Like many Americans, I spent my youth playing sports — baseball, ice hockey, football. But the demands of work and concerns about injury without adequate insurance led me to abandon my childhood passions.
I came out of sports retirement when I turned 35. After moving from the United States to Scotland I joined the Haar Hitters, one of 10 teams in Edinburgh’s coed slow-pitch softball league. (In Scotland, “haar” refers to the fog rolling in from the North Sea.)
The Haar Hitters were mostly Brits who’d never held a softball and a few American expats past their heyday. We were a so-so team stuck in the weaker of two league divisions.
What started as a weekly diversion would become my gateway to building intergenerational friendships, getting fit and familiarizing myself with my new country. Even while living in Scotland, I learned useful lessons for my home country, too.
America is a country of sports lovers who don’t play sports. Yet adult recreation leagues can be an inexpensive solution to so many of the things that worry us: that we don’t have friends, that we’re out of shape and that we’re losing our vigor. According to a 2015 poll, while 73 percent of Americans played sports as kids, only 25 percent continue to do so as adults.
When the pandemic struck, half our players quit and the captain resigned. Another teammate and I took over and I soon realized that we had a golden opportunity to reinvent the team. When pandemic restrictions lifted, everyone in our city wanted to interact again. We had more recruits at our practices than we could take on.
My new leadership role brought out competitive instincts that I didn’t know I had. I sought out experienced players from North American expat groups on Facebook, designed practices, obsessed over batting orders and played the long game by sending flattering emails to good ball players I hoped to recruit in later years. I felt like a cutthroat general manager with carte blanche and fantasies of league domination.
I was also getting into shape. I’d joined the Edinburgh Ogres, one of eight teams in the Scottish ball hockey league. (Ball hockey is like ice hockey, but with a ball instead of a puck and running shoes instead of skates.) I’d played ice hockey throughout my youth, so I thought I’d perform well against the Scots, whose country rarely produces professional ice hockey players and whose most noteworthy athletic accomplishment involves throwing heavy rocks.
But halfway through my first practice I felt like I had the cardiovascular system of an overweight dog. I was nauseated trying to keep up with the Scots, who ran into corners with reckless abandon as if barreling down a hill, sword in hand.
Between the nausea and the wounded pride from having minimal game time on the third line, I had good reason to get in shape. Imagine a mellower, less disciplined, middle-aged “Rocky” training montage: jogging alongside my local river but taking lots of bird-watching breaks, lifting weights in the garage listening to Esther Perel’s couples therapy podcast, stretching to a “Yoga With Adriene” video on YouTube.
We encourage our kids to play sports to improve their physical health while we neglect our own. In America, 32 percent of adult men and 48 percent of adult women are physically inactive — defined as less than 150 minutes of weekly aerobic activity — costing the country some $51 billion a year in health care costs associated with inactivity, according to the World Health Organization. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that 8.3 percent of adult deaths in the United States are attributable to inactivity.
I was out of shape, but I wasn’t entirely useless. I liked to block shots with dramatic self-sacrifice by diving headfirst into the ball’s trajectory. After years of changing diapers and singing lullabies, I felt like I was reclaiming a bit of my wild side when fighting gritty battles along the boards for ball control and limping home with a few well-earned bruises.
My teams weren’t just helping me reclaim some teenage vitality, they were also helping me make friends at postgame pub gatherings and on long drives to tournaments. I became pals with Gregor, the player-coach of the Ogres who also runs a weekly roller hockey scrimmage. He told me how he’s served as best man at a teammate’s wedding, been a shoulder to cry on and even acted as a reference for a visa application.
“I’ve seen lifelong friendships made, romantic relationships form and flourish, and teammates grow from quiet, shy boys and girls into confident and assured adults,” Gregor told me.
Sports can be a social glue in a time when Americans are spending, on average, 20 fewer hours a month with their friends than they did two decades ago, according to the surgeon general. Being lonely and socially isolated is estimated to have the same impact on our life spans as smoking 15 cigarettes a day.
American kids aren’t playing sports as much as they used to, either. Sports participation declined by 6 percent, or 1.2 million Americans ages 6 to 17, between 2019 and 2022, according to the Aspen Institute’s 2023 “State of Play” report. Part of the participation decline may be due to the high cost of sports. Parents pay $30 billion to $40 billion a year in travel, equipment, lessons and camps — costs that exclude many kids from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds.
We might take inspiration from European countries like Iceland, where the government and, especially, local municipalities invest heavily in recreational sports. A country of some 360,000 people, Iceland shocked the soccer world when it qualified to play against much bigger countries and more professionally developed players in the 2018 World Cup. The country’s sporting success has been attributed to cultivating a culture of almost universal sports participation. (About 90 percent of Icelandic kids play in sports clubs at some point in their youth.) In Iceland, sports facilities are open to anyone, kids as young as 4 are mentored by highly trained coaches and teams promote personal development while placing importance on fun and friendship.
Barriers to sports are unfortunate because sports can be something close to a lifeline for people, as they were for me. When I left the United States, I lost my social network and my job connections. Rejected applications, a failed driving exam and financial anxiety made me feel like I was failing at life. Sports weren’t a distraction. They were the only thing reminding me that I was a competent person.
I was struggling to meet many of society’s typical marks of success, but I did manage to jump from the third line on my hockey team to the first. In softball, I had a batting average of almost .700, held my own at shortstop and watched as recruits formed into friends who get together to celebrate holidays and support one another on or off the field, where we now play in the premier league division.
I may not have fulfilled my dream of league domination, but I have friends, Thursday nights to look forward to and a cardiovascular system better than a heavy dog’s. The pandemic may be over, but our epidemics of inactivity and loneliness continue. Rec leagues can be a part of the cure.
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