A Closer Look

Author: David Linholm

Maybe some of you are worried about your athletic exploits here at Middlebury. Well, I'm sure you've heard about my triumphs (I'm kind of a big deal), so you might be wondering why I don't play on every single varsity sport. The truth is: I'm not a star at everything. No really! I'm serious! Anyway, here's what you may not have heard.

In sixth grade I joined a basketball team, and we were pretty good. I mean, we won a trophy at the end of the year, and it wasn't just because they divided the league into an "A" bracket and a "B" bracket for the playoffs. (We won twice as many games in the "B" division playoffs as in the regular season.) But as awesome as our team was, I knew basketball wasn't for me when I went 0-for-13 from the free-throw line in one of our late-season games. We lost. And my whole family was in the crowd.

Lacrosse was another option for me, but in my first and last season, I played attack for most of every game without scoring a single goal. My teammates were convinced I was trying to miss. That, coupled with the fact that I was routinely getting clobbered by body checks from opponents who actually knew what they were doing, left me no choice but to give it up.

Another sport I could have been great at if I'd been given half a chance was baseball. According to a member of our team here, Liam Quinn '05, I once threw a baseball almost 100 mph! Unfortunately, that ball went directly into my own dugout, killing two and injuring seven more (again, that's in Liam's account and he might be exaggerating on the casualties). I thnk it's fair to say it wasn't my shining moment.

Shall I continue? The most memorable moment of this fall's soccer season (ask anyone on the team) came in our NESCAC playoff game against Tufts, when I dove to my left to make a save, only to crash, with my entire body, into the post. Most everyone that saw it thought I had died. Oh, and the ball went in, too.

As for hockey, my career was over as soon as it began, when, as a five-year-old, I thought the point of the sport was to skate as hard as possible into the boards and then fall over. You can still see me doing that most nights down at Kenyon during intramurals.

However, my pairing did tie for third place in last year's "Turkey Tourney," an intramural badminton tournament. So take heart, Middlebury students: eventually you'll find the sport at which you are destined to be great. Mine happens to be badminton. Okay, good talk. I'll see you on the court.