Personal athletic resumes

It was the running joke. Fortunately, the competing papers agreed so I didn't have to defend myself too much...

 

Dabbled in just about everything up until freshman year of high school. Had no athletic talent, so I was out of competitive sports by the age of 15.

Perhaps the most bizarre story of my athletic career came as a freshman in college. I was taking a fencing class and at the end of the semester there was a class tournament. I don't know if I was any good at it, but I was invested in having good form and doing things the right way. In the first round, I was paired with some jerk who thought he was in the Pirates of the Caribbean. Dipshit struck my foil so hard that his snapped in half. Instead of stopping, he continued to come at me and was trying to stab me in the chest with the blunt end of the broken foil. I fought off the attack, but after it was finished I got into his face, started screaming at him and was promptly ejected from the class for the day.

 

Played little league baseball from ages 9-12. I was about 4 feet tall, so I mostly either walked or struck out. Nobody could throw a strike to me. The downside was, I never really learned to hit because of it, so I could barely even make contact. Being so small, my arm was also about as strong as a 6-year-old girl with polio. So, needless to say, my baseball career never really took off.

Played a lot of backyard football with the guys in the neighborhood, but because of my size I was always afraid to try out for the high school team. I weighed less than 100 pounds my freshman year, so it might not have been a bad move. Still regret not at least being on the team, though.

Finally, I found a home with the swim team. Had absolutely no idea what I was getting into when I went out for it. I could barely make one 25-meter lap. The second or third day of practice we had to swim 100 yards for time. I did it in 1 minute, 59 seconds and could barely stand afterward.
For some reason the coach let me stick around, and I kept working at it. One day in practice, I got my wind and was able to just go and go and go. Not fast, but I literally went from struggling to swim 50 meters one day, to being able to do 500 meters without stopping the next.
By the end of the first season, three months after that first practice, I was doing the 100-meter swim in 1:35. By the end of my sophomore year I was down to 1:12, and by my senior year I was around 1:06 (fast enough to be fairly competitive).
I was never a top-level swimmer, but did become good enough to hold up my end of a relay, beat a few mid-level opponents and earn some points for my team.

Fifteen years later, I got back in the pool to lose some weight. Took me a month or so to get back in shape, and now I feel pretty frisky in the water. I do a couple masters meets a year and my times are pretty respectable. Still not fast enough to seriously compete with the "good" swimmers, but I don't embarrass myself. My 100-meter freestyle time these days is around 1:10.

Plus, my other athletic abilities have rounded into form. I can hit a batting practice fastball pretty well and I'm not a terrible pickup hoops player. Guess I was just a late bloomer on some fronts.

 

Tripled in the sprints in end-of-year meet in college track class.

Had the championship winning hit in a coed rec softball league.

Played seven years of youth baseball, but I wasn't any good

 

I was a good junior tennis player that could have played at some mid-major colleges. I chose to drink beer at Ole Miss instead.

I was also a three-year starter on my high school soccer team and did pretty well the one year I ran track.

I've also run three marathons with a best time of 3 hours, 14 minutes and 58 seconds.

 

They say every great fighter's got one fight left, right?

 

I was always heavy and had bad ankles (birth defect), so I was a slow runner and didn't jump very well. Through junior high, I was a great shooter in basketball and our coaches taught us how to play volleyball the right way. Volleyball was probably my best sport. I had all the skills, except my jumping ability was limited.
Played baseball through little league, pony and colt leagues. Went out for baseball my junior year in high school and only made JV because the coach was also my history teacher. He knew I was a good-attitude, no-talent guy and he had to see me in class every day. I got to play about 3-4 games, pinch hitting or a couple innings in the outfield. Stayed with it as a senior on the varsity. The coach pulled me aside during a preseason practice and told me that I could be on the team, in uniform, a regular member of the team, but I was never going to play. It was up to me. I stayed on. The only time I got on the field was during a scrimmage a few days before our season opener. Being a non-counting scrimmage, coach used a 10-man batting order. He let me bat 11th the third time through the order. Walked on four pitches and the three guys at the top of our order went out meekly with me standing on first base. But I still enjoyed the season being on the team and I learned a ton about baseball that helped me when I started covering baseball for the paper.
After college, I played a lot of slo-pitch softball and was actually pretty good, since my lack of speed didn't matter so much on the smaller field. One game we won, 10-9, I had 9 RBIs, including a game-winning single in the bottom of the ninth. I was 4 for 5 with a grand slam, a solo HR, and a bases-loaded triple.
Also played a lot of volleyball on the beach, just pickup games with friends. Once daylight savings times started, we had a regular game every Wednesday after work, playing until it got too dark to see. Middle of summer we could go to well past 9 p.m. That lasted about 20 years.

 

Played soccer through high school and was "honorable mention" all-conference sweeper, which I felt pretty good about until I realized that every senior starter on every team made honorable mention. My high point came against our crosstown rival, when I was guarding the back post on a corner kick and stopped a point-blank shot after the goalie got way out of position. Play of the game and it was the only game all year the local TV station televised.

Loved playing basketball and baseball growing up, but I was just weeded out of the system by age 15. Did hit two home runs as a 15-year-old, which on our large fields put me second in the league. If I had stuck with it, realistically I could have been a varsity benchwarmer as a senior but probably not much else. Our baseball team went to the state tournament and had a guy drafted and go pro out of high school, and our basketball team had five D-I players (spread over four years) and an NCAA Tournament Sweet 16 starter.

Adding to my own athletic limitations, this is the one area that I felt like starting school early held me back. Graduated high school at 17, a full year younger than the guys I competed for positions with, and just by circumstance ended up in a freakishly good athletic class.

 

I also was 17 for my entire senior year of high school (turned 18 a week before I started college). Some of the guys I played high school football with were almost 19. Really wasn't fair.

 

Yeah, but unfortunately my very best wouldn't be enough to hang with some of the freaks at these meets. They're 10-15 seconds faster than me. I think I've done pretty well, I'm happy with my time and they're on the deck and dry by the time I finish.
Swimming and running and a lot alike in that there aren't really any tricks you can learn, or any amount of training you can do to make up ground on somebody who's just, naturally, that much faster than you.

 

Outing alert, SoCalDude is slo-pitch guy.

 

My buddy is intentionally holding his son back for that reason...so he'll be a monster and almost 19 his senior year of football.