I know everyone is doing these 9/11 stories, and I know that most of them will be of a larger scale and impact than this, but since I’m always reflective on September 11^th, I figured I’d share my reflections—I think it’s important to recall the horror and the resulting feelings of brotherhood and togetherness, especially now as political maneuvering has left us more divided than ever. 

I was a senior at Long Beach Poly in the Fall of 2001, and had just gotten out of the shower when someone called my mom to have her turn the television on.  I stopped to watch for a minute, my mind reeling.  Then I got dressed.  I didn’t know what to do, but I knew I couldn’t be late to school.  On the way, I talked with a friend of mine while we listened to the radio for updates.  “What’s going on?” he asked.  “Is this over?  Are we being invaded?”  We had no idea.  School was surreal—all sports, including football games, were cancelled for the foreseeable future.  At Poly, that was a big deal.

For the next two days I walked around in a fog of contradictions, afraid but resilient, wanting to lock myself in my room alone but needing the company of my friends and family.  Piece by piece, the minutia of my daily responsibilities came back to me.  I was volunteering as an AYSO soccer coach for a team of seven and eight year old girls with my best friend, and we started getting calls relatively soon after the attacks, from parents who wanted to know if we were still practicing on Thursday (just two days later).  Some of them were afraid to let their daughters out of the house.

It was that fear that motivated us to hold practice, at Stanford Middle School where we always did.  And as the minivans and SUVs pulled up to let our players out, something different happened—they didn’t pull away.  Every mom or dad stayed for the whole hour, to watch their kids play.  And the kids, for their part, did—they were young enough to be mostly insulated from the tragedy.  I’m sure they knew that something terrible was going on, that had their parents freaked out, but while they were on our field, they were all smiles, running and kicking and acting exactly the way they did the Thursday before, in a different world.  I was filled with a pride and a joy I could never describe.

When practice was over, some of the parents thanked us—they weren’t sure if it was safe to bring their girls to practice, but they were glad they did.  Driving home with the looks on their faces singed into my mind, I thought about everything that I had to be grateful for.  When I got home, I went into my room and, for the first time since 9/11, cried for a half hour, for reasons I couldn’t really understand.  I still can’t—it was something about what those girls meant to their parents, and what the freedom to run and play soccer with each other meant to them. 

That practice meant more to me than I realized then.  I don’t think about it very often, but in a way it has shaped the way I’ve thought about sports since then—as the nation was looking to the NFL and MLB to tell them when it was okay to get back to a normal life, I was looking to second graders to tell me how to appreciate that life.  I don’t think about it very often anymore—I should, though.