Enough stories of organized, high-stakes middle and high school sports that often end in embarrassment and disappointment. Alex here, and I'm back to talk about the real gold from our childhood competitions: backyard sports.
Sure the video game series was great, but nothing really compares to your elementary and middle school days - when you would get home, spell a couple of words, figure out a couple of multiplication problems for homework and then get outside and just play in the yard or street of the neighborhood.
The value of being active is undoubtedly important for establishing healthy habits at a young age. The NFL has Play 60, a campaign to counter any notion of childhood obesity with the mission of encouraging kids to be active for at least an hour a day. As true and beneficial as this is, that's not why we were out there.
We just had fun.
I remember being in elementary school and starting a home run derby with my younger brother. There were trees planted around my backyard, and at the time, they were only seven feet tall or so. Translation: the perfect height to hit a Wiffle ball over and feel immensely proud of what you had just accomplished.
We would each get 10 outs, similar to the MLB's rules for its home run derby, to see who could hit the most homers. We would use a technique called "bottlecapping," however, which involves throwing the ball up to yourself and then hitting it, rather than having a pitcher. We had a souped-up plastic bat with electrical tape wrapped at least five times over on the barrel. I would win some and he would win some, but no matter the outcome, we always came back for more.
Then there was the outdoor football league we had going at my friend's house down the street. Sure, there were some trees in the yard we had to watch out for, and the neighbor once kicked us off his lawn that served as one end zone because we ran into his plants, but we kept playing.
There were around seven or eight of us, and we would break up into fairly even teams and "kick off" to each other. It was a game of tackle football, which sometimes meant injuries and other times meant cowering in fear of the kid who had 40 pounds on you.
It evened out, though, as it always did, and that was the beauty of backyard sports: There were hardly any pressures outside of wanting to impress your friends. It was a carefree environment to laugh, joke and definitely show off. We could try out different positions, and if it didn't work - if you threw an interception - it didn't count for anything but a joke from your friend.
I remember making diving catches and feeling like a real player. I remember trash talking before and after the games. I remember walking back up the hill to my house with my brother as the sun was setting. The results of the game didn't matter in the long run, but the rest did. We weren't especially busy back then, so we could wake up every day knowing that later on we would get together as friends and enjoy ourselves.
There was a real feeling of camaraderie established in those days, and I was just talking to one of my friends last week who says he wants to try and get a game going for fun when we're all back in town.
I don't think I could pass up the opportunity.
