Constable: Cubs lose to Senior Night
The most rewarding sports event I attended last week was not a thrilling Chicago Cubs playoff victory at a rocking Wrigley Field. It was a much quieter affair called “Senior Night,” a tradition across the suburbs for most of the school year.
The Senior Night tribute is a way to honor high school seniors who are playing in their last home game for their school, or performing in their last concert, or acting in their last play, or swimming in their final meet, or competing in their last Mathematical Olympiad, or exhibiting in their last art show. And it also honors the parents and guardians who supported those efforts.
For my wife and me, the event during half-time of a soccer game centered around our youngest son, Will, and marked our last high school Senior Night. The public address announcer called our son's name and said that Will's favorite memory from the season was beating Hinsdale Central. My wife and I walked onto to the field where all the senior players, with smiles and roses, met the adults who helped them get to this moment. Clinging to a 1-0 lead, the players no doubt were eager to get back to the game they love.
For parents, the moment could have lasted so much longer. Veteran soccer parents, far more organized than my wife and me, hosted a get-together earlier in the week to create photo collages recapping our sons' soccer careers. The images of our little boy with a couple of his grade-school buddies after a soccer game, or that time his AYSO team won a championship and a beaming Will came home with a trophy and on crutches, make us realize all that went into making Senior Night possible.
We remember those soccer games more than a decade ago when parents drank coffee on the sidelines and yelled advice such as “Kick the ball!” to gaggles of children in brightly colored shirts swarming in a pack around a soccer ball. Sometimes that spontaneous coaching advice was followed with an anguished, “Nooo! Kick it the other way!”
The suburbs are filled with parents who get up early on a Saturday and stand under umbrellas on cold days beside some field where their children are playing soccer or T-ball or softball or flag football or some other sport that might be gone in a season or develop into a lifelong passion.
Parents wake kids before dawn for swimming meets and cross-country events. They squeeze into hot, humid and smelly gyms to cheer on a kid playing volleyball or basketball. They drive all over tarnation late at night to get a kid to a far-flung ice rink for a hockey game or a skating competition.
Parents who once rushed home from work on a Thursday to endure grade-school band concerts where the main task was trying to determine which squeaks were coming from their kid are rewarded on Senior Night with beautiful music that sounds as if it's coming from professional musicians. Dance recitals that once drew nothing but, “Oh, they look so cute,” get replaced by performances that are met with jaw-dropping observations of, “Wow! They are amazing.”
Mother's Day projects made with dried macaroni are replaced with actual works of art. Hours of practicing scales give way to haunting oboe solos. Grade-school videos starring Lego figures are overshadowed by stunning films.
Some kids will go on to play, swim, sing, act or perform in college. A rare few might even make a living out of the passion they developed as children.
Senior Night honors the students' hours and hours of hard work. But the tribute is more of a reminder to appreciate the journey. Parents love that last chance to soak it all in much more than their kids might realize.
It doesn't get the attention a Cubs playoff victory garners, but those sentiments expressed during Senior Night will last forever in parents' hearts.