Becoming a N(on-) A(thletic) R(egular) P(erson)

It was in elementary school that I first began to identify myself with my ability to kick a ball.

Because it was during those five years that I was playing soccer for the most feared youth travel soccer team in the Greater Baltimore area: the Towson United Thunder. Coached by former semi-pro and Maryland soccer legend Chris Reif—the Pep Guardiola of little kid soccer—we dominated tournaments around the area for five years. We were packed with athletic talent: up front was Teddy, a lanky, quiet kid who was Cristiano Ronaldo’s speed and Lionel Messi’s dribbling packed into an eight-year-old body. He later played professional soccer in Argentina before signing with an MLS team. In the midfield was future Georgetown University track star Owen, a little dynamo who hounded other tweens with his constant energy and occasional anger issues, as well as Mattias, a strong kid with big, curly black hair, who now plays soccer for the Ivy League-champions Penn. And between the sticks was Peter, who, for his exploits on the baseball field, was drafted in the second round of the MLB draft last year by the Dodgers. I was the stalwart on the back line, tasked with shadowing the opposition’s best attacker and using the defensive instincts and tenacity taught to me by my huge older brothers to run people off the ball and boot it down the shrunken field. If there had been an AP Poll of the best U8 boys’ soccer teams in the state of Maryland (why is there not?), we would have been the Alabama.

We turned this team into our identities, wearing our maroon and white Towson United jackets to school every day and looking down upon the other kids who played rec. “You’re not allowed to slide tackle??” I remember asking my rec-ball-playing friend while feigning bewilderment. We were in second grade.

And although we were still concerned more with birthday parties and Wii games than soccer, some of the games during this period were the most intense I ever would play in. We had four chief rivals—Perry Hall, Fallston, Hickory, and Lutherville-Timonium, challengers to the booster seat throne—and competition was fierce. On one occasion, after Teddy collided with the opposing goalie, a parent of the other team invaded the field and was soon met by one of our assistant coaches, with each one launching F-bombs at each other over our small field of torn up grass and dirt holes. During another game, my overly polite mother got into a spat with two parents who had condemned our team as dirty. And among the players, yellow cards and trash talk were surprisingly frequent. Toward the opposing attackers I marked, specifically the blonde haired lefties named Gavin and Garrett—on Perry Hall and Hickory respectively—and the preppy loudmouths on Lutherville, I felt as much dislike as was possible in my 8-year-old brain.

But there was a less ugly, more enjoyable side to the intensity. It was here that I learned the joy of winning the ball through a hard, aggressive tackle and having the parents clap, my coaches shout, “Well done Nicklebud,” my teammates giving me high fives, while I felt like I had just made the sickest play anyone ever had.

Late in the second half of the Baltimore County championship.

Towson High School 1 – 1 Hereford High School.

A through ball was lobbed over my head, while the striker—a short kid named Nico with curly blonde hair and a mean face who I had played against since elementary school—stood on my shoulder.

I swiveled my hips and sprinted.

The ball slowed to a roll, waiting for someone to collide with it.

Nico, who had been named to the All-State team, was faster than me and he quickly closed the small gap between us.

My goalie was sprinting out, but he wasn’t going to get there in time.

We were now even. I was throwing my shoulder into him with the back of my arm pushing against his chest—he was about to pass me.

I leaned my weight against him and slid, reaching out with my left leg, tucking my right foot underneath. Just as I began to skid, my toe swiped the ball toward the sideline and sent him toppling to the ground.

A cheer erupted from the packed bleachers; “Well done, Miller!” came from the sideline; my teammates ran over to pat me on the back and add a “Good shit.”

At this point a senior playing for Towson High, a school of about 1,700 kids just north of Baltimore known best as Michael Phelps’ alma mater, not much had changed since those Towson Thunder glory days. Sure, I had realized my potential rested significantly below the levels I had originally thought, but I was still the rock at the back, relishing each opportunity to put in a hard, aggressive challenge on the attackers running at me, some of whom were the very same I had played against since I was a kid.

