November 6, 2015
I coached speech and debate at Parkview for 18 years. During that time, my students won many state championships, a national championship, dominated invitational tournaments for over a solid decade, placed again and again at the national tournament. We were feared. We walked into tournaments with a swagger that was warranted: when our opponents saw "Parkview," they quaked a little. It was a wonderful advantage we had, rendering our adversaries less adversarial because of who we were.
This all sounds a bit much. It's just speech and debate. It's just Missouri. It's just high school. But I must admit it's a big deal to those in its grasp. And our part of the country is known nationally for its ass-kickingness in this field of battle.
I was preceded by two legends who built the program into national prominence. By some miracle, my Vikings and I managed to perpetuate the legacy. Okay, it wasn't just a miracle. I worked harder in my years at Parkview than I thought possible. It wasn't just the hours: I slept, ate, breathed my role as the leader of this force. What we needed to do next and better and bigger was constantly on my mind. Unfortunately, the weight of it crushed me; I was eventually suffocated by the demands of it.
I've been away from it for almost a year and a half. I haven't missed it. Oh, I've missed the kids, I've missed my coaching buddies. I miss winning. But the cost of it I don't miss.
I write this in the parking lot of Republic High School. It is late Friday night. I'm back at a debate tournament. My sweet daughter is competing inside those walls. This is her first tournament. It is a surreal night.
As I walked into the school this evening to bring her food between events, the sights and sounds were familiar. But I wasn't leading the squad most likely to win the tournament. I'm a mom. A mom whose daughter came to countless tournaments in her stroller or pig tails or as an elementary school kiddo with roller skates on to roll through the halls. She grew up in this, in the midst of my obsessive attention to a job that likely took too much attention away from her and her little brother.
Today she looks stunning and grown up. She is confident and has had a successful first day thus far. I get to view it all with complete understanding of what it means and how unbelievably difficult it is and yet just be her supporter. Rather than managing the needs of 100 debaters at once, I get to manage the needs of one. The most important one.
Watching her excitement today and viewing this incomparable activity through her eyes is as good as any of the championships enumerated in the "I was good at what I did" portion of this post. I am proud of her. I'm proud I helped make her. I'm proud she is seeing inside the very thing that took me away night after night, weekend after weekend. She gets it, even if just a smidge. There aren't words for the guilt that gripped me every hour I spent away for the good of the cause of speech and debate.
The thing is, it's redemptive to be understood.
After today--in some measure--she understands.
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