Line drills are usually a punishment. Late to practice? Line drills. Made the wrong play? Line drills. Coaches seemed to view it as this beautiful thing, an answer to any and all questions. Line drills aren’t complicated. Starting at the baseline, you sprint to the nearest free throw line and back, then further to half court and back, go on to the furthest free throw line and back, and finish with a full sprint to the opposite baseline and back. Most people hate Line drills, but I’ve never understood that. Sure, it’s tiring, but running laps is easily worse, just the same monotonous slow-paced jog for god knows how long. I should’ve just kept my reservations to myself.
In the 7th grade, we had basketball practice every Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday after school. Our coach had given us an option: run laps or run Line with a variation. He soon took away that freedom of choice and made a decision for us instead, Line variations it was. His variation wasn’t anything out of the ordinary; instead of sprinting back to the baseline, we had to sprint backwards to the baseline at each checkpoint. A collective groan came from the girls. I kept quiet. This felt like a pre-practice treat.
We had an outdoor basketball court, grey cement grounds, and white lines painted over to mark the different lines and areas. Most outdoor basketball courts are usually asphalt surfaces, not as prone to cracks and crevices in the ground as cement. Another con of cement grounds that I found out that day was a lack of traction. It was incredibly, incredibly easy to slip on them, especially if your shoes were as worn down as mine. Naturally, within the first 10 minutes, I had fallen on my ass. Next thing I knew, my hand was fractured or a ligament tear? A shifted bone, a broken bone—whatever it was, I didn’t know. All I knew was that my right hand was unusable for the next 2 months.
I watched every inter-school and inter-house match, but not once did I feel envy. Not once did I want to be back on that court. I’d come to realise that no matter how much I’d been impaired with this stupid broken hand, I didn’t have to play basketball anymore, and that felt like the biggest blessing I’d ever been granted.
Here’s the thing with team sports—everyone tells you to “focus on yourself” and that “no one’s looking at you, just play your best game!” In all my experiences, I have found that to be horribly incorrect. You could single-handedly carry your game, or lose it for everyone. And it isn’t only your coach who ends up being disappointed in you, it’s your teammates as well. Being a part of a team felt like you were carrying everyone’s hopes along with your own, and one mistake on your part felt like you could solely be responsible for crushing everyone else’s. But that’s the thing with team sports, you know that even if you do lose, you carry that loss with everyone, you carry that win with everyone, and most importantly, your coach’s disappointment is not focused only on you.
The same cannot be said for individual sports. The second you mess up, the only face you look for is theirs, and that disappointment is only reserved for you. You win some, you lose some.