When I was in my senior year of high school, I broke my left pinkie while playing volleyball in gym class. You know how coaches tell you not to lace your fingers when going to bump the ball, or else you might break a finger? They're right.
This impressive display of raw sportiness earned me a foam brace for the next three weeks. It rested under my pinkie, and was held in place by a few bands of medical tape. As you can imagine, it greatly restricted the types of hand signs I could make (thank heavens my gang career hadn't taken off by that point!). I could never give someone a thumbs up, but I could tell them to hang loose like a true surf-bro. The Dr. Evil jokes from my friends were unending, which made sense because Mike Myers still retained a bit of relevancy at that point.
This incident pretty much sums up my skill level while playing team sports. I might not be a total disaster, but I'm far from MVP. After that injury, I shied away from any sort of team sport, vocalizing how certain I was that nobody would want me--a pinkie-breaking, high-school-gym-class failure--on the roster.
That all changed this past February. My boyfriend, always one for a good time with friends, started gathering team members for a local co-ed intramural volleyball league. As the roster began to flesh out, with friends and coworkers-of-friends agreeing to join up, he was met with a bit of a problem: The team would need at least two women on the court at all times, and they had only one female signed up. This put me in a bit of a predicament. I knew how much my boyfriend wanted to register a team (as he had done the previous 2 years), yet the thought of playing a sport stirred up some residual anxiety. Ever the supportive partner, I told him I would sign up....if no other women wanted to join. Really, give everyone else a shot first, I'll just be the back-up plan. Seriously. Don't let me stand in anyone's way.
After a friend's birthday party (read: one too many beers) less than a week before the roster was due, I caved. I was more nervous than an adult should be about an intramural sport played in a middle school auditorium, but I ponied up and agreed to enlist.
I have to admit, after two or three weeks (we played three games in a row each week), it actually became kinda fun. Maybe it was because we had just the right combination of seasoned vets and eager novices, or maybe it was because we all more or less looked at this like a social event and not a serious competition (unlike some other far-too-intense teams we faced on the court). Whatever it was, my nerves calmed down, and I started having a great time on the court. We got comfortable enough with each other to really enjoy game nights - we joked around, gave each other ridiculous nicknames, all that fun team bonding stuff. Not only that, but I began actually playing well! I'm still no Misty May-Treanor, but I did some work, y'all.
Eventually, our rag-tag group of underdogs started winning games, and even our losses were less devastating. When it came time for the play-offs, we showed up for the first round, raring to go...
And still got knocked out. Seriously, some of those other teams are nasty.
But we do all have the first game of the summer league penciled into our planners.
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