Lacrosse: A Love Story, Part 3 (12/30)

Thirty essays in thirty days, number twelve

If you missed them, here are Part 1 and Part 2.

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The concussed have a lot of time to think. There’s not much else you can do. The thinking happens slowly, erratically, in fits and starts, but the sheer proportion of your waking hours that thinking occupies means that a great deal of it occurs.

During my months of concussion, I thought a lot about identity. The identity of ‘lacrosse player’ had come to define me. I was other things, of course—a student, a son, a friend, and so on—but the pie chart of how I saw myself was colored mostly by my sport. This is true for most athletes. When you love a game on such a deep level and spend hours and hours every day playing it or talking about it or thinking about it, you can’t help but decorate your own image with its ornaments. 

This creates fragility. Athletes get hurt, especially in a physical game like lacrosse. A season-ending injury forces the athlete to grapple with uncomfortable questions. Will I be able to perform at the same level when I return? Will I return at all? Without the game, who am I? 

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When I arrived at Southwestern, a school with only 1,300 students, I came to understand that fraternities were at the heart of the social scene. The coaches of all the sports teams had begrudgingly come to terms with the fact most of their players would join fraternities. What they did not come to terms with, however, was their players going through pledgeship during their sport’s season. They thought it was too much. While the coaches didn’t have the power to forbid it, they very strongly suggested that we wait until the offseason.

Most of us didn’t. As freshmen, we were having too much fun with this new college thing. That our coaches told us it would be too much for us to handle was the perfect reason to prove them wrong. Besides, there were thirteen of us in my recruiting class, and we made up most of the starting lineup. What were they going to do—bench us all? 

It turned out that our coaches weren’t stupid. Pledging during the season was absurd. A given day might include a 6am breakfast followed by an hour cleaning the beer-soaked fraternity house floors, three hours of class, four hours of practice plus rehab and film, and another few hours of pledgeship events. This didn’t include schoolwork or other…socializing. 

The relative success of our first season temporarily eased some of the tension with the coaches, but it always lingered in the background. It intensified when the new coaching staff came in ahead of my sophomore season. Our recently-promoted head coach had been in a fraternity at Southwestern, but the new assistant was coming from the high school level, and he didn’t like the ubiquity and the perceived distraction that the fraternities provided.

I had moved into the fraternity house for my sophomore year, and the injury dictated that I spend most of my time there while I recovered. I naturally found myself getting more involved with the chapter. I didn’t have anything else to do, and I loved my fraternity and the people in it.

It also offered a burgeoning new source of identity. 

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Recovering from the concussion did in fact take months. Long, monotonous months. It was around the end of the semester that I finally started to feel like myself. I decided to spend the summer with my sister and brother-in-law out in the countryside of North Carolina, a beautiful change of scenery where I could regroup and get back to living. In a subconscious effort to make up for lost time, I took both an unpaid internship and a well-paid job waiting tables for a tyrannical Greek. This was on top of all the classwork that needed to be made up.

The good news was that I was cleared to get back to full activity. My dad bought me a lacrosse goal that we assembled in the pasture of the North Carolina farmhouse, and that pasture became my practice field. I set up some cones and used that space to work on shooting and conditioning, and the brick wall on the side of the house was perfect for passing. This work was a conscious effort to make up for lost time. I was ready to make that record-breaking season a reality.

My coaches were texting me all summer, hyping me up for my triumphant return. I was going to have a breakout year, they said. And the team looked primed to bounce back from a disappointing season during which mine wasn’t the only major injury. We had some key players returning, and we had brought in another strong recruiting class, including a couple highly-touted transfers. It was time to put the previous year in the rearview and play up to our potential.

In the weeks leading up to our return to campus I played in some local men’s league games back in Houston. I felt fantastic. My conditioning and stick skills were in midseason form, and the laid back environment of men’s league helped me ease back into the flow of the game. It was going to be a big year.

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During my time at Southwestern, the fraternity went through something of its own hero’s journey. The first semester of my junior year was the ‘all is lost’ moment. Our average GPA had tanked, our house was in shambles, and we had all kinds of disciplinary issues. It all came to a head with a particular incident in the winter. This isn’t the place to go into the details, but the upshot of it was that we needed to make some major changes.

I had developed a good reputation among the chapter and our advisory board. After all the dust settled from our various catastrophes, they voted me president to help turn things around. I felt a responsibility toward the chapter; it was important to me, and I thought I would be useful in the role. As far as lacrosse went, my strong freshman season had happened during my pledgeship, so I wasn’t worried about having too much on my plate.

The buzz again grew as we approached our season opener. We were healthy and deep at every position, and our coaching staff now had a full season under their belt. We hit it hard in the preseason. Our practices were intense, and we felt like we were working towards something. When that first whistle blew in February to kick off the regular season, we were going to be ready. 

Our first few games validated our work—both the team’s and mine. We won the first two convincingly, and I had strong performances in both, including a big (and slightly illegal) hit on an unsuspecting midfielder.

A play that happened in our third game told the story of how well I was playing and how much confidence our coaches had in me. We had committed a penalty, so we were playing down a man—five on six. We made a stop on defense and got the ball back, and our coach called timeout. 

