For the Love of the Game

It’s a tale as old as time.

“Back when I was your age…” it always started. Internally, I would groan. Another high school “glory days” story I had heard a thousand times. Out came the dusty scrapbooks, newspaper clippings of black and white articles and big 1970’s hair. I’d heard it a thousand times, but I would listen anyways. I would listen and smile and act like it was the first time I had heard the story of my dad running the 110 high hurdles on a cinder chip track in inch-long spiked shoes, even though I knew the story so well I could probably tell it word for word myself. I listened because I could see the passion and light on my dad’s face as he recalled athletic feats from days gone by, 30 plus years after the then 17-year old from a small town in northeast Iowa taught himself to long jump by watching re-runs of the Olympics. 3 decades separated my dad from the stories he told, yet from the excitement in his voice, you’d think he did it yesterday. The boy in the story stayed the same age, the track stayed the same length, and the times stayed the same, no matter how much time passed.

When I was in high school, I didn’t understand it. “Close the yearbook,” as the saying goes. What’s in the past is in the past. Time to move on. As a senior, I could not wait to get out of my sleepy, small town. I was ready to start the next chapter of my life at a bigger school in a bigger city. I finished out my senior track season with an attitude of vague apathy. Perhaps it was a coping mechanism to minimize the pain of the end of my running career. Perhaps it was burnout from internally inflicted pressure. Perhaps, a mix of both. But I was ready to leave my career behind and not look back. I never once thought that I would look back on those memories with the same fond nostalgia as my dad.

3 years of college, 2 half marathons, 1 stress fracture, 2 stress reactions, 1.5 years on a Division I team later, I am standing in my childhood home, no longer a member of any team, looking at a the “wall of fame”, a hallway wallpapered in pictures of my brother and me in our red and blue uniforms. I am looking at pictures of myself, yet I barely recognize that girl. She looks like me, but I remember how much she used to love to run. Looking at those pictures, I can feel the same adrenaline and excitement of years past, I can feel the butterflies in my stomach that always came when I heard “runners, take your mark”, and I can remember how truly fun it used to be. Looking at those pictures, I think I’m beginning to understand.

Nobody wants to hear your high school stories, yet we hold them so closely to our hearts. Why is that? There is something so beautifully pure about high school competition. It is sport in its simplest form, sandwiched between pre-algebra and PE. It is sport before the concept of money has any effect, before scholarships and bills and internships and jobs. It is sport before it becomes a job itself. In retrospect, those rainy, early season track meets at tiny schools in rural towns were likely as exciting as House Hunters re-runs to anyone on the outside. But to those competing, it was the Olympics. The state meet, an experience larger than life, with thousands of neon-shirt clad fans cheering in the spring sun as you left every ounce of energy on that big blue track in a valiant effort to achieve goals you had set years before and worked towards every day since. High school sports are beautiful in that they are fun. Sports, by definition, are games, and games, by definition, should be fun. It is easy to forget that as you get older.

The quest for perfection will drain the fun out of any sport at an alarmingly fast rate. Perfection is not attainable. Striving for an unattainable goal is bound to get exhausting and frustrating. Remember when you first started playing your sport? Remember your first ever track meet? I do. I was in 7th grade and I didn’t know that two gun shots from the starter means false start, stop running. So I ran my entire 200m race as fast as my 12 year old legs would carry me, paying no mind to the fact that I was, I fact, the only one running. I reached the finish line and the official informed me that it didn’t count, and I needed to go do it again. I looked across the track, where the other seven girls stood in their blocks looking back at me. I shuffled my way across the infield where I prepared to start again, for the second time. I look back on this memory now and I have to laugh. I just had no clue. But that was part of what made it so fun. Having no clue meant having no expectations, and having no expectations meant that you were satisfied with your performance regardless of the results. While this is not practical or a productive way to go through life or set yourself up for athletic success, it does result in maximum enjoyment. Playing for the love of the sport, as the adage goes. I think that’s one of the reasons people look back on high school sports with such fondness. Whether they were state champions or JV benchwarmers, they were doing it because they loved it, and they loved it because it was simple and fun.

