We celebrated my 20th high school reunion this year.
It was a small gathering, but a good one. I’m hoping the 25th is bigger and better.
With high school reunions comes nostalgia, both the good and bad kinds. You’re a mental misstep away from being gripped by old grudges and fears, finding that there’s an 18-year-old in your head who hasn’t moved on. But done the right way, nothing puts a smile on your face quite the same way as reminiscing on shared experiences with the only people who can unlock old memories and revive inside jokes.
As the calendar prepares to turn to a new year, I’ve become more reflective on those high school years and what I learned from them.
My mind always comes back to my days playing for the Western Harnett Eagles — four years of basketball (including one injured season) and one “sure, why not?” senior year experiment with tennis.
It was not an illustrious career.
My running joke when I first started covering high school sports was that I was an unofficial N.C. record-holder in two sports. No one will ever have a higher free throw shooting percentage (2-for-2, thanks for asking) and no one will ever win fewer singles matches (0-for-whatever, I’ve never counted them up).
If I didn’t get a scholarship out of it, if I was never featured in an article or news clip, if I never had a mixtape, if I never won a championship, if I never had that feeling of invincibility after a game-winner over a rival, what exactly did I get out of high school sports, you ask?
I learned to be intentional.
The fear of getting cut was always there in basketball, and so just making the freshman team or the JV team was good enough for me. But when the hourglass of high school was filling up at the bottom, operating out of fear wasn’t going to make my final year special. If there are things you want in life, you have to go for it, and this was the first time I faced this truth.
I learned that hard work will pay off, even if no one else notices.
Offseason work took discipline and work ethic. I got better, but it didn’t translate into more playing time. I sure as heck didn’t quit though, and that’ll always mean something to me in any context.
I learned how to make the best of any situation.
My two sports were polar opposite situations. I basically learned tennis during 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 strong program, always winning at least two-thirds of its games and going to the playoffs. Sure, it would’ve been cool if I could’ve been both a starter and on a good team simultaneously, but no situation is ever perfect. I still try to approach things with a glass-half-full outlook as much as possible.
I learned the importance of relationships.
For four years, my basketball teammates and I sweated through practices, offseason workouts, team camps, and then one day we were on a bus back home and our careers were over. I couldn’t process all my emotions. It felt 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 more bus rides with friends to games, even if these bus rides were far less serious. I still don’t like goodbyes, but I value them more than ever now because of how “quickly” this felt taken away.
I learned that leadership must be bold.
No need for me to go into every little detail, but my senior year of basketball should’ve had a better ending. It didn’t due to some internal strife that finally blew up at just the wrong time. Sometimes you learn things through negative examples just as well as the positive ones, and there was a brief moment where a vacuum of leadership early in the season cost us dearly later on. This truth has been only more pronounced as I’ve gotten older: you have to face conflict head-on as soon as it arises.
I learned the importance of positivity on others.
There was a guy on the tennis team who others didn’t like to play with. He goofed off at the wrong times and they’d yell at him and he’d snap back and then he’d start playing worse because he was mad, which made the other player yell at him more. Our coach, in a genius move, paired us up. I didn’t yell at him. I told him things like “good shot” when he’d hit one. We started feeding off each other’s positive energy. My coach told me “No one’s ever encouraged him before.” So, by the end of the year, we were better together than we were separate, and grew into a tough doubles team (we even won a match!). It wasn’t that I never told him to focus, or had to rein him in in other ways. But it was the purest lesson I’ve ever been part of that our words matter greatly.
I learned the importance of being a good teammate.
My only superlatives in high school came as peer awards, and that’s more than OK. 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 an award for that. Coach said he had polled the team one-by-one and I was unanimous, so there was no reason to ask me, which is how it was kept a secret. I took great comfort in knowing I had my teammates’ respect after all we’d been through.
But in truth, I’m not done being a teammate. We’ll always have teammates. We won’t hop on a bus together and hit the highway like we used to, but we’ll always be part of something bigger than ourselves and we’ll always need others. In life’s journey, you want good teammates and you’d like to be someone else’s good teammate.
…20 years later…
These lessons and stories are more fresh to me now than ever, because you can never fully untether from your own school days while working in one. I returned to high school, this time as a teacher, in 2018.
Sometimes I’ll share some of these stories with my own students. Maybe they’ll glean something from them. Or maybe they’re charting their own unique course through high school athletics, and they’ll come to the same conclusions on their own.
They won’t put my name on either court at Western Harnett anytime soon. If I didn’t write about high school sports, my name would be forgotten there altogether.
But the lessons learned are ones that have made me a better (but still very much imperfect) husband, father, teacher, coworker, and friend.
You asked what exactly I got from high school sports?
You’re looking at him.
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