Basketball has long taught me about life.
Today, I’m a student in Camosun’s Athletic and Exercise Therapy program and a student athletic therapist with the Camosun Chargers. But 10 years ago, I graduated high school and entered my first year of college with limited attention paid to academic growth, and a wholehearted focus on collegiate sport. I was a woman then, seemingly cisgender and straight, emerging into adulthood, living alone, dating handsome men, partying and playing with the team who would become something akin to family, and doing my very best to belong.
Collegiate sport is a uniquely intimate experience. Strangers gather in the early season with a burning energy and a common goal: to win. Rookies fresh from high school and players midway through their eligibility are recruited and enter the arena (Theodore Roosevelt’s metaphorical arena, that is). Veterans better grasp the depth of it all; there is often a fiery sense of urgency behind each game, practice, moment, because they know they’re close to the end.
Eligibility is finite, as is the body’s capacity to perform with consistent excellence through such rigorous physiological and psychological conditions.
Elite sport and deep vulnerability are enmeshed. There’s a prerequisite of emotional exposure required to wholly dedicate your mind, body, and spirit to a craft, and to be witnessed doing so by team, coaches, and crowds. There’s a personal and collective expectation (and requirement) of unwavering intensity. It’s a poetic paradox. A vigorous passion burns to the pinnacle of a win, and the equal magnitude of emotion is felt in a loss. The burden of the rise is known in the fall; losses provoke a sense of the unbearable, tearing apart the spirit as much as a win strengthens it.
Hours in the arena blend to days to weeks to months. What begins as a group of untethered players becomes a cohesive, focused force. The transformation from team to family happens along the way: it’s subtle. It creeps up on you, and suddenly they’re your siblings. When one falls in pain during a practice, an invisible but palpable string is plucked among the group.
The cohesiveness is so present that any minute rupture shakes the whole. This is the beauty of sport—the collective perseverance is transcendental, uniting the team far beyond the game. You inevitably leave with the experience of having become a part of something bigger than yourself.
This was the state of connection I was a part of 10 years ago with my team, when, on her way to school, a teammate’s vehicle drove off the road, rolled several times, and left her unconscious and brain dead.
We didn’t know she was dead yet. All we knew was she had been flown by helicopter from the scene and was hours away at a larger hospital. So that evening when we gathered in the centre of the court to hear an update, and our coach said, “She isn’t going to make it,” I thought, No kidding, she’s several hours away in the hospital; of course she won’t be at practice.
It wasn’t until my teammates—my family—clasped their mouths, released primal wails, and fell to their knees like dying leaves that I understood: she died. My body turned around, took three steps away from the group, and collapsed. I was acquainted with death at this point of my life, so I immediately grasped the unbearable finality of it. She was gone, forever. Our coach kept speaking to us, but I was underwater, inside the ocean of grief and shock, and couldn’t hear him. If minute ruptures could shake the whole, this could devastate.
The transcendental capacity of adversity multiplied (and was realized) in the weeks that followed. Her body was kept alive by machines for three days until six different people received her organs: lives saved and transformed by her sacrifice. While she was on life support we all got on a bus to play our final game of the season, and we needed to win to secure our place in the playoffs (which felt frivolous given our new reality). I would normally stretch out across the bus, laying my feet in the lap of a now-empty seat. We always did a head count before leaving campus, and this time we left with one person missing.
I was shocked at the collective ability to keep moving forward, which in retrospect was a forced, rushed lesson of simultaneity. Two things could be, and had to be, true at once: she was dead, and our season continued. Grieving as a team who had consistent practice at enduring challenging conditions together was immense. Our entirety was felt in waves of grief that, when washed over one of us, rocked us all. The game became a source of stability, an anchor.
Grief is a culmination of energy and the game gave us a place to put it. We won that game with an empty seat on the bench. I held my crumbling sisters and sobbing coach in my arms. We cried
through a long moment of silence observed by our opponents, holding on to each other for quite literally dear life.
A week later we each laid a rose on her casket before it descended into the earth. Her funeral was beautiful and agonizing, exactly as ought to be for the sudden loss of a beloved 18 year old. Our bus carried us from her casket to the playoff banquet the same day, a relentless procession. Every single team present donned T-shirts in her honour. Speeches were made in shows of support. Players Sharpied her number onto their skin and their sweat would rub it onto ours as we faced each other on the court. Playoffs are traditionally a space of elite competition, but this was a triumph of collective spirit. The death of one united the whole. How devastatingly inevitable it is that vast transformation is so catalyzed by loss. And did we ever lose. I don’t recall where we landed in the ranks, but I do recall my final moments of that sport transporting me some place beyond the court. This was the arena; we strove valiantly; we dared greatly.
The capacity to hold two true things at once became the skill that would calcify as essential as I waded through the world. Suffering—or loss—and evolution would continue to coincide. The human experience, it turns out, demands sensitivity. The capacity to feel is a superhuman power, informing and forming everything.
I write this on the nine-year anniversary of her death. When I walk into the arena and hold a basketball in my hands, it will feel—and it will be—bigger than the game.