make sure they don't forget their water bottle and shoes, and then you get yourself back in line and hand over more than the hourly minimum wage rate for the privilege of using a bleacher seat for a few hours. I feel even more upset about that than I do about the tryout fee, alas, I am powerless to change the system.
But because I’m an idiot, I say “yes” and decide we will figure this out as we go.
I know what you’re thinking. Good parents tell their kids “no” all the time. Our children are not owed club sports. It’s a privilege, one that perfectly healthy and well-rounded children go without their entire lives and turn out to be just fine as adults.
But I cannot separate my daughter from, well, me. The memories of 10,000 soccer practices flood my mind: laughing with my teammates, inside jokes, working hard at something, getting stronger, winning, losing, being in big trouble with the coach or making him so incredibly proud of our efforts. I can still remember the way a soccer field feels at 7:00 in the morning, when your feet and a simple soccer ball are the first things to make a path through the dew on the tips of the grass. I remember hotel rooms with my mom and running down the hallways and being too loud with teammates at tournaments. I remember the way I had to learn responsibility, hard work, and the deep in your gut kind of grit—which is the only kind that keeps you moving when your legs can’t move on their own. I remember everything, because playing soccer was the best part of my childhood, and the foundation of some of the best parts of me.
Are there a hundred other ways to learn all these lessons? To be responsible, hard-working, to keep showing up whether you win or lose? Of course there are. But I learned them in sports. And somehow, I’m determined to give my daughter the chance to do the same.
***
I’m sitting at a coffee table outside of the Starbucks on Mill Avenue in downtown Tempe, Arizona, the home of my college and the place that holds my whole heart, Arizona State University. It’s the end of May, so most of the students have gone home, and the frenzy and energy of the campus has settled into a low hum. I’m still here, on this campus and at this coffee table underneath the misters al fresco dining in Arizona is famous for, because I’ve just had another surgery on my left knee, the sixth in three years.
Except this surgery is the one I cannot come back from. Ten days ago I woke up from anesthesia to see my mom in the chair next to me crying, and my soccer team’s athletic trainer rubbing the top of my head with her hand and saying “I’m so sorry, Katie. They couldn’t fix it. Our goal is not to get you playing soccer again, but walking.”
This news was a lot to process for a twenty-year-old who had done nothing but play soccer her entire life.
I had waited until finals were finished to have this surgery, so by the time news of its results had gotten out, my teammates were already gone for the summer, and I had to stay on campus for doctor visits and physical therapy. But our team manager, Allison, a former college soccer player herself and the resident hype-girl of our team, is still in town. She’s brought me here for an iced coffee and to see how I’m doing—which is not great, to be sure.
Allison listens to me cry for an hour. We talk about all the great memories, all the things I will miss, how unfair this feels, how I would give anything for one more chance to play soccer again. She is so patient, so kind, so gentle with my feelings, acknowledging all of them and holding them with me. When you lose a dream and a vision for your future, it takes someone else to see another one.
Once I’m done talking, a few minutes of silence hang in the air between us. Then Allison begins to ask the question she brought me here to ask.
“Are you ready, Katie?”
“Ready? For what?”
“Are you ready to keep going? Because you are too important to this team to throw in the towel. You mean too much to the people around you. We need your heart and your attitude. So I’m going to set a timer on my watch, and I’m going to give you five more minutes to feel sorry for yourself, and then we are going to dream a new dream together, okay?”
I looked back at her, the tiniest bit stunned. I only have five more minutes to feel sorry for myself?
She took a risk—a big one—pushing me this hard while I was grieving. But the more years that go by between this moment and my life today, the more I appreciate how much you have to believe in someone to push them like this. And Allison believed in me with everything she had.
She changed my life with that sentence.
Playing a sport, giving it everything I had, and being surrounded by people who wanted the best for me as much as they wanted the best out of me, is what really prepared me for what the rest of my life would require.
“Okay,” I cried to Allison. “Okay. Five more minutes.” I pause, wanting so desperately to believe that she’s right about who I am at the core—someone who will keep going—even if I’ll have to fight to get there. “But I’ll need your help with a new dream, okay?”
“I’ll be here for every step.”
***
Club volleyball didn’t get off to the smoothest start. For one, I stayed in a state of shock over the money for months. (It’s possible I still am). There were tears over the (many) losses the team experienced. There were some tough conversations about the kind of character we have to display when we’re not getting the playing time we want, because being a good teammate is just as important as being the star. There were complaints about going to practice when something else that sounded more fun—like going to a school party with friends—came up, but, “You committed to this, and being a person of your word and commitment is essential. You’re going to practice.”
And then somewhere along the line, all the best parts of being on a team came back to me. Maybe it was the second tournament when Harper had such a great dig from the back line and looked right over to me, her face and body language anxious to know, “Did you see it, Mom? I did that!” and I beamed back at her, clapping wildly and proudly. It might have been during one of games on the road, when she got ten serves over the net in a row, and all the parents on the team were cheering because she had never done anything like that before.
But it very well could have been the day her team came back from nine points down in the second set. All the parents had resigned themselves that the team was going to have to go to a third set to determine a winner, but then every single girl ran and dove and jumped and threw their bodies around to get the ball over the net and chip away at their deficit. Mostly, Harper was on the bench for those rotations, cheering her little heart out. Like it mattered so much, all the effort. None of the girls gave up. Not even the ones who weren’t playing in those moments. Her team won the second set 25-24 to win the whole match and send us to the championship. We lost in the final, but I knew—because I was blessed with that feeling once too—Harper will never forget the game before the final, the one where the girls gave their very, very best, and did something incredible in the process.
Club sports cost so much. We miss church more than I’d like, and there were several times this year when I had to send my daughter to games with another family, because I couldn’t get there myself. But I watched a piece of my firstborn come alive a little bit this year, being a part of something, working hard and getting better, handling failure and disappointment, getting a taste of what is possible when you give your best and learning in the end, no matter the outcome, that’s enough.
Is club volleyball going to prepare my daughter for the rest of her life? I have no way of knowing that. She might decide she’s done next year. She might not make the team. She might get injured. But will every single lesson, all the things we did just for the experience in the meantime still matter? That, I have no doubt about.
Someday she’ll face a moment where she’s asked, “Are you ready to keep going?” and the work she’s done her entire life, the foundation she has laid to prove to herself who she is, will be the only thing she can rely on for her answer.
***
Did Allison know, twenty-years ago, that one day, my new dream would include watching my kids do the things they love? She couldn’t have. But it is. It’s better than my dreams. I’d pay a million dollars for it every single time.
Kids’ and their club sports, man. Stealing our time, money, and hearts since they started.
Katie Blackburn lives in the Pacific Northwest with her six little ones, one of whom came to her through foster care. She is saved by grace and runs on cold brew coffee and quiet mornings at her desk. You can read more of her writing on faith, motherhood, special needs, and a good, good God on her Substack.
Photo by Jennifer Floyd.