And at Towson High, whose colors were also maroon and white, soccer was the best athletic program, making it just as much a status symbol as we thought it was in elementary school. We wore blazers and ties on game days, and at home matches, students packed the bleachers a whole lot fuller than they did for the football games. We were coached by Randy Dase, a 66-year-old graduate of Towson in 1972 who returned to his alma mater to teach and coach in 1977. He never stopped. With leathery skin and coiffed hair, he was known for his fiery outbursts toward anybody who stopped before the designated line on a jog, his creative insults—he once called my older brother “a waste of taxpayer money”—and his speeches about the greatness of high school sports. He called away games “business trips”—hence the dressing up—and while we always knew he was a little crazy, I did agree deep down that there was something serious, important and unique about what we were doing.

In my senior year, after an 11-1 regular season, we faced in the Baltimore County championship the one team we had lost to: the Hereford Bulls. As a school in the conservative and rural northern part of the county, they were suburban Towson’s antithesis and the target of much school-wide hatred.

Before the game, played late in the evening at a neutral site stadium about 40 minutes away from Towson, we warmed up on the grass between the goal and the surrounding track in relative darkness. The towering lights made the field Friday Night bright—everything else was comparatively dark.

There was an outsized sense of importance and seriousness about it all—we were the U.S. hockey team about to play the Soviets in the movie Miracle and like Coach Herb Brooks said, it was our time and we were going to go out there and take it.

Soon after the game kicked off and we booted the ball down into the Hereford corner, the crunching tackles and macho trash talk began. In the first half, a ball came rolling toward me pursued by a Hereford midfielder, the most toxically macho of them all who hyped his teammates up with nonsensical yelling before the game and who played like he had a deep passion for violence. After I cleared it, he continued his charge, ending it with a slide tackle into my ankle. The referee sprinted over, pulling out the book where he kept his cards, while the kid, who had already received one yellow in the game, smushed his hands together and began begging.

“NOOOO WAYYYY!!!! ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!!”

Out came another yellow card and then, a red signifying his ejection.

The crowd, which had packed the bleachers on both sides of the field, was an active participant in this aggression. Whenever our right back, a kid from Britain with a flat head named Olly Hogg, took a thrown-in, the Hereford bleachers, in a deep, intimidating collective, chanted “OLLLLL—LY, OLLLLL—LY.” Meanwhile on our side, students (and I like to think the teachers that had made the trip joined in) yelled “Fuck the Bulls,” while raising their arms with their pointer fingers and pinkies straight and their wrists tilted toward the ground—the international sign of disrespect for a team with a horned mascot.

After an emotionally volatile first half in which both teams scored, the trash talk stopped and the game turned into a nervous stalemate. And I was in the zone. It was then that I made that slide tackle I still vividly remember, left me with a bloody scrape for a week. Sure, at one point I slipped with the ball at my foot allowing Nico a breakaway that our goalie saved with his face, but in my deluded state of mind, that didn’t matter—soon afterwards I was back in the zone, defending 1v1 in the corner, certain of my brilliance. Pressed into a deep squat, tapping on the balls of my feet as Nico performed stepovers and fakes, I felt there was not a person in the world that would get by me. I kicked it away from him with a shout and a clap.    

Just a few minutes after the game progressed into overtime, as I still considered in the back of my mind how I might take my penalty kick if the game remained deadlocked, our striker deposited a cross into the top corner, seizing for us the sudden-death victory.

I remember seeing Nico collapse his head into his hands as I sprinted forward to join the dogpile, riding the wings of a high that inflated the moment beyond its relative insignificance. It was an accomplishment that thousands of high schoolers achieve every year—there are over 800,000 high school soccer players in the U.S.—but within my world, this was the World Cup final.

That high lasted through the next day at school as I strutted through the halls, into the spring as I began my club season, and for the next year and a half as I sat inside through a pandemic that canceled all levels of organized soccer.

Still lamenting the loss of my prom and graduation, I walked to Towson’s field nearly every day to work out and run defending exercises, pretending that I was still a high-level athlete who had a game in a couple of days.

Between drills, I scanned the turf, allowing my thoughts to drift to different games I had played there, specific tackles I had made, still feeling that rush—but just from a distance.

This line of thinking naturally wandered to the future. I had known for a while that I wasn’t quite good enough to play at a prominent college, but a university club team had represented the chance to transport this athletic self-identity I had possessed for so long to the bigger world of higher education.

I began to train with this vision in mind, running intense sprint workouts and doing countless dribbling exercises not to get faster or improve my touch, but to ensure that the college version of myself would resemble who I had been since elementary school.

