Seniors: This is Your Year

One winter afternoon in 2004, a rusted brown Chevy Cavalier of indeterminate age rolled to a stop in front of Gampel Pavilion. The doors opened on this relic from the early '90s and Ben Gordon, Emeka Okafor, Rashad Anderson, Denham Brown, Shamon Tooles and Taliek Brown got out.

How they all fit in one Chevy Cavalier remains a mystery but there are times when this memory is heartening to me. This was a college moment when any car, no matter how rickety, was something to be treasured.

That afternoon gives me hope that not all of the time those men spent in Storrs was consumed by the business of basketball. There is a hope that some nights, when things aren’t going so well in Detroit, Ben Gordon thinks back on riding in the back of Taliek’s car with a certain fondness he can’t explain.

Now to be certain, this requires a degree of success after college. There is nothing nostalgic about cramming into an ancient Chevy if you are still doing it at 30, or 40. Then it simply becomes the hard facts of life we live with in the hopes that our children won’t have to.

Each of us has moments like this in our memory. Moments when the sun seemed to be shining a certain way and the world’s worries were kept at bay as long as the Chevy’s old engine kept running. For many of us, those moments revolve around athletics.

For me, the first cool breeze of September instantly recalls fall days spent on the soccer field, which is what Americans called the pitch a few decades ago. The games have faded, although one or two standout, but the memories of walking down the empty hallways of the school in my socks, cleats thrown over the shoulder, remains powerful.

The fall sports season is about to start in high schools across the state. For most of the seniors out there, this will be their final year of organized sports. Sure, colleges have intramurals and there are adult recreational leagues, but these are not the same thing.

If you don’t practice together everyday, ride a bus together to away games and listen to the same loud, overly aggressive music then it’s not really a team.

So this is what I would say to the seniors:

Enjoy this year.

Adults have conspired to make a mess of the youth sports system. So much so that an estimated 74 percent of kids stop playing organized sports before they turn 14. If one went to Google News and typed in “youth sports” on a Friday afternoon, they might get a number of links to an ugly brawl at a youth football game in Florida that concluded with an attack on an official. Or links to a story about how youth sports actually contributes to obesity rather than prevents it because we have made the enterprise so time-consuming that parents substitute KFC for dinner. Also, three million teeth are lost each year to youth sports.

So we’ve made a mess and we’re sorry but that is all behind you.

There is only one season left and it belongs only to you. I beg you to cherish it. Not just the games, but each and every moment you spend with your teammates. All the moments you spend riding in cars and walking down hallways together and eating pizza and running laps and going over strategies and working out strange, secret handshakes and inventing nicknames for each other and painting your faces and riding on buses.

All of it.

This is the good stuff. This is the stuff you will think of in two decades when you are hoping your own kids want to play sports. When you are hoping the entire system hasn’t become so screwed up that the bad outweighs the good. When you are hoping your kid is one of the few who wants to keep playing in high school, if only because you know what it is to feel like part of a team that represents a community and you want your kid to feel it, too.

Every generation thinks they are going to remake the world, but nostalgia is too stubborn to be undone. The world may not resemble the one we have today but I am promising you that whatever it looks like, seniors, you will think of this moment in time as simpler time; a time when the sun seemed to shine a certain way.

We have found ways to strip so much of the joy of sports away from you but we can’t touch these moments. They are yours.

Enjoy them.