Winless Fillies at top of league
If you’re not a fan, you probably aren’t aware that this year’s girls basketball team at Laurel Highlands has been on the receiving end of quite a few lopsided defeats.
There have been games – too many to count – in which the Fillies have scored in single digits.
In what was the worst drubbing of the year, Oakland Catholic scored 81 points against the Fillies’ four.
The team currently stands at 0 for the season. As for future victories, prospects are not bright Penn Hills and Woodlands Hills are slated this week. Oakland Catholic comes to town January 30.
As bad as this sounds, it’s not the entire story, for along with the losses, the young Fillies – one senior and one junior are on a roster dominated by sophomores and freshmen – have demonstrated what may be the rarest attribute in sports; in the face of defeat after defeat, in a season in which the likelihood of even a single win appears dim, this team has not given up.
It’s a life-lesson that should be taken to heart by all of us.
The Fillies play hard. They try. Every minute of every game.
If sports reveals character, as often has been said, this is a team brimming with character – the kind that bodes well, if not for seasons to come, then for the real test: life itself.
Face it. Life is not a commencement speech. We adults feed young people the line that success is just around the corner, that they can be anything they set their minds to. Maybe we wish it were true. Maybe we believe it’s true.
But it’s not. For most of us, success, if it comes at all, it is circumscribed, provisional, transitory. Limitations – physical, emotional, intellectual – are part and parcel of life. The sky’s the limit? Not likely.
Except for a lucky few, most of us live middling, muddled lives – lives that are neither complete successes nor complete failures.
For the overwhelming majority of us, the daily grind of small chores is reality, is life itself.
Some people never learn to live with the grind. Frequently, this failure results in … well, I’m just not sure what it results in. Addiction? Unhappiness? A quiet despair? These are among the consequences, just maybe.
The comedian Woody Allen once said, “Showing up is 80 percent of life.” His writing partner, Marshall Brickman, added, “Sometimes it’s easier to hide home in bed.”
For many of us adults, losing like the Fillies have lost this year would result in weeks spent in the fetal position.
Losing is hard. Losing all the time is harder yet. It takes real character to lose and to lose again and yet stay determined and ready to play.
“Showing up,” in the sense of being present and being prepared to tough it out, is the quality these Laurel Highland girls have displayed every time they have stepped on the court this year.
Now, it would be easy to dismiss all of this. It’s only basketball, only high school. What does it matter? I get the point. But back to Woody Allen: being there is not just a thing, it many ways it’s THE thing.
Even for those who achieve great success, it’s a factor.
Sticking to sports: Sandy Koufax was the most brilliant pitcher of all time, but he struggled early in his career to control an errant fastball. As youngsters, both Jerry West and Michael Jordan had trouble making their junior high basketball teams. And Alex Morgan struggled to recover from a torn ACL at 17 to become a national soccer team superstar.
The point is, each of these athletes worked and worked, day after day. The daily grind.
What’s true In sports is also true in the larger world: Einstein calculated infinity on a dusty chalkboard. F. Scott Fitzgerald never stopped revising his novels. Marching for justice and equality, Martin Luther King set one foot in front of the other.
Again, the daily grind.
So, go, Fillies. Hang in there, kids. You’re showing us how it’s done. You’re an inspiration. You’re playing a thousand. You’re leading the league in life.
Post-script. Playing on Monday and Thursday last week, the Fillies scored 26 and 24 points respectively. They shot better, they rebounded and dribbled better, and they managed, more often than, to break the press. Another lesson learned: persistence and hard work pay off.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.