Go, Team!

The parental joy of winter basketball

Kid basketball tournaments have overrun winter weekends. These marathons of youth athletics often begin on Friday and, if your team is lucky enough to win a championship spot, through Sunday afternoon. I did not grow up with well-funded schools that boasted elementary team sports, so this is new to me. By the time team sports became an option, I had already chosen my path at the crossroads of junior high by embracing alternative, Seattle music and theater. In the schools I attended, youth social pressures ensured one had to choose sports or the arts, not both. Very little prepared me to be the dad to two young jocks, and I’m loving every second of it.

For kid basketball tournaments, there is the requisite preparation before court arrival: gathering gear and water bottles, along with the prolonged car ride, often with a teammate in tow. There are music requests for top 40 hits, or one kid wants to play DJ with my phone, and soon enough I find myself humming choruses to songs by Juice Wrld. We drive through small, rural towns, past the occasional homemade Trump signs, numerous Stewart’s—my favorite New York-based gas station for coffee and Clif bars—and churches that need fresh paint. Today such a church advertised a “Lenten Fish Fry.” Not long after, I spotted a memorable van shrouded in bumper stickers, one of which proclaimed that “Bigfoot was here.”

When we arrive at the school destination of the week, the kids gather excitedly until it’s their turn to warm up on the court. I chat with fellow parents or steal several minutes to read a chapter of a book. I’m guessing I was the only person at last week’s tournament to carry in Palestinian theologian Mitri Raheb’s “Decolonizing Palestine.” Warm-up time ended, the buzzer sounds and the tip-off takes place. Our eyes are riveted to our kids’ competition.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Watching a youth basketball game is a roller coaster of emotions—if the game is close, I am caught up in the fierce efforts of both teams, clapping at our team’s baskets and cheering accordingly. If the more cheer-happy kids start a “DEFENSE!” chant first, amplified by foot stomping, I’ll join in enthusiastically. There is the momentary thrill of victory and the unabashed joy of witnessing kids jump up and down, all smiles, after a win. There are, of course, the kids’ frustration and frequent tears at narrow losses. Then there are the weekends when I’m tired and would rather be anywhere than in a crowded, noisy gym.

Becoming a sports parent has taught me about the gifts of group consciousness. Since I moved overseas in my adolescent years, I did not connect with American sports rituals such as the Super Bowl. I relish the festivity of Super Bowl parties, but I still find American football a brutal sport, one that reminds me of the deathly games housed in the Roman Colosseum. And since I didn’t pay any attention to sports growing up, I completely missed the global thrall of the World Cup. I even lived in France when they won in 1998 and remember wondering what all the car honking and ecstatic shouting was about. Perhaps because of my overseas experiences of diverse cultures and countries, I never identified with U.S. patriotism, soaked in “our nation is the best”-type nationalism as it often is. To this day I don’t say the pledge of allegiance. The early Christians confessed Jesus as their “Lord” and refused oaths of fealty to Rome. I can’t understand why I would give my allegiance to one country instead of God, the ultimate force of belonging and good in the world.

I recall being judgmental toward people watching football or basketball on TV. Why cheer on one team, my existentially brooding, mid-twenty-year-old self thought, when the game’s outcome will have no impact on my life or contribute to any positive social or spiritual change? Then again, movie lover and contradiction-laden as I am, I always tuned into the Academy Awards. But it’s the negative side of group identification that has created much of the injustice in the world. Christianity is often presented as a group to join with the threat of one’s eternal future at stake. Nationalism is a myth of group belonging that identifies with one nation often to the violent exclusion of others. The creation of the United States was forged amid Native genocide and African slavery, and to this day, Indigenous and Black Americans suffer the material consequences. Early U.S. naturalization laws that only allowed “free white persons” to become citizens (1790) helped devise legal “whiteness” that excluded and harmed anyone who was not “white.”

Group identification doesn’t have a lot of positive good going for it, and that’s why it has surprised me to discover such joy in cheering on one team. It turns out that it’s a great time cheering for your group to win! I sit near or with local parents, trade game observations as we try to send encouragement to our kids (“Good pass! Great basket! Shake it off, you’ll get it next time!”).

There are still the coaches one sees who take the sport far too seriously and berate young athletes when they make mistakes. Such unhealed, typically white male anger always makes me wince and can be a serious problem in coaching. There are inevitably the dads, and sometimes the moms, whose fiery cheering and jeering reveal an unhealthy reliance on their children to make meaning for them. Fortunately, such instances are rare exceptions rather than the norm in our small community, which creates the freedom for watching games to become sheer delight. We hold our breath at the fourth-quarter nail-biters, and we all give high fives and eat pizza when we win. Of course, it doesn’t really matter who wins and loses these games in life’s larger scope—but for the moment, it does, and it’s fun.

How is any of this spiritual? I’m not practicing contemplative prayer during any of these sports activities. Other than the occasional page or two of a theology book, I’m not thinking of God. I’m not dedicating myself to a social justice cause. I’m just having a blast living. And that seems to me to be both deeply ordinary and holy.