Two States Away
We left at 4:47 AM on a Friday in January for a tournament in Hershey, Pennsylvania.
That sentence used to sound insane to me. I would read it on somebody else’s Facebook post and think: that family is broken. Something has gone wrong over there. They have lost the plot.
Now I write the sentence about myself and feel nothing.
The drive is seven and a half hours if nothing goes wrong. Nothing has ever not gone wrong. There is always a Sheetz at hour four where someone needs a bathroom and someone else needs a phone charger and the dog — yes the dog is in the car, we will get to that — needs to be walked on a strip of grass between a propane tank and a diesel pump.
By the time you cross into Pennsylvania, you have eaten a gas station breakfast sandwich that was assembled in 2019. Your kid is asleep with cleats still on. Your spouse is doing math in the passenger seat: eight games over three days, three other families carpooling, two hotel rooms at the Residence Inn, one tank of gas there, one tank back, registration, food, the inevitable Target run for the thing you forgot.
The math never works. We do it anyway. We pretend the math works.
You arrive Friday afternoon. The hotel parking lot is already a tournament. You can identify everyone’s sport from twenty yards. The hockey families have the SUVs that smell like a locker room from inside the closed doors. The baseball families are pulling out bat bags the size of golf bags. The soccer families look the most normal until you notice the canopy strapped to the roof.
You will see the same families at check-in that you saw at the rest stop in Connecticut. You will nod. They will nod. Nobody says anything. Everyone understands.
The first game is Saturday at 7:40 AM, which means warmups at 6:55, which means in the car at 6:30, which means breakfast at 6:00, which means you are awake at 5:30 in a hotel room in the middle of Pennsylvania wondering how this is your life.
Your kid plays. Your kid plays well. Your kid plays badly. It does not matter. Whatever happened in that 50-minute game is now the entire emotional content of the next eleven hours until the next game.
You eat lunch at a Panera attached to a Marshalls. You eat dinner at a place called Roosters that has thirty-eight TVs and one of them is showing a tournament from Ohio that one of the dads at the next table is also watching because his older kid is playing in it.
You drink one beer. You wanted four. You have a 7:40 AM game tomorrow.
You know more about the U13 girls team from Pittsburgh than you know about your next-door neighbors. You know their goalkeeper has a hip thing. You know their coach is a screamer. You know their #14 is going to play D1 somewhere and you are slightly resentful about it on behalf of your own kid, who is eleven, and who you are evaluating against a stranger at a tournament in a state you do not live in.
You are aware this is insane. You do it anyway.
Sunday afternoon, somewhere between the third and fourth game, your kid will look up at you from the sideline with a face you do not have a name for. It is somewhere between exhausted and proud and seven years old. They will say something forgettable. “My shin guard slipped.” “Can I have a Gatorade.” “Did you see that pass.”
You will remember it for the rest of your life.
This is why the math doesn’t have to work.
You leave the hotel parking lot at 4:30 PM Sunday. You stop in Carlisle for gas. You stop in Allentown because someone has to pee. You hit traffic on 78. You hit traffic on 287. You hit traffic on 84.
Your kid is asleep in the back by Danbury. You and your spouse don’t talk for the last hour. There is nothing to say. You both already agreed to do it again in three weeks.
We pulled into the driveway at 11:52 PM. School at 7:15.
The other families are doing it too.
That is not comfort. That is a diagnosis.
— Tournament Parent