I haven’t written about this yet, and it needs its own blog post.

Our family friend/sister-in-law Darryl M had a goal of playing in the OK Native B-Ball tournament this past March. I haven’t played ball since long before my first hip replacement back in 2015. In January of this year we started playing at a local gym. There were just 4 of us at our first workout. My sister and I, Darryl, her husband Mo, and her niece Jan-u-fer. We shot around, got familiar with the ball again, played Knock-Out and Horse. Maybe we played 2-on-2? If we did it was just for a very brief amount of time. And that was about all we could physically do. I was so sore after that!! But we kept going back weekly, every Sunday, and we got more people to come out.

We gradually worked up from knock-out to playing 3 on 3. Then 4 on 4. We went from playing half court to full court. We had some youngins come out to play, and they were so supportive and encouraging of us! We found more 50+ and 40+ women to come play. Some the kids of the women who came out to play jumped in to help fill out a team or to be subs.

I think all of us started out playing in our running shoes. A vast assortment of Hoka Ones, Saucony, ASIC, and Brooks ran the court. We all gradually got court appropriate shoes. We worked out in spandex, old school mesh shorts, whatever was comfortable and what we could move in. We took lots of breaks. We had good music going. We tried to take a team picture after each session. There so much laughter, a little trash talking, that I looked forward to it every week.

There were several of us with health issues that showed up faithfully every Sunday. Me with my 2 replaced hip joints, my sister with her stuff, one woman needed a new knee, one had a heart attack previously, and another was recovering from a mysterious heart ailment. We all had grief, losing family members to the pandemic. But we showed up. And we improved. We were running full court games within a couple of months.

We were able to scrape together a team for the OK tournament. For the 50+ division, we had to play 6 on 6!! 😂 Some of us had never heard of that, much less played. So there was much YouTubing of 6 on 6 games and trying to practice it prior to the tournament.

I wish I could post a highlight reel here from the tournament. It was a sight! The thing that got me was that I felt like I was going full tilt…moving fast on defense, rebounding, etc. But when we watched the videos of our games we were all like, “Why does it look like we are moving in slow motion?” 😂😂😂 Just really given’er but barely moving. Soooooo many comical moments on the court….I think we laughed for days after at some of them!

We lost our first game right off the bat, which we protested. The official made us play down with 4 players because the other team only had 4. We should have been able to put 6 on the floor. It would have changed the outcome of the game, so we protested. We had to compromise on the protest. They wouldn’t let us replay the game, but they gave us our protest fee, plus half our entry fee back because their official messed up.

We worked our way back from the losers bracket to the championship game! And the 50+ women’s bracket games were all played in ONE day! Thank goodness there were only 4 teams total, but since we ended up in the losers bracket, we played 4 full games in one day.

We were exhausted by the last game. Before tip off we were already happy and excited because we didn’t expect to make it that far. One of our teammates said, “We’re already winners!” The other team out of Washington state was goooood. We got worked. We ended up with 2nd place at our first tournament!! Woooooo!!!! Darryl just hugged us really hard. She was our fearless leader and kept us moving towards her goal months.

I never ever thought I would be playing ball again at 55 years old. It has turned into self-care for me. Playing with these ladies on the weekends helps me take care of my physical, social, emotional, and mental health. I’m moving thee old bod, pushing it to do more as I am able, I get to laugh around for 2 hours, and do something I’ve enjoyed since 6th grade.

I’m so glad our weekly games have started back up again after the summer and fall hiatus. And I’m so glad to have found another form of self-care.