OCTOBER 22, 2021 – Yesterday evening while walking in the moonlight, I heard the distant echo of an amplified announcer calling a game at the local high school. The words were muffled, so I couldn’t tell if the event was a soccer match or a football game. At one stage, however, I heard, “puts the first points on the board.” Presumably, the spectators had a good visual of how many points.
The sounds reminded me of our sons’ soccer matches in high school. Both kids played on the varsity team, which performed admirably for a small school where sports were optional but the arts were compulsory. I remember well the camaraderie among parents along the sidelines—conversations that helped warm our jaws, at least, in the crisp autumn air.
In my day soccer was non-existent in Minnesota. I was introduced to it at boarding school in Vermont. There, only the outliers—the few kids from outside the Northeast—hadn’t played soccer from an early age.
With other outliers I was assigned to the “reserve” team, though we weren’t in reserve for anything: there was no chance of being “called up” to JV, let alone varsity.
Our loser status was often tacitly underscored at the close of our formal, sit-down dinners. The headmaster would tap spoon to water glass and issue the invitation to after-dinner coffee in the lounge adjacent to the dining hall. Seniors were automatically allowed to attend. The rest of us were part of the lottery played inside the headmaster’s head. Often the invitation was extended to “members of the winning JV team” or “members of the varsity team, which won its game today.” The invitation was never bestowed on “reservists.”
Then came a day of exception. Two weeks before, the school’s athletic director had received an invitation to a cross-country meet just north of the border. The host school was a traditional English-style academy surrounded by Quebecois. The director knew a few of us “reservists” could run a mile or two without stopping and asked us if we wanted to participate. I jumped at the chance.
I was surprised by the competition—or rather, lack of it among the runners at the meet. In the three-mile freshman race, I took an early and easy lead, which I held to the finish. Afterward, we were treated to a Salisbury steak dinner in the dining hall. I remember the tall, leaded windows, the dark oak interior and the heavy oak tables and benches. The place was far fancier than our more rustic school south of the border. At the close of dinner, my three teammates and I got to stand to the polite applause of our hosts.
The next night, back at our school, our headmaster made an exception to his usual soccer-friendly invitation. He invited our school’s “winning cross country team.” I was no longer a loser or an outlier. I was a winner. I’d put our fledgling team’s “first points on the board.”
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© 2021 by Eric Nilsson
