Letters from Lisa

Today I was supervising recess, watching the kids engage in a time honored playground tradition - picking teams. There’s no way around it - someone has to be picked last. Even if your group consists entirely of professional athletes and superstars, and you start picking one by one, you still end up with someone getting left until the end. And this being an elementary school group with a typical range of sports ability - some play competitively on the weekends and some can barely make contact with the ball, and everything in between - it’s almost inevitable that certain kids are going to get snapped up first and others left hanging until the end. We’ve all been there and remember how it feels.

I have to say, this particular group plays very fair. When I was a kid and boys and girls were expected to play on mixed teams, every boy were always picked first, unless there was a super-ultra-tomboy in the group, who would generally get picked in the middle even if she was a superior athlete. This group is more enlightened (and their teachers make sure of it). The active girls are picked right alongside the boys. There is some angling to make sure that friends end up on the same team, but with such a small group, that often can’t happen and the kids don’t make much fuss about it. The last kids to be picked are generally the ones who don’t really know the game rules, and/or don’t make much contact with the ball.

Of course, the experience of being picked last never does anything to change that, either.

There’s one boy who always gets picked last for teams - I can’t remember watching a game where he wasn’t picked last. He’s a kid I’ve gotten to know quite well over the past few years and yet the fact that this keeps happening surprises me. What surprises me is that he hangs in there. He’s eminently clumsy, chronically knocking things over and bumping into people, and often can’t make contact with the ball or defers to more confident, aggressive players because he really wants his team to win. He’s competitive (read: anxious about losing) and he does bristle sometimes when he’s picked last, like today when he burst out, “This is a stupid team!” after watching the most non-athletic, disconnected girl get welcomed onto a team before he was. (She later wandered away from the game, without anyone noticing she was gone.) It’s the closest I’ve ever heard him get to complaining that he is always, always picked last.

What’s amazing to me is that this kid goes out there, every day, and stands there in public, and watches everyone else get picked before he does, and takes it. He wants to be in there, with those kids, so badly that he’s willing to take it. Not always with the best grace, but guaranteed if it isn’t raining tomorrow and the group goes out there, he’ll be right there waiting to get picked, hoping maybe this time - this one time - the team captain will turn to him and pick him out of the crowd. Maybe not first. Maybe not even second. And if he’s last again, he’ll take it, because he isn’t giving up.

I didn’t do that, as a kid. I gave up. I couldn’t control the embarrassment or anger I felt about being picked last, and I was convinced that the other kids hated me and were picking me last to send me a message that I wasn’t wanted. It was a tangle of mistaken perceptions and emotional overreaction, and a compounding of teasing and rejection and insults until I finally just walked away. I actually stopped trying. I played alone at recess - for years and years. I was almost too old for recess by the time I started interacting with other kids on the playground. There had to be kids at my elementary school who stood there and endured the selection process day after day, but I didn’t notice because I couldn’t even bring myself to be a part of it at all. I didn’t participate, or even watch.

This kid stands there and opens himself up to the possibility of being picked last every single day, and because he does, he ends up on a team. And he gets to play. It makes me really proud to watch.

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