Musings from the Bench

Sitting me on the bench for the first basketball game of the season makes sense. I mean it's my first game in my return- if you can even call it a return, then maybe to basketball as a game but practically, its a start, for sure competing in a league. I'm not a good player, I have miles to go before, I believe I will really have any helpful impact on my team during a game. This means logically I know that it makes no sense to put me on the court if there are better players, that give our team a better chance to win. Internally I am still super competitive and "game-day" brings up the nerves and stress of competition. Which for me led to the two hours before we were meeting up for warm-up, I was dysfunctionally stressed and nervous. What came up in my mind was the feeling that I had no idea in my mind how to process these pre-game emotions and nerves. The only other competitive history I had was rowing competitions, and my mental preparation for these competitions consisted of intense (depending on who you asked too intense) internal focus, closing into myself. I spent time breaking down specific moments of the race and what my plan was for each time, and going over the repetitive movement in my mind, these tools helped calm my nerves, and as I liked to say "focused me into a coiled spring" ready to release all the power during the race. This structure to me felt non-transferable as basketball is a team sport and I'm on the court moving constantly in different ways, to me this felt like there was no repetition which I find hard. I reached out to a friend who competes in both these sports at the highest level and her response made a lot of sense "your skills, your shots and movements are more repetitive than it seems on the surface, you focus on your shot, and repetition of making the different shots, and your movements on court." Sitting on the bench after the warm-up I fell into the focus, of just the movements and shots of my teammates on the court, which made me super quiet and focused on the shots and plays on the court, almost taking me back to pre-race levels of focus, which for me personally felt good, I felt a comfort in that level of focus, which controlled my nerves. A teammate though reminded me about the difference, of sitting on the bench to pre-race. Yes, you are sitting on the bench, but you are still part of the team, which means cheering for your teammates and pumping up the energy. Yes learn from what is going on, but part of that is also being involved with everyone else. While my first thought was that she doesn't get what I'm doing, the reality was I could still focus pretty well on the specific skills on the court that I was trying to focus on as well as cheer super loud and make myself part of the team. In reality, while I still really wanted to get out on the court, I mean c'mon there is nothing like the wheels hitting the court and the ball bounce, that is one of my happy places, and yea I wanted a workout as well, but I learned plenty from sitting on the bench. Team isn't yea, I'll play with the team, but wanting to focus on your own skills and goals. Self-learning doesn't mean shutting out the team, and sometimes shouting loudly teaches more on the silent inside than you think. Here's to learning and growing on and off the bench.