Full-Court Dharma

Team Sports, Buddhism, Anxiety, and True Grit

Hello, everyone. Have I waited long enough to post? Did the passage of time and the Thanksgiving holiday make us forget all about the election?

But I kid. I took a Substack break when the results came in on November 5th. Emotions were running high out there. The discourse was cantankerous. Posting a hot take here felt futile; my thoughts would have been lost in the great din of election analysis and recrimination. Fresh writing on a non-political subject was also inopportune since many of us were busy escaping into our favorite old books, music, and movies.

I’m thankful to have had another focus and orientation this month. During times of crisis and change, like the recent election, I usually deepen my Buddhist practice. This November’s vote also fell during my son’s brief middle school basketball season. My concurrent focus on Buddhism and basketball over the past few weeks yielded some unexpected but welcome benefits. They seem worth sharing with you.

For the arts lovers, here’s a basketball connection: Thelonious Monk and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar at the Village Vanguard in 1966, when Kareem was 18. Photo: Nica de Koenswater

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Team sports aren’t for everyone. Still, I believe team sports are for more of us than we might realize.

I was acculturated into this view. My rural public school was so small that we couldn’t silo into cliques of brains, jocks, band geeks, or goths. Participation and identities were open and fluid. It was never implied that playing basketball meant I shouldn't also sing in choir and play clarinet and tenor sax. No one ever suggested my Academic Olympics medals precluded running on the track team or managing the football team. Containing multitudes was our way of life by necessity. All those extracurriculars needed us.

Other formative experiences can lead to different perspectives on athletics. Regularly enough, I come across the outlook that team sports are nothing more than tribal savagery, that competitive athletics and creativity/intellect/spirituality are mutually exclusive.

The culture has a long and rich tradition of philosophical approaches to team sports. Just this year, we had Hanif Abdurraqib’s moving cultural study There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension, a National Book Award finalist. Waaaaay back in the 90s, Phil Jackson popularized a Buddhist approach to basketball with his championship coaching of the Chicago Bulls and then the Los Angeles Lakers. Jackson helped to put some Zen ideas into wider cultural circulation: working with non-attachment to outcomes like winning, staying in the moment in any competition, and remaining equanimous—athletes and coaches, he emphasized, could even stay cool and do their best in the face of unfair ref calls.

(“These refs better not stop for a drink here in Manitou tonight,” I’ll joke in a bad Philly accent after a questionable call during my son’s home games. Our school’s mountain haven of Manitou Springs, Colorado was once dubbed a “hippie Mayberry” by the New York Times. Not the kind of place where gangs of aggro fans assault referees. The kind of place where 20-somethings who self-identify as shamans vibe tourists hard.)

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Buddhism in the bleachers

Buddhism’s benefits for team players have been covered. Here, I’d like to discuss what it can mean for spectators.

As we know, having kids doesn’t necessarily make us enlightened. Not having kids doesn’t necessarily make us enlightened, either.

In Buddhism, though, motherhood has long been a metaphor for how we can all treat one another. The Buddha’s 5th Century BC discourses said we should love everyone as if they were our mother, and we should treat everyone as if they were our only child. Motherhood—all parenthood, really—is seen as an exalted model of compassionate love.

The thing is, transferring our parental compassion to all living beings isn’t easy for most of us. We’re biologically inclined to care deeply about our offspring. We have to work to care about others even a fraction as much as we care about our own families.

This is where my son’s recent basketball season presented an unexpected opportunity. A shortcut, even.

Last season was my kid’s first time playing a team sport. He was a tall, uncoordinated 6th grader on basketball’s C team who could barely catch a ball. But he fell in love with the game. After the season ended, he practiced basketball every day with an almost religious devotion. We spent part of our Spring Break trip away from our destination’s dreamy turquoise water and on a hot-ass basketball court. He was always looking to improve. At his Vermont summer camp, at my gym, and everywhere else, he asked older, streetball-savvy players to dunk on him, to help make him better.

My kid’s basketball obsession took our family away from dreamy open water vistas to hot courts over Spring Break

The 13-year-old’s off-season practicing paid off this October when he earned a spot on the A team, the only 7th grader to make that squad. But this achievement brought some heavy pushback and grief from peers who made the B team. Our family values around sports participation aren’t achievement-oriented, anyway. We care more about cultivating adaptability, perseverance, and the skill and confidence to play well with others in all areas of life.

Wanting so much for our kids, as most parents do, can make it hard to watch them compete in a team sport. As the season began, I walked into a loud, reverberant gym with even louder doubts bouncing around my mind. Should the 13-year-old’s Dad and I have insisted he play with his peers on the B team? Would he have a chance to develop as the only 7th grader on the A team?