I finished my first year of college with this desire still intact. COVID had continued to pause all club sports, so my self-conception had not yet been shaken. But in the August before the next semester began, I received an email saying normal operations—including tryouts—would resume in September.

For the rest of the month, I practiced with the current Towson High team in preparation. I walked down the street to the field with my blue water jug just as I had every preseason for four years. Each day, I arrived at the turf and Dase threw me a “How ya doin’ Miller?”

“I’m doing well, Coach Dase, how are you?” I replied just as I always had.

My first appearance at practice, with the team all standing in the line, Dase introduced me. “This is Miller. He was one of our best guys in the back.” He stood with his hands behind his back, his torso and head tilted away from us. “He’s now in college and studying to be a…what do you wanna be, Miller?”

“A writer, I think.”

“A writer, huh? Gonna write some books?”

“Maybe, Coach Dase.”

“Well anyway he’s gonna play with us to get ready for his club team tryout.”

Now two years out of high school, I had only played with a couple of the kids still there, but during water breaks, one of them—a short, skinny kid named Vinny who was a freshman when I was a senior—would come up to me and reminisce about my senior season: “Do you remember when you cleared that shot off the line in front of a wide-open net?”

I had played particularly well during those couple of weeks, lighting up the shooting drills and controlling the small-sided games, enjoying what I found out later were the last moments in my soccer bubble.

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College club sports have grown exponentially since the 1990s, according to a New York Times article by Bill Pennington. A significant factor is what Pennington refers to as “America’s outsized youth sports culture.” He writes, “With more than 40 million children playing organized sports—often on first rate travel teams—more students are graduating from high school with extensive athletic interest and skills than ever before.” That figure is now 60 million with over 3 million children playing youth soccer.

It was this scale that I began to partially understand when I arrived at the Brown University field and saw all the kids with gray Under Armour T-shirts, white Nike socks, and backpacks of their previous club team, stretching and juggling and passing.

The tryout itself went fine—I made a few good plays but certainly didn’t stand out among the hundred-some others. We would’ve been emailed if we were invited back the next day. As I expected, I never received an email.

It didn’t quite sink in immediately that my competitive soccer career was likely over. It happened slowly over the course of the semester as I walked around campus realizing I didn’t have a thing, something people connected me with, something I connected myself with.

I remember hypothesizing to my parents later that semester during Parents’ Weekend: “I don’t think our brains are capable of comprehending how many people are in the world.” The experiences I had on the soccer field as a kid were joyful, terrifying, invigorating, painful, and undeniably special for me and for my development, but I had to realize they were not unique.

It was a frightening realization that dislodged a fixed and crucial part of my identity that had existed for almost fifteen years. My intramural soccer team won the championship, providing a brief moment of glory that reignited the memories. But other than that, I had become a Non-Athletic Regular Person, or a NARP. I started wearing my glasses more, abandoning my black trainers in favor of my beige Vans, and devoting time that I previously used to workout to writing and learning Portuguese and thinking about the inadequacies of breaking news journalism. It was an unsettling transition, but I have come to see such a degree of change as a necessary part of college.

The average American university population size is 6,354, according to U.S. News and World Report, while Forbes says the average high school has 850 students. Incoming college students are not just away from home for the first time or in a more rigorous academic environment, but also in a community far larger than the bubble they are coming from. They must reevaluate the size of the world and reconfigure their place in it. And they will have to do so again when they study abroad and meet people who don’t understand what it means to be a quarterback or the student government president or when they graduate and lose the figurative brightly colored nametags of fraternities or university email addresses or ultimate frisbee teams (Post-Graduation Depression does get its own page on Healthline after all.) Or again when they apply for a new job and realize that there are a lot of people who have interned for a congressperson and not everybody can be a diplomat.

As one’s world grows, one’s identity shifts, potentially landing one in apparent mediocrity. But such a change is also a chance to come to terms with that averageness and the size of the world in relation to oneself. Unmoored from the specific activities and accomplishments that previously made them unique, people find new hobbies or develop new skills, or even choose to no longer use such external metrics to determine their self-conception. They become free to appreciate the many things the world has to offer outside of the rigid identities of their youth.

Because thankfully, life is a lot bigger than an eight-year-old soccer field.