CNAE : Belonging in Spring

 https://www.mediafire.com/file/95xxmuae83n09dk/CNAE.m4a/file 

Around Valentine’s Day for the past six years, I have been called to the office in my middle and high school for a meeting. Usually getting called to the office meant trouble. As I hear my name getting called, everyone turns to look at me. I get nervous, even though I know why I am getting called. I had to miss class, my teachers would get mad I was leaving, and I always had to make up my work. I dreaded going to this meeting every year. I was not ready to start our three hour tennis practices in the freezing weather with a group of girls and guys that I was not close with. For the past six years, my team was a group of people who had one similar interest, tennis. I never talked to any of the players on the team, and often felt like an outsider. Why didn’t I just quit? I started playing with my two best friends in seventh grade and we promised each other we would make it to our senior night. 

This year, my final year, the meeting was a little bit different. I was happier to go sit in the same plain cream colored gym listening to the same boring speech about bringing a jump rope to practice for conditioning. I was happier because it was finally my senior year, I got to pick out the uniforms, and I could finally take a shot at bringing my team together as one instead of twelve girls and twelve guys going out to play their individual matches and going home. 

It was March 5th of this year, our first tournament in Elizabethtown, freezing weather and the strongest winds I have ever played in. My team was talking about burger week going on in Owensboro, and I knew this was my shot to bring the team together to bond. I asked if anyone wanted to try the final burger of the week, the smokehouse burger at Beef O’ Bradys, when we got back to our hometown, and to my surprise, a group of seven players agreed to join me. We all rode home separately and met at the restaurant. We sat and talked for over two hours about random things from the burger sitting in front of us with an onion ring on top, to the small things in life. From this moment, sitting at the table talking to six people I had never conversed with, my views on life changed. 

Over the course of six months, I started to get close with my team. Monday through Friday, I spent over nine hours with the same group of people. We went to a small school, so it became impossible to miss any of them during the day. After our away tournaments, we would all ride the bus home together and play games together. Our conversations made the three hour bus rides feel like 20 minutes. We formed a tradition of going to eat at Buffalo Wild Wings after every match. Not only was I becoming bonded to this group of people, I was becoming complete myself. I finally fell in love with the sport I had been playing for years, I went to church with friends and grew stronger in my faith, and I realized what it means to be emotionally home, not physically home. I started going to clinics to try to improve in tennis, striving to be the best player I could. I tried harder in school because my team would emphasize grades. I became the best and happiest version of myself. Spring was no longer one of the seasons that just floated by, it quickly became my favorite time of year.