Carmen's Story, Part 2: You're Tall - You Should Play Sports
Hello Yarn Lovers,
If you've not met me in person before then you may not be aware of how tall I am. I am in fact 6'1" or 186cm and have been since about the age of 13, meaning I was a really tall kid. Like the kid that was a head taller than almost every other kid. What the heck does this have to do with anything? Well you see, if you're tall and growing up in America then you are going to be asked, no told, to play sports for tall people.
My Mom took me to swimming lessons starting at 1 month old and I absolutely took to the water like a fish. I mean I am a Cancer so that really shouldn't be too surprising. I continued lessons and joined the swim team and was competing against kids twice my age pretty quickly. Swimming was great, I absolutely loved it and I don't remember there being a lot of pressure on me to win even though I was doing well. My dream was to compete in the 1996 Olympics.
This is where the height comes in. In the third grade (aka 8 years old) you could start playing basketball. I had already been playing soccer for a while - because all of my friends did, not because I was any good at it but it didn't interfere with swimming in the same way that basketball would come to. So my best friend's Dad decided he would coach and I was told to come play basketball because of course I should, I was tall.
This started me on a path that would continue until I was 21, it would consume my life. After basketball came volleyball and those are the two sports I ended up focusing on. I left the swim team, finally stopped attempting to play soccer around age 11 and gave up trying to be a high jumper around the same time. I was to do the tall girl sports and that I did. I tried out for all the teams and usually made the top tier. I'm not entirely sure I always deserved it but I was tall and they needed a tall girl.
I don't say I didn't deserve it to sound self deprecating or to put myself down but I wasn't the fastest or strongest or most physical. This lead to being looked at as the weak link by coaches a lot. They wanted my height but wished I had the speed of a point guard and the power of a boy so I got yelled at a lot and told I wasn't fast enough, wasn't good enough. A common coaching technique at the time (I really hope it isn't still) was to make the whole team run lines under a certain time and if anyone didn't beat the clock, you all ran again and again and again until you were so dog tired that there was no chance of you making the time. It was always important to make sure everyone knew why they were still running and that it was because that person wasn't trying hard enough - wasn't trying hard enough for their teammates. Letting everyone down. Like I said, I really hope coaching styles have changed...
I was by no means terrible, I was pretty good and I worked incredibly hard and the teams I was on were successful. We won a lot and with winning comes a lot of praise and a lot of pressure. University is incredibly expensive in the US and so my path to going was to try and get a sports scholarship, so that became my singular life goal. My parents had diligently been saving for me and my sister to go to college but the deal was that they would pay for in-state tuition (in the US tuition is different if you live in the state or out of it and it can be 3 or 4 times as much for out-of-state students) and if we wanted to go elsewhere we had to figure that out for ourselves. And I wanted to go away, far away and see the world, starting with an out-of-state university.
So I got competitive, I didn't just play during the regular season, I joined all of the out of season club teams and went to summer camps and my parents installed a basketball hoop in our front yard and I practiced my free throws and all of my post moves. I had a couple of incredibly lovely basketball coaches - namely Allison Lang a former Canadian Olympian who had played professionally in Italy. I wanted to be her, she was tall and blonde and so athletic and the thought of playing professional basketball in Europe sounded amazing.
Not all of my coaches were very pleasant, not at all. As I moved away from basketball in high school (much to everyone's surprise) and towards volleyball, the level of competitive insanity and psychologically damaging coaching styles only increased. The concept of tearing someone down in order to rebuild them the way you wanted was a favorite of the set of coaches I ended up with. I didn't at all realise how ludicrous the behaviour of the those adults around me was until I was years past being involved with them. Telling teenage girls they were worthless morons who wouldn't amount to anything because a serve went out of bounds during practice is really unnecessary and really bad for one's self esteem, let me tell you.
My senior year of high school we were really good. We didn't lose a single match that year, not in league play and not in side tournaments. The local news regularly showed clips of our games on TV and I was awarded the "Prep Athlete of the Week" award by one of the stations. Somewhere exists a VHS recording of the news cast from that week and my interview alongside a clip of game play in which I spiked the ball, past the block and right into the face of the girl behind them, knocking her over - all in slow motion - its a rather impressive and hilarious clip actually. So we had an undefeated season and went to the State Tournament and lost in the first round. We had been the tournament favorites and in about 45 minutes our state championship dreams came crashing down.
That same year we were at a weekend tournament and playing a team from our league - it was the 3rd game in the match and we were down 14-0. They needed one more point to win, one more point to end our undefeated streak. I still remember the feeling I had on the court that day, of all the games I ever played, this one really sticks with me. We came back and won 16-14 - it is always possible to come back from what looks like inevitable defeat, always.
I did it. I got what is called a "full ride" or a full scholarship to a university to play volleyball. My tuition and my housing was paid for so long as I played volleyball - how good a deal was that? I was recruited by a couple of schools and ended up accepting the offer I had from the University of California Irvine. Moving to Southern California seemed like a fantastic idea, I would live by the beach!
I played college volleyball for two seasons and then I joined the Track & Field team. It was a bit of a lark at first, I just wanted to train more and better. We were the bottom of our league in volleyball and I wasn't used to being there and I wanted to be better and I had befriended one of the track coaches and so myself another teammate went and trained with them in the Spring. One thing lead to another and I became a hammer thrower. I left the volleyball team and my scholarship behind after we got a new head coach and I could see the same abusive tendencies in her coaching style that I had had in high school and I wasn't prepared to continue on that path again. My health was more important to me. For obvious reasons this didn't really please my parents - they saw me losing out on $40,000 a year but also there is no way I explained to them very well what was going on and why I was giving it up. I didn't have the vocabulary or the capacity to communicate it properly. I spent the summer sorting out how I was going to pay for the rest of school and I managed to get in-state residency so the fees were greatly reduced and back in the bracket of affordable.
Then I was a hammer thrower and I had the best coach in the world. Jim Driscoll was his name and he had once been an almost olympian in the hammer throw and he changed my life. Changed my outlook on a lot of things, taught me about resting and recovering for peak performance. He taught me about canaries - the signals our body gives us that it's time for a break. That you can achieve things through positive reinforcement. While throwing is technically an individual sport, we had the best team. That first year it was only me and a kid named Andy and the next year we grew to a team of seven and we were a tight bunch. The best teammates I'd ever had and it wasn't a team sport, it was nothing but supportive and hilarious. Every Friday night before a meet everyone came to mine and we had "steak night" - basically a lot of steak on a BBQ with a side of bread and cheese, possibly some asparagus. I thank my past self so much for the choice I made to leave volleyball and give this random sport of Hammer Throwing a try, it was one of the best decisions I ever made.
When I graduated in 2002 and left competitive sports behind for good I was sad and confused - what in the world was I going to do with myself now? I had only had a plan as far as getting to University and getting a scholarship. I felt quite lost and untethered after graduation, that's for sure. It wouldn't be the last time I felt that way but it was the first.
Carmen's Story
Part 1: Let's Start at the Beginning
Part 2: You're Tall - You Should Play Sports