Here’s Why It’s Weird To Be A Sport Parent

I may not be good, but I still won

After so many years of getting my kids to swim meets (mostly) on time I feel I should at least get a participation trophy. Picture by author.

It’s weird to have kids who participate in sports. During Covid my daughter used to do tumbling on the lawn and then joined the high school gymnastics team. She also was on a local swim team for 12 years and her high school swimming team for three.

My son was also on the same swim team and also spent a year on his own school team.

Both of them did quite well, thank you, with each qualifying for local tournaments.

This comes as a great shock to me since I am from the might Volk clan, the only people I’ve known to get “C”s in PE. I mean, how hard do you have to not be trying to not get an “A” or a “B” in this class? Heck, in my kids PE class at high school, you were pretty well guaranteed an “A” if you bothered to show up at all and make a token effort at participation.

I don’t know where they get it from.

It’s not for lack of trying, though.

When I was 5, my parents signed me up for Little League baseball, but did not bother to teach me the rules of the game. So, I spent many hot, Southwest Florida mornings standing in right fielding waiting for something to happen. Anything, really. What, I wasn’t sure, but since I was in right field, there was little chance of it happening anywhere near me. So, mostly I just stood there sweating in the sweltering North Fort Myers heat with nothing to do other than wipe my nose on my sleeve. Then, one day, I made an amazing discovery. My glove may not have been much use as sporting equipment because there were no grounders coming my way, but if I put it on my head, it served as a much better sun visor than the puny bill of my cap. So I took to wearing it on my head and never understood why people were poking fun of me.

Not too surprisingly, I was not invited back the following summer.

Ellen didn’t look quite so amused after I beaned her. Photo by Gabriel Martin on Unsplash

I went more than a decade before getting bit by the sports bug again. I liked watching football and baseball (especially after I finally learned the rules) and even had a relationship partly based around the Kansas City Royals, but I didn’t go back to the field of play until my freshman year of college, starting with Hacky Sack, which I was surprisingly good at. Emboldened by my dorm lawn success, I took a racquetball class, which started out great until I beaned Ellen De Leon in the head with a return volley, which pretty much ruined any chance I had to ask her out. Embarrassed and shame weren’t enough to knock me out of the class, but lack of a textbook was. I had no idea there was going to be a written test on the rules until the teacher announced it the day before. So, I dropped the class before I failed.

The bug didn’t bit me again until I became one of the founding members of the B’nai B’rith Hillel softball team in Seattle. I hadn’t improved much, but I usually managed to get on base — perhaps because the other team was so shocked I made contact with the ball that it rolled right past them. I mostly played right field again, which I had started calling left out, but I did have one moment of greatness when I was playing short stop and had an unassisted double play as a result of knowing the rules really, really well.

It happened when a batter hit a line drive right over my head and I spastically jumped in the air with my arm extended knowing there was no chance in hell I’d actually catch it, then, somehow came down with the ball in my glove. The runner on first had already advanced to second without tagging up at first base and I knew if I could tag the first base before he got back, I’d get a second out. Since no one else seemed to know the rule everyone was puzzled to see me run towards first base, including the runner, until the umpire called him out before he realized what had just happened.

Of course, I also had my low moments like the day I was in left field and chased after a hard hit fly ball that I missed, but it didn’t miss me. It hit me right in the head, knocking me over. Suddenly everyone was running toward me to see if I was okay. One person even held up two fingers and asked me how many fingers I saw. Ever the wise guy, I responded, “I would tell you if you’d just make them stop spinning.”

Years later, I was at a singles event standing in a buffet line, talking to a cute woman standing in front of me when the guy behind me said, “You look real familiar, but I can’t figure out why.” Then, he suddenly remembered, “Oh, yeah, I hit a line drive off your head,” ruining any chance I might have with the woman who had been standing in front of me, but I now realized was on the floor, doubled over, laughing.

Now that I think of it, she did look an awful lot like Ellen De Leon.

I’m the one who won the prize in the end.

Despite all my apparent ineptitude (is that a word?) on the field of play, I may have gotten the last laugh. Remember that double play I mentioned? Although I didn’t end up talking to her until months or even years later, I ended up marrying the woman who was playing first base that day. And, since we didn’t talk at all that day, I can be sure that she didn’t marry me for my athletic prowess. So, I ended up winning anyway.

As to whether or not my kids will end up dating someone they meet while competing, only time will tell, but in the meantime, I’ll be sitting here, poolside, hoping for the best.