I Became a Freshman Again

The first lift is where it hit me.

Not a game. Not even a practice. A lift. I have been in weight rooms my whole life, so I thought I knew exactly what I was walking into, and then I got maybe halfway through and understood that nobody in that room was going to let me coast. You don’t skip reps. You don’t stand around between sets. You’re tired, your body is already sore, and the answer to that is you keep going anyway.

That was the first time I thought, okay. This is different. This is way different from high school.

I kept telling myself the same thing all week. Just take everything and learn from it. It’s only going to make you better.

What I didn’t know yet was that the lifting was not going to be the hard part.

I used to be the big dog

Ask me a month ago what I was most confident about in my game and I wouldn’t have said scoring. I would have said leadership.

Last year I was a senior. In high school that means you’re the big dog. You’re the one who talks. I over-communicated with everybody, all the time, and it never cost me a thought. It was just who I was on the floor.

Then I got to Washington and I became a freshman again.

That sentence sounds obvious written down. It did not feel obvious. I walked into a gym full of players who are all really good and all really smart about the game, and the part of me that talks just went quiet. Not because anybody made me feel small. Nobody did. I did that by myself.

What I was actually doing

Here’s the honest version of my first few weeks.

I was going into workouts trying not to make mistakes.

That’s different from going into workouts trying to be good, and I didn’t understand the difference until I was already living in it. I wasn’t playing. I was managing how I looked. Every rep had a second job, which was to prove something about me.

I didn’t want anybody looking at me and thinking, yeah, you can tell she’s a freshman.

So I thought about everything. And thinking about everything made me mess up more.

That’s the part I’d want somebody to know. The overthinking wasn’t protecting me from looking like a freshman. The overthinking was the thing making me look like one. I was doing it to myself, in front of everybody, on purpose, and calling it being careful.

The same word, in a different room

The move has been good. I want to be clear about that, because I know how this kind of thing can read.

The team and the coaches have made me feel welcome from the first day. We hang out constantly. There’s no bad blood, nothing dramatic, nothing to complain about. Most days I’m just happy to be here.

And then there are the nights.

You’re in the dorm, it’s late, you can’t sleep, and you’re lying there having a whole conversation with yourself in your head. That’s when it gets you. Not during the day. At night, when it’s quiet, and it’s two hours later where your family is, so there’s nobody to call even if you wanted to. What you want more than anything in the world is to hug your mom.

I only noticed later that I’d used the same word both times.

Overthinking in the weight room, because I didn’t want to look like a freshman. Overthinking in the dorm in the middle of the night, because I missed my family. Same habit. Two different rooms.

What changed

Nobody sat me down. There wasn’t a speech.

It was just something I finally let myself believe, which is that anybody can lead. Anybody can use their voice. Being the youngest one in the gym doesn’t disqualify you from talking, and waiting until you’ve earned it is just another way of hiding.

So I started talking again. Not because I’d earned it back. Because it turns out you don’t have to.

If you’re fourteen or fifteen and you want to play at this level one day, that’s the thing I’d tell you now that I couldn’t have told you a month ago. It’s okay to make mistakes. It’s okay to fail. It’s okay to fall down in front of the exact people you were hoping to impress, as long as you get back up and you actually learn something from it.

You are going to be new at something. Probably more than once. The people watching you can tell already, and they don’t care nearly as much as you think they do.

Trying not to look new is what makes you look new.

I wish somebody had told me that in July. So I’m telling you in September.