I was on the volleyball team when I was a freshman and sophomore in high school. I really enjoyed playing the game. I was a pretty good server. I liked riding the bus to the games that were at other high schools. I don’t remember what happened to the team, but there wasn’t one when I was a junior and senior.
There weren’t many sports offered for girls when I was in high school. Looking at my yearbook from the year I graduated, 1967, the only teams that had girls on them were the swim and golf teams. Golf had one girl on its team. There were no girls on the track team, no girls baseball, softball, basketball or soccer teams. The only “team” girls really had was cheerleading and that was limited to just a few girls. There also wasn’t any city recreation league in the area I grew up in. I was on the girl’s basketball team for one year in Jr. High. I don’t know why there wasn’t a girl’s basketball team in high school. Very few girls were able to participate in any sports. I’m sure glad that has changed. I think that sports are very important for human development.. It is as important for girls as it is for boys. It is important for everyone.
Mary Lou
I swam competitively since I was eight-years-old, so when spring sport try-outs were announced my freshman year in high school, I went out for the swim team. I grew up in a neighborhood that had a community swimming pool for each housing association. We lived three doors down from the Lincoln Village Association #3 swimming pool. There was also a little league baseball diamond next to the pool. I spent about 90% of my summers at the pool or the baseball diamond and the area around them. I had a natural talent for competitive swimming, especially the freestyle sprints and the butterfly. I was decent at backstroke, but I struggled with breaststroke. When I competed in the individual medley (where you swim all four strokes in one race), I had to run up a large lead in the butterfly and backstroke before I lost most or all of my lead to the breaststroke. I had to then gut it out in the freestyle to have a chance of winning.
I was very successful on the high school swim team. I was the best butterflier on our team, and one of the best in the section. I was also one of the fastest freestyle sprinters on the team. I won first in the section in the 50 yard butterfly my sophomore year and first in the section in the 100 yard butterfly my senior year. I was recruited by several college swim teams my senior year, and went to Southern Oregon University (College, then) on a partial scholarship.
By the time I was a senior, my best friend and I had the ear of our swim coach. The night before game day, Rick and I would independently build a line-up for the upcoming swim meet. We then compared notes that next morning and came up with a combined line-up. We would then make a visit to our coach and present him with the line-up. He would look at it and laugh. However, most of the line-up Rick and I developed ended up being the actual line-up. I learned a lot of water polo and swim coaching from Coach DeLong.
I also played water polo during high school. We didn’t have a high school water polo team until my junior year, but I played on a city team my freshman and sophomore years with three other high schoolers and our high school swim coach. Those two years of playing the San Francisco Olympic Club, Rancho Cordova, the University of Pacific freshman and alumni teams, and other adult water polo teams taught me valuable skills that enabled us to have undefeated seasons for the two years we played on the high school team.
I also played basketball my sophomore year in high school. I really wasn’t very good. I only went out for the team because I figured it was a good excuse to quit my newspaper route. I barely made the team. I’m sure I was only kept on the team because my dad had been the high school principal and was now the assistant superintendent of the school district. I remember sitting on the end of the bench during games, hoping I wouldn’t be put in. If I was put in, I had no clue as to what I was supposed to do. Nobody threw me the ball, for good reason, and I just ran around waving my arms.
I always thought I would play football when I got to high school. When I was six years old, I remember sitting with the cheerleaders and rooting for our team while my dad was walking around doing his principal duties. I played neighborhood football at the baseball diamond. I thought I was a pretty good running back. I was one of the fastest in my class up through sixth grade. I was even the quarterback of a flag football city league team. We went undefeated during the regular season which meant we represented North Stockton in the Turkey Bowl. We played the winners of South Stockton. We got trounced, and I was pulled by a substitute coach at half time and replaced by his son. It wasn’t the best day of my life.
By the time I got to high school, most of the boys in my class had matured. I didn’t have even the shadow of a pubic hair until the middle of my sophomore year in high school, so I was pretty small. I didn’t even know about high school football try-outs my freshman year, as football is a fall sport. Being so small, and having a pretty low self esteem, I probably wouldn’t have tried out even if I knew about them. I remember talking with the high school varsity football coach during the spring of my freshman year. He knew my dad was a large man and that I would probably mature and grow into a large high school student, eventually. I was slightly interested, but by then I was doing quite well in swimming and was just starting to play water polo. I felt that football and swimming weren’t compatible and didn’t mix very well.
High school sports lifted me out of my self-consciousness. It gave me the self-confidence that I needed to make friends and have a good high school experience. It also set me up for college, as I had a little financial help, and I had a built-in set of friends and a support network to help me through college life.
Brian
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