Coach for a Day

Life is full of surprises and great ironies. Just when I think nothing else will surprise me, something comes along to make me laugh. I had one of these many moments this past month when Rob asked me to pinch hit for him by coaching girls basketball. 

To understand the irony of this you would have to wind back the clocks with us to before Rob and I had ever spoken. All the way back to the 1990s when we were in Junior High. I grew up in a time and place where sports were everything (at least it felt that way at the time). While in Asia studying and GPA are all-encompassing, in America sports team participation seemed non-negotiable. So what was this awkward, shy, and woefully un-athletic 13 year old to do? Why join the girl's basketball team of course! If I didn't, I would have been left behind weekly as the sports teams regularly left School Early to travel for games and spent weekends at tournaments. To have any hope of being cool and socially keeping up you had to be at those games. If you weren't you wouldn't understand the stories the next day or know how the ever-fickle dynamics of teen world were playing out that day. So I gritted my teeth and joined that basketball team, just to secure my spot on the traveling bus and to make sure I didn't get left in the social dust. 

Rob's very first memory of me is from watching me practice with that basketball team. He was of course on the junior high boy's team that traveled on the same busses and was at the same events. Of course being in separate grade levels we had never spoken before. He is without a doubt, much more athletically gifted than me and so he and his friends got a good laugh out of watching an awkward un-athletic 13-year-old girl with braces on her teeth and massively curled bangs, trying pathetically to dribble a basketball. Then there was the even more humorous enjoyment of actually watching me play against other girls. All of that grabbing and hitting trying to keep or protect the ball really wasn't my thing. I would much rather have handed over the ball then suffered bruises or scratches trying to protect it.  So I was pretty awful the few times I ever got put into a game.  

So fast forward 20+ years and here stands the boy who mocked my early basketball skills, pleading with me to coach the girl's basketball team. Ah, life! So what's a girl to do? Why coach those girls and redeem a little bit of her 13-year-old dignity :-). 

Funny thing about Asia is that sports are really not so much of a thing here. And although ping pong and badminton thrive, big team sports like basketball are just starting off. Attend a high school game and there are few spectators from among the student's friends, virtually no parents watching, and most of all, no cheering. Having grown up in a place where large crowds of enthusiastic students, parents, and alumnists gather to cheer at the top of their lungs for games, the gym always seems eerily silent to me. I have a hard time not yelling (cheering) for our kids when they play. I think someone should. But I always get stared at by people who wonder what I'm getting so excited about. The thing is, my 36-year-old self isn't nearly as insecure as my13-year-old self was. Plus I've now lived in a foreign country for 8+ years which means I've grown accustomed to being a curiosity and not fitting the mould.   Living in the same house with an avid basketball fan and two boys who spend every spare moment shooting a basketball hasn't hurt my knowledge of the sport either.  

So February found me standing in as girls basketball coach, screaming at the top of my lungs for a bunch of teenage girls to run faster, fight harder, and be more aggressive in their pursuit of the ball. I bandaged up and sent back into the game girls with bleeding knees and noses. And I had fun cheering on this tough band of girls playing in their first ever basketball tournament. They were scrappy and gave it all they had. They were much tougher than I was at that age. And at the end of the day I just had to laugh and wish I could go back somehow and tell the 13 year old version of myself, desperate to fit in, to relax, because life would turn out to be funny and far different from anything I could have imagined and that even those moments that made me cringe have often in the strangest ways turned out to be useful sometime in the future. God has a great sense of timing (and of humor).

Ecclesiastes 3:1, 10-13  "For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven.......I have seen the business that God has given to the children of man to be busy with.  He has made everything beautiful in its time.  Also, he has put eternity into man's heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.  I perceived that there is nothing better for them than to be joyful and to do good as long as they live; also that everyone should eat and drink and take pleasure in all his toil -  this is God's gift to man."