Raptured and reeling, I vomited some words onto a Google Doc.
It was October, I’d just spent an hour enthralled by some magical creation called volleyball, and I wanted to memorialize the experience. Here’s what I wrote:
The stands rattle and shake, convulsing under hundreds of stamping feet. You can feel it, the movement of the stands quivering up through your body, starting at your feet and ending somewhere in your gut, the rattling mixing with the tension and the emotion and the kineticism.
Deafening roars reverberate off the gym walls. The place is a cauldron. Fans lob dueling chants at each other. Energy courses through the air.
A hush settles before every point, but one different from the perfect stillness before, say, a tennis serve. This silence is laced with visceral screams. Expressions of sheer emotion cut the silence.
Double-hand high-fives are a way of life. They are made with the whole body, not just the arms. The torso leans back, almost winding up, and then comes forward as hands meet, an effortless but perfect connection.
This is a county semifinal. This is a rabid environment. This is all anyone could possibly want from sports. This is glorious.
A breathless account of a breathless hour.
This epiphany about volleyball happened randomly. A total fluke. Three friends were covering Westfield’s Union County Tournament semifinal, and, seated in the stands at Arthur L. Johnson High School, they called me asking if I wanted to come. Sure, I said.
So I unlocked the front door, stepped into the comfortable October night, hopped into my car. The two miles between my house and ALJ disappeared beneath my car’s wheels, and there I was. At a volleyball match. For the first time.
I mainly went to hang out with my friends. I expected to spend the hour sitting in the stands and talking, the game a mere backdrop, an excuse. I was partially right. We did that. It was fun.
But it was more. So much more.
Because, well, volleyball.
The backdrop had vaulted to the fore.
It was my first encounter, in the fall season, with a “smaller sport,” one of the ones not called football or soccer, because my own uninitiated brain had consigned itself to covering football and girls soccer and nothing else.
It was the logical choice. Football is, of course, America’s most popular sport, a national pastime that vacuums attention, a game Americans have always unabashedly romanticized. Soccer is, importantly, my favorite sport, the beautiful game, and because I played on the boys team I jumped at every opportunity to cover the girls team.
Volleyball? An afterthought.
Then I watched a match. Woah.
I eventually covered two matches: the UCT final and the Group 4 final. Each time, the action riveted me. The sport’s kineticism drowned me.
What a revelation.
A crammed fall schedule prevented me from exploring other “smaller” sports. Then came the winter. Basketball to watch, to cover. But other sports, too. Bowling. Swimming.
Again, shock. Awe. Newfound appreciation for sports I’d barely considered.
Months and months ago, before this school year—when Hi’s Eye Sports existed only as a shapeless concept, as a lump of malleable putty—I’d thought little about the smaller sports. I was indifferent. I remained so, even as the fall season hurtled forward, even as some of my classmates covered the unheralded sports, the field hockeys, the volleyballs.
But that October night whisked away my prejudice against smaller sports.
Bowling stunned me the most. It’s an old-timers’ sport, a children’s game, a place for food and laughter and lighthearted fun. Or so I thought. It couldn’t possibly be an engrossing high school sport. Could it?
Again, I vomited words onto a Google Doc. Many Google Docs, actually, little universal tidbits manifesting at each match. Here’s a consolidated form, culled from my notes:
Walk into Jersey Lanes on any winter Thursday afternoon, and you walk into a hub of activity. Pins clatter, bowlers yell, balls slice down lanes. There is an endless bustle, a ceaseless energy, a fierce competition that belies the camaraderie inherent in bowling.
Union County Tournament day is different. Most of the 42 lanes stand empty, phalanxes of pins silent in their dark alcoves. The environment, to a clueless somebody wandering in through the front doors, perhaps seems akin to the sleepy feel of a bowling alley on a Sunday afternoon.
Then you walk into the county tournament pocket, into the patch of lanes entrenched in competition.
There things are different.
There the tension bubbles.
There a wordless, gnawing tension replaces the usual steady cacophony.
It was all, I quickly realized, rather glorious.
I’d stumbled upon a hidden wonder, like a desert traveler gulping from a secret freshwater spring as, around him, everyone else sips stale bottled water. It frustrated me, a little bit, that so few shared this appreciation for the smaller sports.
It was a common sentiment in our Hi’s Eye Sports classroom. Someone would cover a new sport—venture into a new realm—and return to class the next day exclaiming surprisedly about the sport, about how cool it is, how fun.
It happened with wrestling and swimming and volleyball and field hockey and more.
I couldn’t resist, during one bowling article, lobbing a barb. Here’s how I concluded my article about the Union County Individual Tournament:
The unique format creates an inimitable spectacle.
Things are quiet down there at the end of the lanes, quiet but for a murmur. If not for the soft pulse of the discordant music and the distant crashes from recreational bowlers, it would be nearly silent.
Silent, that is, until the ball slams 10 pins into the ground. Then the motley cluster behind the lanes grows animated.
There was a lot of that on Friday, a lot of ooohs and a lot of clapping, a lot of appreciation for the gifted array of Union County bowlers whose brilliance was on full display for those who were there to see it.
It’s that last part. For those who were there to see it. A gentle parting shot, leveled at all those who were, of course, not there to see it.
Which, looking back, is a bit unfair. Do I truly expect people to uproot their weeknights and journey to a bowling alley? Not really. The world just doesn’t work that way.
But to journey to Jersey Lanes on a winter Thursday is to uncover an idiosyncratic delight, something uniquely special.
Bowling is, it’s safe to say, the least popular high school sport, spectated exclusively by coaches and parents—and maybe also by the occasional bowling aficionado who basically lives in the lanes. It’s also the most intimate high school sport. The ceiling is low, the standing area limited, the bowlers mere yards from their watching parents. There exists, unlike in other sports, essentially no divider between playing area and spectating area. All is one.
Every sport has this, the little things that differentiate it, the amazing stuff born out of its distinct environment.
And the emotion. The passion. Every sport has it. The soccer player tearing off his shirt and running around like a madman after scoring the winner in a sectional final. The swimmer sitting by the pool’s edge and roaring to raise the dead after winning the state championship. The basketball player sobbing as the buzzer sounds on her season. The tennis player screaming in frustration as his rhythm deserts him. The list goes on.
A sport is a sport because its practitioners possess that fervor. A sport is a sport because it threatens its practitioners with a terrifying yet irresistible tornado of emotions. A sport is a sport because it’s beautiful and ugly and unpredictable all at once.
And a sport is a sport is a sport.
