Escape Pod Dreams: The 'Athletic Culture and its Discontents' Issue

The Running Daughter

I'm going to dispense with the usual horseplay this time. Instead, I am going to pay tribute to all the people who went out for extra-curricular athletics who stuck with it in the face of mediocrity.


My daughter has had a hard slog as a cross-country runner. She's not very fast, but she is persistent. She has not given up and she has not been told to go find something else to do with her time.


When they held an athletic award ceremony for her school this evening, she sat there reading, apart from the rest of the groups, not really hoping that she would get a piece of paper or a plaque, but maybe that she would get to stand in the public eye with her team mates. Many of her team mates were multiple offenders, who played more than one sport and got to stand up with other teams. My daughter only participated in one and never got out of her seat.


While many of the team coachs made sure that all their people got to get up and stand together, her running coach didn't see any reason to.
With forty-odd kids and only four certificates to present, maybe she wanted to shorten the time length of the ponderous program or maybe she wanted to avoid embarrassing the ones who didn't get a piece of paper or a certificate. I don't know.


What I do know is that I had to have a conversation with my daughter after we left about not winning not being a form of losing.

I don't know how much she or I believed of the pucky I was shoveling, but we got a couple of laughs out of it.

I have won and I have lost and I have had instances when recognition was extended for dubious reasons to others while I did my best and hardly anyone had any reason to know.



Sometimes trying or persisting takes more fortitude and even skill than excelling. The pursuit of excellence and the awarding of same gets all the headlines, but in the end, the excellers wouldn't stand out without the control group of the persistent who don't 'win'.


So, to every person who didn't give up, who stayed the course even though they weren't a star or an olympic hopeful, who sat through interminable awards functions knowing damn well they were just filling a chair, this certificate is for you.

This is to certify that sheer guts makes a team, that persistence makes a team, that the willingness to help others accumulate points makes a team and without a team, there are no stars, and no marketable faces.

When my daughter ran at the back of the pack, doggedly, not faltering, not falling out, not throwing up, her staying the course and finishing helped her team.

I know this, she knows it, and her coach knows it, whether anyone else does. No plaque or ribbon can ever take the place of knowing.