Why I Can’t Stop Playing Soccer

Tim Bascom

My wife, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Kansas, sometimes has to explain why I am not present for a church-related event. A parishioner might ask in the coffee line after a service, “So where is your other half today?” and she’ll reply, “He is very religious about his soccer.”

That is true in more than one way.

First of all, I am doggedly devout about keeping my soccer-playing schedule. On Wednesday at 3:30 in the afternoon, I drive thirty minutes from our home in Topeka to Lawrence, where I play for two hours with a group of international students and community members at a beautiful turf field between two dorms at the University of Kansas. No stained glass there, but the field boasts a very impressive icon. The center circle is emblazoned with a red, blue, and yellow Jayhawk.

On Saturday mornings at 8:00, I head the other direction, driving an hour west to Manhattan, to play with a similar group that includes immigrant soldiers from Fort Riley. We scrimmage in an old limestone stadium on the campus of Kansas State University, which features a very different icon: a bronze Wildcat, mascot of KSU.

I am very religious about getting to those fields twice a week, despite the fact that I am now sixty-three years old. To say that I worship is risking blasphemy, but in the Episcopal tradition, worship includes Eucharist, which is Greek for “thanksgiving,” and I certainly experience thanksgiving each time I join one of those groups, especially since I come away feeling uplifted in a manner that I need, given my tendency toward chronic depression.

In my case, almost any opportunity to step onto a soccer field with other players has a wonderful spiritual dimension to it. I know! "Spiritual” is way overused, having been applied to practically every type of situation or activity. My wife, the bishop, would say that spiritual moments are characterized by feeling connected to the Divine, but let me offer a broader definition that works well for me—feeling fully connected to all that surrounds me, which is accompanied by a sensation of being fully alive and fully in the moment.

When I am running after a ball in crisp forty-five-degree weather or during a classic Kansas heat wave, I am in a heightened physical state of being. If the field is wet and chilly from recent rain or if the artificial turf is burning under the August sun and making my feet broil, then I am very much in my body. I may not be as rationally conscious as indoors at my computer, but I am very present, existentially speaking, and that state of being can make me feel spiritually alive, not just physically alive.

I’ll take it further. If the opposing team has worked the ball down the field from one player to another until it arrives at someone I need to guard, then I become utterly focused, blocking the lane to the goal and making the opponent second-guess whether to pass or dribble. I am not thinking as much as reacting or following instincts, which means I am not distracted by bills that need to be paid or emails that need to be sent or anything else that goes with my ordinary mental clutter.

This in-the-moment awareness is akin to the state one reaches through meditation, particularly the discipline of mindfulness. By giving close attention to the elemental act of breathing, one can let go of thought. Similarly, through the physical focus of soccer, I find that I am able to let go. I surrender to “being,” and I feel a strange release—a kind of blissful internal quiet.

At some point in a game, I might also dash to an open space, setting up a safe line for a teammate’s pass, and I might trap the ball then tap it downfield to another teammate, lifting it just over the outstretched foot of an opponent so that it drops in front of my sprinting comrade. That teamwork will bring me a feeling of being connected as well—another one of the hallmarks of spiritual experience.

When moving the ball in unison with others, I become part of something bigger than myself. It’s a bit like being in a choir and harmonizing, only the harmonizing is in the form of physical movement. Together, we are a singing dance, all of us choreographed to a larger purpose. And what ecstatic delight if my part of the dance makes it possible for a teammate to snap the ball into the goal! At that moment, I have achieved an assist, which suggests the very thing I am trying to define here. I have gotten along, been connected, not alone or disconnected.

This past winter here in Kansas, a hardy group kept gathering every Wednesday in Lawrence, even if the temperature dropped to twenty degrees Fahrenheit. In Manhattan another group kept playing every Saturday, wearing balaclavas, along with gloves, athletic tights, and layered sweats.

Then, one thirty-four-degree Saturday there was freezing sleet, the one condition that simply makes soccer too miserable to play. Disappointed to have lost my usual workout, I decided to skip church the next morning and make a run to Lawrence so that I could jump into a 10:00 a.m. Sunday game. On this particular morning, I was drawn toward the sanctuary of the field rather than an indoor worship space.

The only problem was that the sleet had kept falling right through the night, and it was drizzling when I went out to my car around 9:00 a.m. I stubbornly scraped the iced-over windshield and headed out of town. The air was getting warmer, so fog was settling in. No telling if anyone would show up. Nonetheless, I shot down Interstate 70 and took the exit ramp then made my way to the field at the KU campus.

I saw no other parked cars, but I swung into a marked slot, facing the damp, fog-shrouded field, and I waited. Eventually, one other car pulled up. The driver was Erika, a thirty-five-year-old mother who works as a waitress and plays with tremendous stamina and enthusiasm, often outsprinting male defenders and popping the ball into the net.

The two of us rolled down our car windows and talked through them, looking over the soccer pitch as the fog thinned. She told me how she had first gotten into soccer—by being placed on an all-boys team in fourth grade. And how she had played so well in junior high that her parents sent her to a special academy for high school. It was a boarding school far away in Florida, where women athletes often got college scholarships and went on to play not only college soccer but Olympic and professional.

“Hey, do you have a ball?” she asked me suddenly. “Maybe we could just kick it around.”

“Great idea,” I replied, cheered by the thought of getting onto the field. However, when I looked in my trunk, I was dismayed to find that I had left my practice ball back in the garage.

Still, Erika didn’t want to give up, nor did I. So we climbed back into our cars and kept conversing through the open windows, and she told me now why she had not gotten a college scholarship, as her parents hoped: “Basically, I developed an eating disorder, and it sapped all my energy. There was no way I could play at my top level.”

I was struck by her honesty. I felt honored. She had trusted me with something she wouldn’t normally tell people. In my case, I don’t suffer from an eating disorder, nor have I been physically hampered in my soccer playing, other than temporary setbacks from minor injuries. But, as I pointed out earlier, I suffer from clinical depression, and that has been a struggle my whole life, which means I could relate to what she was describing. In some ways soccer is actually an antidote for my depression, which can become quite isolating when I feel too down to interact.

“That must have been really hard,” I replied— “to lose that chance at college ball. I mean, you play so well.”

“Thanks. I was angry at first, but now it’s okay. Who knows what would have happened? This way, I’m still playing. Not everyone gets to do that, right?”

Twenty minutes had passed. Clearly no one else was coming, so we finally acknowledged defeat, shaking our heads in commiseration.

“Bummer,” I said. “I was really looking forward to playing since I didn’t get to play yesterday.”

“I know,” she sighed. “What’s up with the rest of the guys? It’s really not that bad out here. Wet, yeah, but not too cold.”

“My thought exactly!”

She smiled. And before rolling up her window, she tossed out one last exuberant declaration: “I just love to play, you know—because it feels so good to be out there.”

As she drove away under the rising fog, I thought: indeed, indeed. On those occasions when a group shows up and we take our positions and start dashing around, I am filled with the opposite of depression. I am filled with life itself.

Hallelujah.

Tim Bascom is the author of a novel, two collections of essays, and two prize-winning memoirs about years spent in East Africa as a youth. His essays have won editor’s prizes at The Missouri Review and Florida Review, also being selected for the anthologies Best Creative Nonfiction and Best American Travel Writing. His short fiction has appeared in journals such as Zone 3, Front Range Review, and Briar Cliff Review. Currently, he directs the Kansas Book Festival.