Wednesday, May 09, 2007
Paging through my 'School Years' book, you can see exactly when I stopped playing sports. In the eighth grade the Sports section reads, "Basketball - City Champs; FCC Swim Team." In ninth grade the Clubs and Activities section spills over into Sports. By tenth grade Sports is blank. And in eleventh grade Sports is actually crossed out so no one will wrongly assume that there is anything athletic about representing Belgium in the Model United Nations.
I played a lot of sports growing up, but I was never aggressive enough to be any good. By high school I was perfectly happy to replace sports with Clubs and Activities.
Job #0.5: Basketball Camps
Still, I enjoyed working at Dad's basketball camps over the summer. I sold pizza, sodas and candy in the dorms. I ran various errands.
The only bad experience was the time I had to step in to referee a game. Due to a scheduling mix-up, I was the only person available. And I was in totally over my head. You need to be aggressive to be a ref too. "Oo... should I call that? Was that a foul? Too late. Okay, maybe I shouldn't call that foul to even things out. That was pretty obvious, though. Uh oh... too late again."
The only thing worse than having two teams of sixth graders yelling at you and giving you shit for the calls you make or don't make... is knowing in the back of your mind, that they're probably right.
