By Tracy Gates
When I got off the court, just one last match remained unfinished. One teammate had won three zip. Another had lost by mere points in five. And I, sadly, depressingly, had lost in three. If our team had a chance at winning and getting into the playoffs, it was up to this last woman on court.
A few weeks earlier in the league season, I didn’t think we’d get to this point. As captain of a new team at my new club with a mix of both seasoned and rookie players, I had been more concerned with getting everyone on court. You sign up to be on a team, make a commitment to play when needed, you should be able to actually compete in some matches. And at first that was my goal, to split the spoils equally. Well, reasonably equally.
That is much easier said than done.
I’ve been a team captain on and off through the years. More recently on, for three seasons in a row. And once in a while I wonder why I like doing it. I know why I do it. Because if no one else steps up there wouldn’t be a team. I wouldn’t get to play on one. Being a captain can have totally selfish motivations. But I like being a captain because I’m not just getting a few girls to play a match every week, I’m helping them to get to know other women who enjoy competitive sport. I’m introducing the rookies to a part of the game where more is on the line. And that part includes the pain and frustration of losing, and the happy, shining high of winning.
We had experienced both over the course of the season. Girls who were accustomed to winning, experienced their first losses. Others who had competed in sports years ago were reminded of the focus they needed to win. And a few competed for the first time ever. I felt lucky as captain that everyone was so enthusiastic to play; I never had to beg (well, just once) and we never defaulted. But when you’ve got ten players and only four individual matches per team match, it’s a bit difficult to be competitive when you want everyone to play. This is when being captain can get tricky.
Some captains play pretty much only their best players and sub in their lower ladder ones when those higher aren’t available. Some have rating systems, figuring in things like challenge matches and tournament results and how well they can hold their apres squash beer. Some divvy up the season equally and everyone who can play, plays as much as the others. And some may truly not care and just put in anyone that’s available. I probably figure in somewhere between quirky rating systems and attempting equal play. The thing is I want to win. In fact, I don’t quite get why anyone would want to be captain without wanting to win.
Which is what I found myself wanting as we neared the end of the season. I’d spent the first three-quarters creating a spreadsheet of names and dates and availability and pushing x’s from box to box as if squash league were a game of tic tac toe. I even sent it out for the first half of the season so that teammates could see when they were scheduled to play. But while being so organized looks great on paper, it has no flexibility, no room for spur of the moment strategy if we were suddenly faced with a team roster much stronger or weaker than usual. After this happened a couple of times, in which players were either crushed or doing the crushing, I decided to move from the monthly plan to the weekly one. It made for more fair and fun competition.
And it also made us move up in the team rankings. We were number six in a field of eleven teams when I realized that we might have a slim chance to make it to number four and a place in the playoffs. But not only would we have to win our last three matches, but the teams at numbers five and four would have to lose. This is when being a captain can either be fun or hair-tearing. I happen to enjoy the extra challenge, but it’s a good thing I have a lot of hair because our division was comprised of two levels of players, along with rules about how many times a woman could sub up or down. (Consult http://www.msra.net/leagues/rules. asp if you want your head to spin.) I couldn’t just put in my top four players…or I could, but I’d have to think of the ramifications of that. A season’s worth of play had jumbled the roster, as it probably had for every team.
Fortunately, the first match that mattered was a pretty sure win. The second, however, was much less so. We prevailed anyway, less to my captain’s skills and more to my teammates’ great play. Finally, it had come down to the last regular season match and the last individual match. Our opponents were up two games to one, but if we won this last one, we would be going to the playoffs.
I’m still not sure if my teammate realized this. And by the time I began watching, just before she tied the game score at 2-2, I wasn’t sure whether I should announce that she was our last hope or not. “Attention!” I imagined myself saying. “This is your captain speaking. Whether our team goes down or flies on is now all up to you!”
At news like that, some players may grab the controls and fire the engines. Others may panic and plunge into a nose dive. I didn’t want to be responsible for the wreckage, so I just prayed that my teammate had a steady hand, could keep her head out of the clouds, and was headed in the right direction.
She was…but so was her opponent. The final game went to extra points, 15-13, won by her opponent. Final point score over five games: 38-34. It was an excellent match.
I don’t know who takes an end-of- season loss harder, a player who gave everything they had in the last moments of the last game or a captain who’s been thinking how to eke out a win for weeks. I happened to walk a number of blocks with that player on the way to the subway after the match and I can say that we were both pretty bummed. And my own melancholy lasted a day or two. But squash, like many things in life, is about learning from loss and then moving on. I’m not yet sure if I’ll be captain again next year; it would be nice if someone else took the controls and created the spreadsheets…and I’m sure they’ll do things differently than I. For now I’ll just say this, “sit back, relax, and enjoy the summer.”
Tracy Gates plays squash in New York City and writes about it on her blog www.squeakyfeet.wordpress.com.