Happily, something shifted in me when the game began. I took a few deep breaths and watched my anxiety transform into excitement. I settled in and gave the game my full attention—parents don’t check their phones much at these games. Observation of everything on-court, good, bad, or neutral, is the goal.

By the end of the first game, I was as interested in the A team’s dynamic as I was in my son’s experience or performance on the court. Their offense originally revolved around one exceptional three-point shooter. As soon as the opposing team shut down the three-point shooter, they shut down our offense. How could the players develop other offensive strategies? Watching the team grow together was far more compelling than whether my son scored big or we won any particular game.

Sitting through a game’s ups and downs with other invested parents promoted mental health and community. My anxiety eased when I become as interested in the team’s welfare and performance as I was in my own child’s. It’s wasn’t just me. Every parent’s spirit lightened when their compassion extended beyond their kid to the other players.¹ We parents bonded as the team worked through its dysfunction to become greater than the sum of its parts. In terms of sympathetic joy and comradeship, it felt like a Buddhist sangha or community up in the stands. The parent who wore a “Kneel for Jesus, stand for the flag” ballcap might call it Christian fellowship. Fine by me.

It was a relief to follow middle school basketball while Democrats were arguing about our election loss. My son’s team played two games a week in an intense six-week season. Unlike the election, a defeat for the team was no occasion for blame or recrimination. There was no time for it. The next game was just a couple of days away. A loss was cause for the kids to regroup, adjust strategy, play smarter—and in this team sport, their only option was to improve together.

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“Everyone’s working through issues out there, bro.”

I’ll say it again. Not everyone thrives as a member of a team. The world offers other ways for us to learn how to work with others to accomplish a common goal. Yet whenever someone cites anxiety as their reason for shunning team sports, I wonder if they’ve ever tried one. Sweated, strived, and thrown their body into a game long enough to know its rhythm and flow. Cooperated with teammates until they felt the esprit de corps.

People with extreme anxiety disorders probably should sit out team sports. But we all experience some mild anxiety during any competition or performance with an uncertain outcome. They come with vicissitudes.

All that unpredictability can occasion joy and even awe. A player throws a long, bold pass down the court on a fast break. A hope pass. Maybe a teammate will catch it and rise to the basket for a spectacular layup. Maybe they won’t. The game will go on regardless. And isn’t it better to hope than not?

Also, aerobic exercise can help to manage anxiety. If team sports cause mild anxiety, they also may carry the cure.

We discuss how to raise resilient kids while guarding them and ourselves from the slightest discomfort or conflict. Online, especially, we curate our lives to maximize pleasure and minimize boredom, challenge, or pain. Reels on “How to Spot a Narcissist” and “Five Traits of Toxic People” proliferate on social media, sending a message that we must constantly guard against fellow humans lest they damage our emotional fortress. Rather than working together through differences to find a common purpose, we now tout setting boundaries as the most worthy goal—even as a kind of enlightenment. Setting boundaries can be healthy, but just as often it seems to involve burrowing down further into our trauma, shutting ourselves off from others, and calling it a win.

One game night, I sat in the bleachers next to an engaging kid, a classmate of the A team players.

“They’re starting to pass the ball around to everyone more often,” I said. “It’s working.”

“They stopped being afraid,” he said. “Or jealous. Everyone’s working through issues out there, bro. Oh. Sorry I called you bro.”

There’s some stress in team sports as players put their hearts and bodies on the line. Growing pains as they address self-imposed limitations, conflicts as they build teamwork, and disappointment as they suffer losses. If they can summon the courage to keep playing, it’s worth it. Everyone’s working through issues out there, bro, and learning to put self-expression in service to the collective. When they find alchemy as a team, players can leave the court with a sense that cooperation is possible in the wider world.

Responsibility to a team can bring pressure. Fears of letting teammates down. This is why players give a teammate an affirming high or low five after a free throw, whether or not they make the shot.² You’ll get the next one, the gesture says. The team is here for you. Learning to support and be supported. That’s the thing.

As I finish this post, my kid’s home with a sinus infection, missing the second-to-last game of the season. No big deal. The season has already allowed him to work through internal and external challenges, to find and exercise his strengths. The season has given me a chance to care about others, offering me a sense of community at a divisive time.

1. The great secret of Mahayana Buddhism is that caring about others makes us feel better.

2. A study found that after missing the first free throw the shooter was more likely to make the second free throw if their teammates gave them a high five or made some other physical contact.