The Locker

I cleaned out my locker today. 

It's incredible the amount of things a person can accumulate in four years.

It wasn’t just the shoes, gear and old T-shirts that I packed away. 

I found myself pulling out memories.

Little things that catapulted me back in time. 

The pictures on the outside of my locker put there by my teammates for senior night, the multitude of motivational quotes taped to the inside of our lockers by the coaches every week or so; I kept every one. A wristband from a senior trip to see Kygo last summer. My big east trophy that we had won a couple weeks earlier. An Ace bandage that I used for my last ankle sprain and kept there just in case. The headband I wore every day of my freshman year and haven’t worn since. A tiny blue tissue paper flower hidden behind various knick-knacks and forgotten things – the flower, a gift from a little fan from two years ago. 

For most people, a locker room isn’t a place of heartwarming memories. Locker rooms are typically thought of as a dirty and grungy place with a weird smell that will never come out of the carpet. 

But that’s not our locker room. 

Our locker room is a warm and welcoming place. 

It’s a place of comfort.

A place where I can walk in and plop down on our comfy couches and do some homework in peace. 

It’s a place of laughter.

A place where my team could sing and dance freely like maniacs before our match. We didn’t need to be good, but we did it anyway because it was fun. 

It’s a place of routine. 

A place where we would wander in early in the morning before road trips, our suitcases trailing behind us; sleep tugging at our eyelids. 

It’s a place of tradition.

A place where our coaches would come in before every match to scout the other team and pray with us as a family.  

“Dear Lord thank you for giving us another opportunity to play the game that we love, let us play to the best of our ability. Please keep both sides of the net safe, and let us come out with a win. Amen!”

It’s a place of peace. 

It’s a place where I can walk through the doors, and all of the stresses of my outside life would melt away because I got to go and play the sport that I love. 

It’s a place that I walked in and out of for the last time today. 

For me, the locker room represents all the little things.

Not the big wins or heartbreaking losses that everyone sees in the newspapers. 

It was the things that people might never see or know about, but it’s the stuff that mattered the most to me.

Because it isn’t always the big things that make a place home, it’s those little moments that made us into a family — the experiences we had both good and bad forged a bond that we will remember for the rest of our lives.

I shut the doors to my now barren locker, to four years of my life. I walk out of the home I made and say goodbye to the people who became family. 

So to the next person who takes up residence in my locker – the third one from the right: I hope that the next four years are your best, I hope you find as much love here as I did, and I hope that you take good care of my locker— it taught me more than I ever thought possible.