This mentality is simply not practical for anyone with a competitive bone in their body. Even if you are only competing against yourself, at a certain point, “just going for a jog” is going to get boring. At a certain point, you want to see how fast you can run, how far you can throw, how high you can jump or how much you can lift. This doesn’t have to take the fun out of the sport. Rather, setting goals and working towards them can take a sport from a hobby to a passion. Seeing results and improvement can become addictive, and that is not inherently bad. It becomes bad and you risk losing the fun and magic if you make the sport too serious. Yes, I understand that at elite college levels and professional levels, you are literally getting paid to play or run. But that doesn’t mean you have to approach it with the same somber, life or death mentality as a soldier heading to battle. Look at Rob Gronkowski. Nobody can tell me that guy was not having fun, while also competing at the highest level of football possible. At the end of the day, it is a sport. It is part of your life, not your whole life, and life will go on regardless of the outcome. Keeping this in mind puts into perspective how – in the grand scheme of life – insignificant the outcome of the competition is. I’m not saying don’t fight, don’t try to win. You should compete with every ounce of your ability, leave every drop on the track or field. What I’m saying is that when all is said and done, when the medals have been handed out, when you’re in the locker room, at the end of the day, it is just a game. As you get older and better and competitions start to become more intense, it is easy to forget that it is supposed to be fun. It is easy to attach too much meaning, too much self-worth, give the sport too much control over your self-esteem. The fear of losing starts to overpower the joy of competing. That is when you run into trouble (no pun intended). That is when you risk burnout. I don’t think I sat on the bus on the way home from my first ever track meet analyzing my performance, berating myself for not running a little bit faster. I probably got onto the bus and sat with my friends and talked about whatever it is seventh grade girls talked about. Because then, it was just track. It was something I did and then went home and didn’t think about anymore. It was fun to race and fun to see if I could win, fun to give everything I had on that day, and then go home. It was not complicated, and that was why it was fun.

“All you can do is what you can do” is what my dad used to tell me when I would express concern over my ability to perform well in a race or execute a hard workout. You either can do it, or you can’t do it, and either way is ok. But the only way you’ll find out is if you give everything you have and do all you can do. I always found peace in this expression. Perfection is not attainable; therefore, it should not be the goal. Perfect effort, on the other hand, is entirely under your control. If you give perfect effort, what more can you do? If you give perfect effort and lose, you can walk away knowing that there was virtually nothing you could have done on that day to win. If your goal is to be perfect, that will leave you dissatisfied and angry. If your goal is to give perfect effort, that will leave you satisfied. “All you can do” may vary from day to day, but what won’t vary is your ability to give all that you have on that day. Operating under this mentality allows sports to be fun again. It becomes a win-win. “I give a perfect effort and I win, that’s great! I give a perfect effort and I lose, what more could I have done?” Either way, it eliminates the blame and self-criticism that is inevitable with aiming for and falling short of perfection. If your sport is fun, if you enjoy running or playing for the love of the game, it becomes easy to work hard at practices (to give perfect effort - some days will be good, and some will be bad, and that’s life), and when you consistently work hard at practice, it follows that you improve. Improving is fun. Do you see the circular effect? Where people run into trouble is when they over-complicate that circle. If your sport isn’t fun, and you force yourself to go to practice and grind out hard workouts that leave you frustrated, you may still improve, and improving is still fun. But that isn’t sustainable for a career. That will lead to burnout and an unhealthy relationship with the sport that you once loved and that once brought you so much joy.

I guess my point is this: people love to tell their high school tales, even if nobody wants to hear them, simply because they were so fun. It was the simplest time in everyone’s lives, before responsibilities got in the way. A time when your daily schedule centered around talking to your friends by your locker and running to be first in line for lunch, a time when sports were simple and fun. Since many people’s athletic careers end there, their only memories of their sport are fond ones. They never got tainted with the complications and industrialization that typically comes later on, after high school. Very few things can compete with the pure joy that comes from high school competition. As you get older, it is easy to forget why you started playing or running; it is easy to forget how fun it used to be. By shifting the focus off of perfection, which is outside your control, to effort, which is in your control, the pressure to win gets replaced with the opportunity to compete. This simplistic mindset keeps sports fun, long after the caps have been tossed and championship banners have been hung on the high school gymnasium wall. Channel the love you had for your sport when you started, when you were a seventh grader who didn’t know what a false start meant, when you didn’t have a clue. Keep playing for the love of the game.

- Jordan Winke (@winkejordan13)