Love of the Game, and the Other Players

Today's blog post was written by Michael McFadden, a sophomore sociology and psychology major.  Michael is a student in the Social Foundations of Coaching, a course taught by Play Like a Champion founder and director Professor Clark Power and Kristin Sheehan.

Although I was born and raised in Indiana, specifically South Bend, I grew up only spending a few gym classes a year on a basketball court. I became very interested in hockey before the age of six, and this interest developed into a twelve year hockey career. Growing up, I spent virtually no time playing basketball, the stereotypical, Hoosier sport of choice, because of the conflict between basketball and hockey season. It wasn’t until last year, my freshman year in college, that I spent significant amounts of time playing and loving the sport of basketball.

Unfortunately, hockey is not a sport that most people can easily play. There are many socioeconomic barriers to entry and this makes it a fairly exclusive sport; equipment and ice time are both expensive and difficult to come by in most parts of the United States. Hockey will forever have a place in my heart, but my recent interest in it has dwindled. Of course, Hockey itself has not become worse or lesser in my eyes. The feelings of a crisp, across-ice pass, a hard wrist-shot, and a defender-evading deke are ones that are irreplaceable. No newly-developed fascination with another sport could reduce the love I have for my years as a hard-hitting forward on my four-time city championship-winning and four-time state championship-losing high school hockey team. The memories and friends made along the way will forever be cherished. In spite of my love for hockey, basketball has truly become my recent passion.

I turned the TV on the other day with the hope that I’d be able to watch some sports. Sure enough, I had the choice between the NHL Playoffs and the NBA Playoffs. Without thinking, I immediately switched to the NBA Playoffs. My involuntary decision left me awestruck. It was just two years ago that I would have considered basketball to be an uninteresting and jejune sport that was infinitely inferior to hockey. Today, however, my immediate choice of sport is basketball. With the sound of Kevin Durant’s monstrous dunks and miraculous three-pointers in the background, I began thinking about the TV channel decision that I had just made.

Delving into my recent, involuntary decision yielded some interesting revelations about my social experience at Notre Dame as well as my past social experience in hockey. When I began meeting most of my current friends, we spent most of our time playing basketball together. Basketball served as an easy way to socially integrate; naturally, it wasn’t feasible to use hockey as a means to interact and get to know each other. Basketball, which meant anything from shooting around to full, five on five games back behind Keenan, started as fun, indirect ways to get to know fellow dorm members. Shortly, it became more than just an introductory rendezvous. Basketball transitioned into my friend group’s way of escaping reality, if only for a short amount of time. It became a way to enjoy our time with one another and to grow closer. Naturally, not only did I grow to love my friends, I grew to love basketball.

I finally realized that my recent love for basketball was not only a response to the sport of basketball itself, which I find to be extraordinarily brilliant, but also to the experiences that my new friends and I have shared and continue to share together. I developed a deep-rooted love for hockey after years of shared experiences with my hockey buddies. It wasn’t merely the sport that captivated me, it was also the relationships that grew over time. While I’ve learned a lot in two years of college, my new perspective on sports and their social roles in people’s lives is indispensable insight that I will never forget. Hopefully, I’ll avoid judging the worth or excitement of a sport based on the apparent amount of “fun” it provides. The value of a sport is not found in its rules and general gameplay, it is found in its instrumental social importance.