More than a game of volleyball
"Day's end" by Norm Zareski. Honorable mention
by Carlyn Greenwald
It was the end of the boys’ volleyball season forVistamarSchool, a history-making game having just taken place. For the first time in our school’s young history, one of our teams had made it to the CIF playoffs. I wasn’t exactly a huge sports fan. I had never before attended a sporting event. But my friend convinced me to go to the semi-final game. Imagine my surprise to find that at least half the school — students, parents, teachers, and administrators alike — showed up to cheer our team on to victory.
For the big championship, I decided to ride to the game on the fan bus. I arrived a few hours early and joined my friend Kiavanne, along with the head volleyball cheerleader, an infamous math teacher and my current biology teacher, who is the craziest (in a good way) member of the faculty. We made headbands and put on our war paint (in compliance with CIF regulations, of course — one V on each cheek). Not too long later, we were joined by several other teachers and many, many more students.
Now, here’s where things got tricky. As we boarded the bus, we found it had maybe eight rows of double seats and we had at least 40 people. The students were willing to squish three or four to a seat, and even the teachers jumped into the mob. But, in the end, it was decided that there was no way we could all last the hour drive to the game, so we filed back off the bus to wait for another bus.
Most of us went to the student lounge, where my biology teacher allowed me to put on some pumping music. For some reason, ‘King for a Day’ by Green Day popped into my head. I asked her if a song about drag queens was okay, to which she responded, “I love drag queens.” Good enough for me.
What felt like hours passed, and still no bus. We asked my biology teacher if she was okay, to which she replied with something along the lines of, if the bus didn’t show up soon, she’d have a mental breakdown. So it was a good thing that a bus did finally show up, about an hour before the big game was to start.
Everyone piled onto the bus and I ended up near the front with the teachers and next to my lovable, though slightly neurotic friend Lindsay. The bus ride allowed everyone to relax and practice our cheers, which were a mixture of the cheers that my biology teacher would awake in the middle of the night to write down (another one of her very amusing tangents she’d typically go off on in biology class) and cheers that weren’t as favored, written by one of the humanities teachers to honor the seniors on the team. They were clever, but for the most part, the classics that my bio teacher came up with were more popular.
That same humanities teacher decided to show Lindsay and I his driver’s license picture with a huge, goofy smile similar to my father’s driver’s license picture, which has a tendency to make airport workers break out laughing hysterically. He got a few laughs out of us and the Georgian physics teacher next to him, which prompted him to show us his American Express photo, which had a similar smile.
Lindsay started spazzing out because she lost her eyeliner. I tried comforting her by reminding her it was cheap eyeliner. (“So why are you freaking out?” “I love that eyeliner!”). She ended up texting me several hours after the game to tell me that she hadn’t found it yet.
When we finally arrived at the championships, the first game was halfway over. Vistamar lost it, but came back to win the second game. I couldn’t help feeling the same pride I felt at the semi finals as my biology teacher, in her thickAlabamaaccent, led the cheers.
In the end, we lost the match, 2 games to 3, but there was a thunder of applause for each young man on our varsity volleyball team as he received his medal. The fans soon filed out of the building where we waited for our team. To my surprise, neither of the cheerleaders was particularly upset. When the players came out, some actually in tears, we gave them the booming applause they deserved. I mean, for our small, young school, reaching the CIF finals was a dream. So maybe we didn’t win it. We still banned together as a school to support our fellow students and the experience was exhilarating.
I never would have thought that a school volleyball game could teach me so much about my place in a community. B