The strategy in this situation is always the same: kill the penalty. Meaning, try to run away from the defense and keep the ball until the time on the penalty expires and we’re back to playing six on six. But our coach had another idea. 

He looked at me. “Start with the ball. They’re going to double team you. Split the double team and go score.”

I stared at him. This was not a play I had ever heard called. As simple as he made it sound, getting through two defenders with long metal sticks who are a foot taller than you is quite difficult. Scoring a goal after that—even more so. I loved the play call and the confidence he had, but this was more than a long shot. Oh well. No choice but to try, I guess. 

I took the ball in the corner of the field. The referee stood next to me, making sure the two defenders who were ready to beat the shit out of me gave me the required five yards of room. My teammates cleared out to the other side of the field so that I would have space to get to the goal—if I somehow managed to get through the two defenders bearing down on me, that is.

The referee blew his whistle. Some subconscious part of me decided to go with a spin move. Bold strategy. The bodies of the defenders converged, and I lost the ball. But then it popped out and rolled on the ground in front of me. As I bounced off of both defenders and squeezed through them, I was able to pick the ball back up with a little bit of momentum. This was where my size became an advantage. I was way faster than those dudes. It was off to the races. Since my teammates had done a great job of clearing out the other defenders and creating space, I had a clear path to the goal. I buried it. 

I played really well in the next game too, a tight one against a good team. The first fifty-nine minutes of that game was probably the best our team looked all season. But during the last minute we came apart. We gave up a goal to go down by one, then had a chance to send it to overtime with a man-advantage from a penalty and didn’t convert. It was a heartbreaker.

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Something happened in that game—to the team, and to me. From that point on we were never the same. As far as the team goes, maybe it was the difficulty of a close loss to a great team that we never moved on from. For me, it’s a bit more complicated and tough to parse out.

I struggled mightily the rest of the year. I played timid and tight, scared and confused. Some kind of switch had flipped. The harder I tried, the more I tried to dissect what was going on, the worse it got. I could not figure it out.

At first the coaching staff was supportive. They saw it as some kind of slump, a transient impotence. They told me that I needed to shoot more, to be more aggressive, to not worry about making the right play and instead just go out there and do what I knew how to do. I was a star player, they said. The production would come. 

But as each game passed without any improvement, their attitude shifted. The support turned to an increasingly thinly-veiled disgust. I had become a lost cause, an embodiment of wasted potential.

It was at this stage, toward the end of the season, that I found myself in coach’s office, watching film, trying to both figure out what was going on and earn back some goodwill. When I told him I was trying, the look of disgust reached its peak, no longer veiled in the least. The walk back to the fraternity house that night remains etched in my memory.  

The fraternity house, though, had become a place of solace. Things were going swimmingly on that front. The morale of the chapter had done a one-eighty; everything was trending in the right direction, and we had raised $300,000 for a full renovation of the house. For all the failure on the field, the fraternity was a place where I felt comfortable—an identity I could hang my hat on. 

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The season ended with a whimper. It could’ve been worse—we won seven games, including a couple to be proud of—but we were far from where we should have been. On an individual level, I had sunk lower than I could’ve imagined.

There are a few possible explanations for what happened. In that game we lost by a goal, the one where everything changed, I remember being pretty banged up afterwards. It’s possible that I was reminded of what an injury could do, reminded of what it was like to sit in a dark room for three months. I remember moments where I shied away from contact, scared of another hit to the head, viscerally aware of the knowledge that one concussion makes you more susceptible to others. I know that on some level I was playing from a place of fear.

I also felt the pressure. I was supposed to be performing at the highest level, making things happen every game. This wasn’t much of a burden when I was playing well. But when I started to come up empty, game after game, the pressure became more acute at the same time that I felt the least equipped to deal with it. This undoubtedly played a role in the later stages of the season.

I learned that my assistant coach had another hypothesis, though. After the season he ended up moving on to another coaching job. He never told me he was leaving; I had to find out secondhand. One night, drunk at a party at the fraternity house, I texted him out of the blue telling him it hurt that he left like that without saying anything. His response: “When u frat, they frat.”

Ah. This explained the disgust.

I knew the coaches didn’t like us being in fraternities. I knew they didn’t like the role I had chosen to take on during the season and the example it set for the younger guys who also chose to pledge at the same time. When I read his message, I felt indignant. Who was he to tell me how to spend my time outside of the many hours I was already spending on lacrosse? He didn’t know what it was like to sit there for months on end with nothing to do while 25% of my college lacrosse career vanished, to have the foundation of my identity on life support. How could he blame me for finding myself in something else?

Valid points on my side, to be sure. But there was an element of truth that I didn’t want to cop to. By getting involved with the fraternity to the extent that I did, I was making a trade-off. If I wanted to be an elite lacrosse player, there were hours that I could have been spending putting in extra work on my shot or in the weight room, hours I could have been spending getting better. I chose to spend those hours otherwise. This wasn’t objectively wrong or right; it was a choice like any other, with its own implications and consequences. 

Either way, the season was over. Time did what time does, passing with a blatant disregard for the wishes of its constituents. The reality of the situation was that I had one more season of college lacrosse left. My senior year. 

Better make it count. 

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Stay tuned for Part 4.