I had been preparing for this moment for nearly two years. Slightly hunched over, hamstrings coiled with tension like angry rattlesnakes, palms turned upward at the blue sky, my head buzzed with a cocktail of performance anxiety and stoic game-day energy. My CWX 3/4 tights peeked hopefully out from my shorts, which were almost as green as the Santa Cruz grass I was standing on. I could smell the sunscreen on my neck mingling with the growing sweat and trickling down onto my jersey. The jersey was from an ultimate frisbee team but I wasn’t here to throw discs. That team and sport were both behind me now. I was ready to embrace a new athletic life and identity. I looked at Matt to my left, wearing a tank top from his recent dive trip to Honduras. He looked ready, so I took a breath and signaled to my opponents that I was ready. After dozens of pickup games and literal days spent playing on the beach, I was finally playing in my first official Spikeball tournament.
The first serve flew off the net so fast it looked like an MLB fastball, bouncing low and flying two yards to my left. The next one did the same, flying two yards to Matt’s right.
“Wow,” I thought, “This is going to be a very different day than I’d envisioned.”
My instinct was right. At my first formal Spikeball tournament ever, at the tender age of 31, I lost my first game 21-4 to two college students, one of whom was wearing jorts.
These humbling losses continued as the day wore on. We didn’t win a single game that sunny day in Soquel. We eventually broke double digits in our score, but never came within arms reach of winning. We were consistently blown out by college kids in short, one-sided, tensionless affairs. I could count the number of rallies we had on one hand. Our opponents got more than half of their points from diabolically fast serves and when we finally got to serve to them they’d end every offensive possession with a merciless kill shot to the part of the net we had no way to get to short of teleporting.
The lopsided lack of parity became frustrating for me. Their serves blasted off the net with side spin and flew unfathomably far to either side of us; ours could barely make it onto the net consistently. Their hits came in dozens of shapes and angles; our smashes and drop shots went right to their waiting hands. Their passes were patient and calculated; ours were panicked and clumsy. We were simply outmatched to the point I began to wonder if what I had been playing in the park and on the beach with my friends bore any resemblance to what I was playing now.
This wasn’t supposed to happen. I had entered us into the intermediate division to give us a fighting chance. Based on our experience (lots of pickup but no formal tournaments) and our self reported player score, this is what we were supposed to do. However, the night before the tournament, we got an email that due to a lack of intermediate teams, all the divisions would be merged together. As a result we only had one set of games that was somewhat close, a spirited battle against two high school kids from Folsom who were the only other intermediate team present. They had driven nearly three hours to enjoy half a dozen clobberings and one competitive best-of-three series against us. This unexpected barn burner was by far the most fun game for me because we actually had a chance of winning instead of the ice cubes chance in hell we’d been dealt for the rest of the day.
We lost nonetheless, were quickly eliminated from contention, and ended up without more games to play. Meanwhile, bracket play headed towards a climax. The team we played against in that first 21-4 loss ended up getting second at the tournament, losing to the tournament organizer and his partner. Huddled beneath the shade tent I overheard other teams bantering about whether Cal Poly was better than Baylor at Spikeball and if Youtube-famous Spike influencer Preston Bies was actually a good player. Surrounded by college kids with superior skills, playing the niche plastic sport successor to Ultimate Frisbee, I suddenly felt old, irrelevant, and out of place.
On the drive back home, winding up and over the Santa Cruz mountains, a litany of questions paraded through my brain.
Did I in fact suck at this game I thought I was good at?
Am I too old to be trying a new sport?
How on earth is the game so serve dominant at this level? Do other people find this fun?
Why were there no other intermediate teams there?
Why was everyone younger than me and better than me at the same time? Couldn’t they pick one?
How did I get here and do I want to keep doing this?
These burning questions motivated me to write what you’re about to read.