No Contest
For as long as I can remember, I have loved soccer. I love to play it, love to watch it, and at least a quarter of my wardrobe consists of soccer inspired apparel. It was a natural transition that in high school, I would join the soccer team. There was only one small problem, in my freshman year; my high school consisted of about 200 students…and no sports teams.
As one can imagine, things were looking down. But all hope was not lost, at least not yet. A few students willing to make their voice heard caught the attention of a teacher whom might have been considered to have a natural acclimation to the game, or at least more of one than most other of his colleagues. To make a long story short, by the beginning of sophomore year, our lowly little school had managed to sign the right papers and gather enough students, a handful of them involuntarily I might add, together on our sponsor college’s pitch. By this time, Queens HS for the Sciences at York College now fostered the massive number of 300 pupils in three of the traditional four high school tiers, that is, freshman, sophomore and junior. Yes, your sarcasm detection is quite acute. Good luck trying to find eleven highly skilled soccer players from such a pathetic pool. Our goalies were more interested in the oversized posteriors of bimbos walking down the filthy streets of Jamaica than they were in what was happening on the pitch. Our forwards were made up of a scrawny underclassmen and overly cocky juniors. Our defense consisted of anyone tall enough and strong enough to do anything about the endlessly approaching enemy. I say endlessly not as an exaggeration for dramatic effect, but as a literal description of the sheer incompetence of everyone coming back to the York benches at halftime. It might not be entirely fair to say that everyone on the team was equally unskilled, but from where I was standing, that is exactly how it looked. And finally, for our midfield; well, essentially our midfield was made up every and anybody else. I myself had the great misfortune of being cast as a defender. I was doomed from the start, as was the entire team’s future. I was an average player on a horrendous team. The years went by and the losses piled up. I don’t care to discuss the particulars but let’s just say we were at the absolute bottom of every season’s standings.
There is a lot about high school that I wish would have gone differently, but if I had to pick just one, there is truly no contest to the experience I had on the Cardinals. “No contest”—exactly what a real athletic commission would deem our performance for those three miserable years.