youth soccer macarena bacchanal

I have three sisters and we're all very close in age. The younger two are even twins, which is about as close in age as two related people can get. Because we were four children all close in age, we needed to all do the same things. Four children with four different extracurricular mindsets? This would not work out, logistically. So we played the same sports at the same time.

I don't like playing sports. I can say that now. The last time I played a sport was almost 18 years ago, which is to say half my life ago. I'm a miserable sportswoman: just athletic enough to not completely flop, but a combination of competitive and inept that always led to poor play at best and abysmal sportsmanship at worst.

But I played sports from kindergarten to senior year of high school. Thirteen years of not-so-noble suffering. Sorry to literally everyone I've ever played with or against.

On offense, I was unable to take it to the net and close the deal. On defense, I was sensitive and violent, prone to flags and fouls. I was best suited to midfield roles on my soccer and lacrosse teams, which required me to do a lot of running back and forth, and occasionally assist in situations that couldn't be sorted out by the more skilled people on my team.

There was a brief bout of middle school track, and that wasn't too bad. Track involved a lot of sitting around and waiting for stuff to happen, and I loved that. But it was also a cold, quantitative measure of the strongest and fastest, and I was more of a "come in 4th out of 8 in the 200M" type of girl. For my efforts, I received ribbons in unexpected colors: rust, cranberry, moss.

Sometimes I wish basketball had worked out for me—basketball had the most flattering uniforms, all swishy and shiny, as well as mercifully short games and a close association with Jock Jams. But I could not hoop to save my life.

Anyway, when all of the sporting first began, I didn't know how long I was going to deal with it. I thought it might eventually dissipate, like an ear infection exposed to amoxicillin. So I had a bit of spirit in my tank to work with. It hadn't been depleted by continued exposure to practices, games, tournaments, and the dreaded "scrimmage."

And when you're that young, life is essentially contextless. Who was I to say whether I was supposed to like sports, or whether I'd end up getting better at them? I had been so recently ejected from life's primordial soup that I was still losing my baby teeth and growing bigger teeth in their place. Who knows what hand-eye coordination or fine motor skills awaited me in the future? Why shouldn't ball be life?

Still, I can easily cue up the feelings I had back in the mid-'90s. The discomfort of moving my body around. The discomfort of getting dirty (not a fan then, not a fan now). The discomfort of relating to my peers through competition rather than collaboration. Sports felt weird, but they seemed like they were designed for kids to enjoy, so I felt weirder not enjoying them.

All through elementary school, my sisters and I played soccer in an after school municipal league. There was practice on a couple of weekdays, and there were games on Saturdays. There was a fall season and a spring season, and even a summer soccer day camp, so I had a distinct feeling for a handful of years that I was never not playing soccer. Soccer was eternal and immutable, as cyclical as confession at St. Marks and just as awkward. All year, I hauled my gym bag with all the Sisyphean resignation a sub-10-year-old could muster. My only respite was winter, the season of sledding, hot chocolate with a thick stratum of mini marshmallows, and most importantly, Reading Indoors.

Each soccer season ended with a tournament that lasted several hours and terminated with a grand fiesta. The schedule was simple and consistent from 1996 until I aged out of the league in spring 2001. First, a meal of pizza would be served to all. And once the pizza was consumed, an adult in charge would blast the Bayside Boys remix of the Los Del Río song "Macarena" over the PA and everyone would get up and do the traditional dance together.

I can't overstate the pleasure that this Macarena moment brought me after a season of discomfort. Months of strictures—games occurring at particular times, balls dribbled through strategically placed cones, whistles blown to signify rules, lines to show where you could and could not go—destroyed in an instant. We were no longer players, we were just a bunch of people dancing in a field, the loose motions of the Macarena our only guidelines.

I loved "Macarena": the clipped, syncopated intro; the taunting, gooberish English verses of the remix bouncing off the Spanish ones; and the collective dance experience it inspired. I never got sick of doing the Macarena, and I welcomed future dance crazes into my life as well.

A few years later, I'd go on to fall in love with the Cha Cha Slide and the Wobble. It took me a really long time to get to the Electric Slide (boogie woogie woogie) but a couple years ago I did a video editing marathon for a kids' summer camp and every hour on the hour the whole room did the Electric Slide, so I learned it by osmosis. Just a couple weekends ago I went to a deeply stupid EDM show and the DJs played multiple songs with communal choreography—"Crank That (Soulja Boy)" and "Y.M.C.A."—and my heart swelled when everyone in the back section of the Shrine did the requisite moves. I love dance crazes because I'm crazy about dancing.

It feels like such a duh moment, writing about this childhood activity now and understanding who I turned out to be. It takes time to get to know yourself, I guess. I respect those who like to play sports, and I think I understand why sports are fun. But I am not meant to relate to my brethren by kicking a ball into their goal, or blocking their shot. I am meant to relate to my brethren by dancing together in a field, or a big room, or even a small room. This is what makes me feel alive, this is what makes sense to me. I am happy I found this source of meaning, and it feels right that it first came to me when I was at my least comfortable. The first line of the chorus of "Macarena" goes "Dale a tu cuerpo alegría" — give your body joy. Isn't that neat?

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