I spent most of my childhood afraid of flying objects. Not UFOs, not bats, which sometimes flew in our Bronx backyard, but sporty flying objects: balls, rackets, any sort of equipment that might collide with my body unexpectedly (or worse, on purpose). My childhood activities included reading in closets and setting up pretend stores with my sisters and lots of bike riding, but why anyone joined a sports team was beyond my comprehension. I hated, and still do, organized activities in general. Cheering makes me shudder. Through some fluke of genetics, my middle sister, Lauren, was athletic, and she was the reason I thought I wanted to enroll in the local soccer league during elementary school, which had only recently and reluctantly gone co-ed. I quickly learned that while Lauren enjoyed being in the scrum of it, was a legit soccer star, I preferred to spend the time my coaches were required to put me on the field avoiding the ball and other players, skipping rather than running and thinking about who might have some Big League Chew after the game. As the youngest child at home, I had no choice but to agree to be Lauren’s human goal post when she decided we would practice between games. I can’t imagine running away from the ball every time she kicked it in my direction made me a helpful training partner.
By high school, I wasn’t reading in closets anymore, but I was still reading voraciously. My intellect hadn’t doomed me socially, and I could care less that I couldn’t throw (or kick or hit, for that matter), well, anything. I had proven that it wasn’t necessary for my world. But the only way out of my school’s PE requirement was to join a team. PE was taught by the sports team coaches, and their general position toward us, the small group of students who couldn’t be bothered to try out for teams, was one of mutual “no thanks.” We all agreed to get through the 50 minutes a week with as little interaction and attention to our subpar coordination and attitudes as possible.
I don’t remember how I got it in my head to join the cross-country team my sophomore year, some combination of not being able to endure another semester of the one of the male coaches giving me a sideways look when I showed up in his weight lifting option for PE (this was strategic; I could lift two barbells and he’d be impressed enough to still not talk to me for the 4 months), and part this long-ingrained fear of equipment that made me think that running through the woods was a sport I could handle.
I signed up for the team. And no, this story is not “that time Danielle wouldn’t take no for an answer from a cross-country course she’d triumphantly defeat” but a story of how once again, Danielle chose the wrong shoes.
My oldest sister ran track herself in high school, and stupidly, when I began running, I wore the sneakers she’d left behind when she’d gone to college. This is how, not very long into the season, running as if I had someone else’s feet, in worn-out sneakers, I developed shin splints. Shin splints so bad I cried through practices and spent many afternoons in the trainer’s office in the athletic building (this is where I point out that I went to a fancy private school that had things like an athletic trainer. I had come from public school a couple of years earlier; I still think this is insane, but that’s another story.). I became a regular in the trainer’s office, and well acquainted with the trainer himself, a fairly nice guy whose name escapes me now but whose face is locked in my mind: blond, square-jawed, dark eyebrows; he always wore shorts and looked as if his name should have been Brad or Chad but it wasn’t. I wasn’t a good runner, but he took me seriously, encouraging me to get some properly supportive shoes, teaching me stretches and pointing me to the stationary bike when my shins needed a rest.
One afternoon as I was about to get on the bike, the football coach came in to say the team was going to watch tape. The trainer’s office had a tv, and a VCR (this was 1994), and this was, apparently, where the team would watch their game tapes to prepare for upcoming games. This set up was next to the stationary bike. The coach looked at me, asked the trainer if I was leaving soon. The trainer explained that I was in there for the length of practice time; I’d be on the bike. The coach said something about moving the bike into the hall. The men went back and forth on this issue of what to do with me as if I was not there.
I still don’t understand who I thought I was. 15, on full financial aid, I already felt out of place in the school, where my mother worked as an admin assistant. In this grand building just for athletics—me, a person who couldn’t even make it through a sport that involved no flying objects without injuring myself just by putting on the clothes I already had—I felt even less authority, in particular in my body, which was failing me, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it that the reason I was in this room in the first place? But it pissed me off that the coach wanted me in the hallway, as if I were an extra piece of equipment myself. I remembered my voice. I spoke up. I refused.
He kept trying to convince me otherwise, and I kept saying I wanted to stay. I don’t remember the words of these conversations but I remember the feeling in the room, the coach’s annoyance and my nervousness about defying him and the trainer’s bit of pleasure, as I matched my insistence on staying with the coach’s insistence that I disappear. In the end, the trainer deferred to me. I remember the expression of the coach, the one that said “Okay, if this is how you want it,” that look that men give women, and in particular teenaged girls, who cannot possibly know what it is they really want, after all, who cannot know what is really good for them.
I wasn’t privy to why he wanted me out of the room. It wasn’t for space, and it wasn’t for privacy—I wasn’t interested in selling coaching tips to a neighboring school—I can only guess it was because he just wanted it so. I was a fairly standard 15 year old, perhaps just having a girl moving her body in a room with teenage boys was, to his mind, distracting. But maybe he thought the whole thing distracting, my refusing to accept his authority. The sport of football, and that team in particular, was dependent on all of those young men accepting his authority. He’d not been, I could see, refused very often by teenagers. Despite what he’d wanted, they’d walk in, and there I’d still be. He couldn’t order drills or laps or bench time or whatever he did to flex this power, not over me.
After the men exchanged a couple of clear okays, after it was established that I would not leave the room, that I would bike not only in it, but literally next to the tv, in came the football team. It must have been a subset of them; I can’t imagine, now, how they fit in a room that I remember as being small. Some of them sat on the floor. Some sat on the examination table that I often was on, icing my shins. Most of them were older. I had my crushes on a fair number of them, despite not wanting to be the sort of girl who had crushes on members of the football team. I don’t know if the coach said anything to them before they came in, or if this is the way they were in his presence, but the boys who were in my class, or who would otherwise freely talk to me, who had flirted or teased me before, said not a thing to me; they didn’t even make eye contact. I was already in motion when they filed in. I don’t know how long the tape was, just that I pedaled as they came in and I was pedaling when they left.
This was before headphones and screens dominated, and it was just me and the walls. I can see, still, the collected presence of them, all the boys I was supposed to be intimidated, maybe shamed by, according to the coach. As if I were playing on some opposing team. As if I couldn’t see that they were just boys, just, in that moment, kids at sports practice, as I was. Of course I thought maybe I had made a bad choice. But I was exhilarated, too, by staying put, by the way they had to work to pretend they didn’t see me there, by how I decided I could take up space.
I think of that girl a lot, who ran her mouth to a man in charge. I think about the moment I realized that I could give a “no” to his “no”, a refusal against his refusal to see me as equal to his boys and their precious game footage. How I kept pedaling because I knew he was waiting for it all to backfire on me, and I wouldn’t let it. I wasn’t mortified as he imagined or maybe hoped I’d be, because I’d claimed my space in that room, because I knew what I felt, and I knew what I wanted. Which wasn’t to be on that bike—clearly I’d rather have been reading somewhere—but to call his bluff and as a girl who consistently finished at the back of the pack nearly every race, to win.