What Sport did you play growing up?

[Hunt&FishCO]

Biathlon/Nordic skiing - through 10th grade was the only school sanctioned “sport”

Bass fishing (Jr Bassmasters), Ice Fishing (Commerial-Yellow Perch), and Waterfowl took up a majority of my free time when I wasn’t working through Middle/High School

 

[noharleyyet]

Every Interscholastic Sport except tennis and golf. Track slow & football fast…a gym rat. Boxed for the Boys Club & took private Kenpo Karate lessons but football was king in our little town. I could run, throw, and didn’t mind contact. Backs and ends were considered skill positions so you had to play basketball and run track…otherwise you were relegated to an inauspicious offseason regimen called the ragnots. High Scholl was a blast, College, with Vietnam blowing up, was serious.

 

[Big Fin]

Football was my main sports interest, though it cramped my hunting and trapping. Thankfully in northern MN, FB seasons were done by mid-October, about the time trapping opened and the grouse hunting got really good.

Physics was on my side when it came to 9-man football. As a Junior I was 6'1" and pushing 185 lean pounds, so being a running back with a ten yard approach against 140# DBs resulted in an incorrect impression of my limited talents. By my senior year I had grown another inch and gained 15 additional pounds of muscle. In my sophomore year I got to start at MLB due to some injuries, in an otherwise stacked lineup of seniors. Lost one game that year, in the state tournament. My junior year we had no seniors and the opponents took out their revenge from the prior year beatings we administered. My senior year, with a more experienced lineup, we again lost one game.

I played basketball, not because I was any good at it, rather for the social aspects. If we had budget for a hockey team at our school, I would have surely went that route. I was lucky to have a coach who understood my propensity for contact sports. I was expected to use all of my fouls, which I usually did. I was expected to have the most rebounds on our team, which I usually did. And any points I scored were considered pure bonus.

I was so bad when I started BB that I was voted "Most Improved Player" two years in a row. You have to start from a really bad spot for that to happen.

My junior year we had no seniors. We lost three games, getting upset in the 16-team District tournament. A lesson learned for the next year.

My senior year we had lost one game going into the tournaments. We won the 16-team District tournament that sent us to the Regional tournament. We won Regions in a 5-OT thriller, that gave us the Region 8 Championship. The state was split into 2 classes, A (ours) and AA (mostly cake eaters). If you won a Class A Regional tournament, you had emerged as the winner out of 64 teams. Then, after winning the 64-team Region, you got to go to MSP and play in Williams Arena, home of the U of M Gophers. We got beat at state in our first game after leading most of the game. Our starting point guard was sick as a dog and missed most of the game. We also got beat in the consolation bracket, with all of us being sick with whatever Jack (PG) has come down with. I got knocked out cold in the 2nd quarter of that game, got a few stitches, and watched from the bench. Such injury in my final HS sporting game might have been some karma for the way I approached BB as a contact sport.

The coaches wanted me to sign up for track, but that was right in the middle of spring beaver trapping, so not a chance I was going to do that.

I never again lifted weights or played another minute of organized sports, but I had a great time doing so.

As General Douglas MacArthur wrote, and with which I agree, "Upon the fields of friendly strife are sown the seeds that, on other fields, on other days, will bear the fruits of victory."