When Winning Isn’t Possible
by Stephen Wunderli

What I am about to tell you is true. I begin this way because it will seem a fiction. But believe me, it is true. It happened last season.

I coach a group of junior-high age football players. On the first day of practice, I brought my son to play for his first time ever. He has Spina-Bifida, a condition that has left him incontinent, but mostly healthy despite nine operations. I was a little worried about how he would be treated. But as the kids began to arrive, I noticed a few more players with obvious shortcomings: There was Jared, he plays defensive end and has a prosthetic leg. On game days he wears a special light-weight carbon fiber thing with a hi-tech ankle. Josh is a midget, and I mean a literal birth-defect midget standing about three feet tall. Trying not to notice, I nonchalantly asked: “So who is the quarterback?” One of the parents answered: “The one with dyslexia.” I immediately make a mental note to not hand out playbooks.

Halfway through the practice, a kid who runs the ball like Emmet Smith, tells me he will be gone the coming week on account his mother will be on the Montel show. There’s also a twelve year old with size 14 feet who stands 6 foot 2 with a body like an Adonis but an emotional IQ somewhere in the fifth grade. There’s Spencer, an intense kid who bursts into a rampage of tears and tantrum whenever he gets scratched (unlike Josh the midget who spews language harsh enough to make a sailor blush). There’s James, who looks like a grade-school Ross Perot and is always doing impersonations of teen idols.

I spent the entire season laughing. I designed an offense around a pulling guard and a half-back that ran the ball like he just robbed a convenience store. We had ten plays. Our defense revolved around the midget who shot between the legs of the center. One time he dove on a fumble, and no lie, he and the ball bounced two feet into the air. We got penalized for his language. Our huddle was more of an ameba. Jared would sometimes forget his game leg. A lot of plays went left instead of right. The first game we lost was in the playoffs when the center left for the weekend to be with his dying father; who had cancer. We never got our timing down, but we played hard enough to get two concussions, a pulled groin and a broken arm. We lost the next game, but it didn’t really matter. We finished 8-2. That’s 8 more wins than anyone would have guessed at the beginning of the season.

Sometimes how you play the game is why you win. I see those kids now and they carry themselves with a kind of confidence that I can’t define. They don’t trash talk. They don’t exclude anyone. They try harder in school. The midget was baptized. You could never gather a more disparate group together; and yet they all share something very special. It makes me wonder about the rest of us, and I’m a little sad. We should have what they have, that sense of brotherhood and optimism even if we are too short, have only one parent at home, can’t afford football cleats, or are suffering the loss of a limb or a parent or the recognition so many kids get for the wrong reason. It seems, too often, that we don’t go to battle for each other. Our season was never about winning, but we won anyway. Those kids smile at me, hug me when they see me. And they still call me coach. What more could you possibly ask of life?

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Stephen Wunderli is the author of two novels for Young Adults: The Blue Between the Clouds, which was nominated by the American Library Association for Best Book of the Year; and The Heartbeat of Halftime which Booklist calls "the ultimate sports novel." Both are published by Henry Holt of New York.