Written late last night in Claremont, NH.
I’m currently writing this from Claremont, NH, where my son’s high school basketball team just took on Stevens High School. To get here, I drove two hours over a route that included Lempster Mountain Road—a roller coaster of white-knuckle stress I haven’t experienced in a long time. There was a winter storm tonight, and at several moments I had to drive through total whiteout conditions. On a few occasions, my truck’s wheels spun out. It wasn’t a fun ride.
But my choice was to either get here so I could take the boy home in this mess or let him do it himself. If I let him ride the bus home and then drive after the game, he wouldn’t get home until 11 or later. Now he’ll still get home after 11, but at least he won’t be exhausted, and his mother and I didn’t have to risk him driving in a storm with less than a year of driving experience under his belt. Instead, he’ll catch some z’s while I drive, and the only fallout is a few extra minutes of exhaustion on my life tally.
Can’t Always Drive
There will be nights, though, when I can’t make it to the game. And the boy, and his teammates, will take the long drive back to their school before driving themselves home. Sometimes they won’t get home until past midnight and then have to be ready to do it all again the next day, bright and early. There will be weeks when they have three games, two of which are an hour and a half away, and when they get home, they can’t sleep past 5 a.m. because their coaches expect them to hit the gym the next day before class. When I was a kid, I remember some football and hockey teams doing this, but that was highly unusual. This modus operandi now seems to touch several sports.
It all feels a bit much, and New Hampshire brings a particularly challenging problem because sports divisions are primarily determined by school size rather than geography—hence why kids might compete against a team that’s over two hours away. This makes a lot of parents go nuts, including me and my wife, because it takes a toll on the kids. How are they supposed to function in class when they can rarely get seven hours of sleep?
This map reflects just one division in New Hampshire High School Basketball. Away games are the worst.
On the Plus Side
But then again, consider the other complaint parents have these days about how kids aren’t forming the resilience that was forged in the woods of their Generation X parents. That we parents fear for our kids’ ability to make it in the world because they never got to be free-range chickens like we did. Well, if this is a fear of yours, high school sports start to look pretty good, as does any extracurricular endeavor that isn’t on the phone. And the more I think on it, the free-range chicken stuff (which I think is extremely important) helped mostly with my creativity and ability to navigate situations, but it was some dreadfully long sports days that helped me with my resilience.
Training Ground
High school sports aren’t like military training or anything, but they do offer some good first tests of will. I can recall many. Wrestling meets in places I’d never heard of, where after a long fight on the mat we were met with snow falling on the ground and a two- or three-hour drive home. Soccer matches where we didn’t have the good sense to bring water bottles like players do now. There were also baseball games, roasting in the sun, where I tried to maintain my concentration while gnats bit my neck. I remember several swim meets, freezing my ass off while waiting to race on a particularly chilly day, all because I didn’t know sweatsuits were a thing. And there were weekend-long sailing tournaments where you’d spend up to eight hours on the water, soaking wet, in all kinds of weather, with hardly any food in your belly.
I played more physical sports as well, like football and lacrosse, but it’s not the physicality of the sport that builds resilience. Rather, it’s the long grind—practices, travel, sustained effort—that helps us withstand the tougher aspects of life that come later. Reflecting back, I benefited greatly from those experiences, as awful as some of them seemed at the time, and it occurs to me now that my son is actually getting to have way more of them. So maybe this basketball grind isn’t so bad for these kids after all.
It sure is hell on the parents, though.