Confession: I don’t play with balls.

I’ve been an athlete my entire life. I love everything about sports: the competition, the aggression, the warrior spirit, the honed skills, the joining of a team, the cool outfits. Unfortunately, finding ‘my sport’ was a long, painful, often bloody experience.

It began when Nana broke my nose. She was trying to teach me to catch a softball (I closed my eyes. Still do if you throw something at me). I’m not sure what was worse: the searing, blinding pain of a broken nose, the resulting—and permanent!—bump on the right side of my nose, or the look of utter disbelief and disgust on my 70-year-old grandmother’s face. A few years later, she tried to salvage her faith in my abilities and my pride by teaching me tennis. While I totally rocked the cute little white skirt and bouncy pony tail, I despised the fact that, swing as I may, I couldn’t make my racquet connect with that stupid fuzzy yellow ball. After earning several round bruises on my back (I kept closing my eyes and turning away from the ball that came zooming from my octogenarian grandma’s racquet at unfathomable speeds), I retired from the court and sat on a bench to watch my grandparents slam the ball back and forth with a velocity that belied both their years and the laws of physics.

My inauspicious career with anything involving hand-eye coordination and spherical objects continued with soccer. Being an all-American kid, I was enrolled in AYSO. I was not as thrilled with these outfits, but I did like the potential to vent all of my youthful aggression. My coaches immediately recognized my natural talents of speed and anger and utilized them effectively. They used my speed to make me chase down whomever had the ball, steal it—often by slide-tackling or simply kicking the hapless girl I was sent to attack-- and then quickly pass it off to someone who could actually dribble, pass, shoot, etc. I racked up the league total for assists…and became infamous for being one of the few U-14 girls to receive multiple yellow cards.

My adventures in ball sports ended (with a minor blip of a season of volleyball...I shudder to even remember it!) with me being a guard on the high school basketball team where my coach channeled my speed and aggression by--flashback to soccer--having me chase down whomever had the ball and take it from them by whatever means necessary. I generally fouled out by the second quarter.

It finally dawned on me that I was not a ball-sport athlete: I was a well-trained attack dog! And while it was fun to be "siced!” upon other teenage girls—and much healthier than the preferred female methods of attack that involve cruel taunts and glares that lead to vomiting in the bathroom—I wanted to find a sport at which I might excel in actually earning points instead of just bruises.

Thus, my sophomore year of high school I retired from playing with balls and decided to stick to non-projectile sports: dancing, cheer, track, crew. Unfortunately, while I had managed to avoid projectiles being hurled in my direction, I soon discovered that in several of these I was the projectile! In cheer I was the flyer. This meant my fellow sexy-skirt-clad cheerleaders (and sometimes burly male cheerleaders) would fling me high into the air to twist, flip and then fall back to earth, hopefully to be caught safely in their arms. A few of my fellow cheerleaders apparently also catch with their eyes closed, as I was dropped on several occasions. In track I was a jumper. I would run, full-speed, down the runway, spring off the board and hurl myself as high and far into the air as I possibly could, eventually skidding to a gritty landing in the sand pit.

I have no problem using myself as the flying object as I don't have to catch anything! However, while I achieved moderate success in both cheer and track, they were painful endeavors. My knees still bear the scars from ‘track bites’ (the result of skidding across textured rubber and then grinding jumping-pit sand into the raw wounds) and I believe my fear of falling originated with a dropped basket toss during the halftime show of my Junior Homecoming game.

Finally, in college, I thought I had finally hit upon the perfect sport. Crew—or rowing—did not involve balls or any sort of flinging-into-the-air. My small size and natural aggression made me the perfect coxswain. I squeezed my little self into the cox’n seat of the boat and berated, cajoled, praised and bullied my rowers into pulling harder than anyone else on the lake. Imagine my chagrin when I discovered that the time-honored tradition for a winning boat is to toss their poor, hapless coxswain as far out into the (always fucking freezing!!!) water.

Once again, I was a projectile.

Speaking of water, I never learned to dive. Or swim. Cheated on all of my swim tests for rowing (my stroke just sorta held me up and tugged me along). Best I can do is flail about until I sorta kinda reach the side. Or sink.

In fact, the list of things I’ve discovered I suck at is long:

Math. Fucking numbers. They never add up the same way twice.

Social stuff. I was horribly, painfully shy until one day (high school-ish), I woke up and decided that was lame. I'm still very very very shy, but 'act as if' I'm not. kinda sorta works. The failed attempts at ball-sports may have helped me here as I’ve channeled all that pent-up aggression into outgoing, extroverted behaviors.

Singing. OK, I LOVE to sing. Unfortunately, no one loves to HEAR me sing. Pity. in fact, I sound so horrible, it took only until the age of 2 for each of my daughters to request that I NOT sing them lullabies: 'mama, no sing. no sing, Mama. please." ouch.

Acting. I'm only funny not-on-purpose. Actually, in my classroom I'm fucking hilarious, but that's because they're a captive audience and have to laugh at any stories or jokes I choose to tell. If they don’t, I give them grammar tests.

Spanish. Never did become fluent. I just can't 'hear' languages. I'm like Joey in Friends: it all just sounds like, 'blah blah-blah-blah blah BLAH". Unlike Stuart, who hears any foreign language for a second and is fluent. Seriously. It’s really annoying. Me..I'm great at English. That's it. Good thing that's my day job!

Recently, in that day job, the Athletic Dean asked me to fill one of our vacant coaching positions. I have enjoyed coaching various sports over the years and readily agreed, assuming he was going to ask me to reprise my role as either cheer or track assistant.

He handed me a tennis racquet and a pair of fuzzy little balls. I closed my eyes, turned my back, and abandoned the court. Ok, I walked out of the office, but I was working with a metaphor here!

So, this memo is for my Athletic Dean:

I don’t play with the kind of balls you throw or catch, but I do enjoy playing with the kind it’s not nice to kick!