Watching one of my daughter’s recent basketball games was so much fun.
The opposing team was decent, and my kid’s team is also good. I was sitting beside a very vocal parent/friend from AAU days. (Read: I was in my element.)
When our kids began playing together as little kids, we all dreamed of the days they would play together in high school. He has nicknames for his kid, I have several for mine to protect the innocent. He’s loud and obnoxious about offering advice and … encouragement; so am I. We are basketball soulmates.
My husband gets as far away from us as he can.
My kid is 5-foot-3. She’s guarding the tallest kid there, who even towers over our tallest. My daughter comes up to her armpit. This is hilarious, but my baby is working it.
The whole game is rough-and-tumble. She’s getting knocked around and fighting for the ball, banging off the walls and scrambling on the floor. Very fast-paced and, naturally, there are fouls called.
When the players have two free throws to make, teammates go over and low-five them and say encouraging words. As a spectator, this looks so united; they break away smiling and one feels heartened in these days of societal dissent.
As play resumes, I observe that each of the players has a different way of expressing her emotions about her performance. Our big girl is the same all the time, all forward motion. Did I knock someone over? Oh, snap. My bad. But I made the basket? Cool. Her expression is always, “Where’s the ball? How do I get the ball?”
There’s another player who keeps her head down and does her job (#billbelichick), and she also keeps a running total of injustices in her head. She makes her fouls count. You can see it on her face: mission accomplished. She isn’t mean or cruel, she’s judicious. She gets her point across.
My kid doesn’t foul much. It could be that she doesn’t need to have an anger button because one of her parents is hollering enough from the bench about what should be done. Possibly.
This got me thinking about how player behavior is like the personalities of the office. We all know someone at work who is so intense to the point of being just a little off about social cues. Everyone is standing around in a circle in the coffee room with tears brimming in their eyes, and this person comes in talking about their thing and never notices the somber tone in the room.
This person has an entire conversation with the room, or the members in it, and leaves without picking up on the vibe. Nobody says anything because it is obvious that the coworker means well and is just really focused and intense.
Then there is the coworker who produces and produces and all of a sudden comes to my office with a complaint with documentation all about how X did this, so she was forced to do Y. Telling the administrator is an afterthought; it’s hilarious, considering the boss has to talk her off the ceiling and to encourage her to use restraint in the future.
Service professions have an overabundance of people who smile when they are distressed in any way, and this is one of the reasons self-care is so important. One Christmas, at the annual swap game, a coworker brought out the life-sized china dog we’d all been wrapping and trading for years and, instead of playing along and sticking someone else with it, she hauled out a sledgehammer and yelled, “So, do I smash it or what?” to a roomful of astonished and totally freaked-out teachers.
This was a good indication of a little too much stress. You could have heard a pin drop.
Then I began thinking what would happen if, like during free throws, we began cheering each other on during our small moments of the day or week that we need to just get through. Low-five on the way out of a tough meeting. An encouraging word: “Good work all around, team!” Fist-pump in the air from across the hallway going home after a 12-hour stint: “You nailed it!” Quick huddle before an evaluation from a supervisor: “Dawg, you got this!”.
Realizing my terminology could be stale, I asked my daughter what do teammates say to each other in those few moments to give their teammates some advice, encouragement, backup and love. She laughed and shrugged.
“Nothing?” I asked.
“Well, jokes about how if they miss it, we are all going to have to run 16 laps at practice, so, they better get it right.”
“So, threats?”
“Yeah, pretty much.”
Here I am, cueing the music and hearing the crowd roar and seeing the flag ripple in the waning sunset, and what is actually happening can best be likened to sibling rivalry.
Next time, they’ll be telling me the basketballs aren’t inflated enough.
Deb Beaupre writes periodically on sports from the parental point-of-view despite the fact that she once referred to uniforms as costumes. She lives in Meriden.