I honestly believe that there is something special about spring sports. It’s hard to explain, but there is a hint of magic, a tingling you get from seeing competition the way it was meant to be seen: under the brilliant sun and on a field of grass so lush and green it deserves its own crayon color.
Former Commissioner of Baseball Bartlett Giamatti hinted at this feeling when he described baseball:
“”It’s designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything is new again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains comes, it stops, and leaves you to face the fall alone.””
And although UCSD spring sports don’t continue into the summer, they do begin at that magical time when the earth starts to shake off its winter slumber and begins to reawaken.
While I dearly love basketball, football, soccer and the other fall and winter sports, they are at a decided disadvantage in that they are played indoors or in cold weather.
But spring sports are played during that perfect period of time when the young sun has yet to find its summer heat, when the air is crisp and each day is longer than the previous one.
As everybody emerges from their winter den with the sun, half-blinded and stumbling into the light, the magic gets hold of them and deposits them on fields and courts where they find themselves panting and sweating in the throes of competition before they even know it.
It’s special for the athletes and coaches as well.
For this is the time when last season is just a memory, and a new year is poised to begin and grow along with the earth’s season, without any hint of victory or disappointment evident for any team yet. This is the time they have been practicing and training forever for — it is the time when they can finally end the inter-squad scrimmages, drills and conditioning to begin some real competition.
This is the time of ultimate democracy because right now, every single team is tied for first and has as good a chance as anybody else. Right now, rookies are setting foolishly high goals and dreaming of what they can accomplish in their first year, while returners are assessing the teams’ strengths and weaknesses without worrying too much about their own.
Right now, all the schemes coaches dreamed up in the off-season are executing flawlessly, and their visions of their team is as well put-together as a jigsaw puzzle.
Right now, fans haven’t had their hopes dashed, and all brim with optimism over the incoming season. For it is the beginning of the season, when everybody flocks to games and cheers themselves hoarse around mouthfuls of hot dogs and beer. It’s new and exciting to see the new players, and immensely comforting to greet familiar returners.
When an athlete or weekend warrior finally picks up that ball for the first time in a real game, it seems sharper, more real than an eternity ago when they last held it at the culmination of a long season. The hand responds to it better, with more sensitivity since the calluses of last season have long faded away.
As the ball sails into the clear blue sky, that tingle, that thrill overcomes you whether you are watching it from the field or the stands. You watch the ball return to its home on the earth, not due to gravity, but because it belongs on the field, just like the players belong on the field, and you belong in the stands, and the sun belongs in the sky, and in that instant that is all you know or care about.
