I Make the Can't Cut List

*This is the first in a series of four or five essays I wrote while I was in graduate school. I was going through some of my old grad school documents and came across the personal essays I wrote during my Advanced News Practices class, which I took from David Waters, who now works at The Washington Post. I thought throwing them up on the blog would be a good forum for them. So enjoy.

I Make the Can't Cut List
This story is about the day during my junior year of high school that I realized I had made the high school basketball team.

The alarm blares. The obnoxious, high-pitched beeping startles me from sleep. It immediately puts me in a bad mood. I roll over and swipe at the clock aimlessly until I hit the snooze button. I throw my legs over the side of the bed and lay my face in my hands. It’s 6:30 a.m. and the sun has yet to penetrate the darkness leftover from the previous evening. No one should be awake before the sun returns from its respite. I’m half-asleep, but a coherent thought races through my still slumbering mind, anyway. I leap from my sitting position, hurry from my bedroom and rush down the hall to get ready for school.

Today. I’ve waited five years, six months and a handful of days. But who’s counting?

I clean myself up, grab my books, yell for my sister to get herself ready, and when she finally emerges from her room fully primped, the two of us leave the house and begin our short walk to school. Yet today, the less than quarter-mile stroll feels like a marathon because my anxiousness distracts me. I walk at a brisk pace, but still my heart pounds as if I had just run suicides at football practice on a mid-August afternoon. I try not to let the frigidity of the November morning bother me. I concentrate on the frozen blades of grass that crack under my feet. It helps clear my mind, but I know when I walk through those doors I’ll head straight to the basketball coach’s office where the list will be taped to the wall.

My sister and I arrive at school. She meets up with her friends, and I bob and weave through the crowd of bused-in students with the dexterity of an NFL running back. I leave the cold behind and walk down the hallways, sweat forming on my brow from a combination of the heated hallways and the anticipation. I remember the final day of cuts from three years of middle school and my first two years of high school. But this year, my junior year, it feels different. This time, I expect my name to be on the list, not absent from it, as had been the case in previous years.

I turn a corner and walk down the hallway toward my coach’s office. My every movement plays out in slow motion in my mind until I arrive. The list hangs motionless, staring back at me blankly, a single strip of tape holding it to the wall. I agonize over every name. I sound them out slowly, phonetically. Jaime Hollander. Not mine. Rodney Britt. Not mine. C.J. Williams. Almost mine. It started with a “C.” Fourth name. Colin Donohue. Internally, I let out a large sigh of relief. My shoulders slump slightly as relaxation overcomes me. I allow a glimpse of a smile. My friend and now teammate C.J. stands behind me. He was almost assured of a spot on the roster. I was not, and he knows that. He pats me on my back and leaves.

“I made the basketball team,” I say to myself. “And it only took five years, six months and a handful of days.”

But I wasn’t counting.