I found a spooky house that might have been driven to insanity by youth sports

It was a Monday evening when I discovered an extremely alarming house lurking next to the grassy sports fields at a local church.

Discovered probably isn’t the right word. It wasn’t difficult to spot. I walked out onto the field, and there it was. Looming behind trees, unkempt bushes, and an old white fence.

I took a closer look, snapped a quick photo, and retreated to my car. It’s been uncharacteristically cold in Florida (our house’s water pipes actually froze one night recently, true story), but the icy blast that penetrated straight to my bone marrow was definitely the ghosts. Or perhaps the tortured souls.

The fact that the house of horrors overlooks fields where children have been playing soccer and flag football and other assorted sports for decades raises an important question: Was the house always this way, or did years of proximity to youth sports drive it to insanity?

My money is on the latter.

Don’t get me wrong, I love sports, and I love watching my kids do activities. I will definitely miss these days and nights of practices and games when they’re over. More than anything, I love the routine of it. Flag football practice on Monday, gymnastics on Tuesday, Basketball on Wednesday and sometimes Thursday, games for everything almost every weekend. However, despite the positives, there is just something about youth sports that is simply soul-crushing. More accurately, it’s multiple somethings.

The house knows.

It’s heard the shouts from inexplicably angry coaches and psychotic parents who, despite pulling up to the field with a dusty folding chair, seem to think they are watching the Super Bowl.

It’s seen the same kids sitting on the bench all game long, year after year, in an “equal playing time” recreational league.

It’s seen coaches get ejected, and literal fist fights break out between adults watching 9-year-olds throw a ball around.

It’s seen more petty drama than one house can possibly be expected to handle without breaking down emotionally and seeking solace in the undead.

At least the spirits are quiet most of the time. And there are no piercing referee whistles; only the whistling of the wind through the leaky boards.

Also, I envy the house because it has never seen youth basketball.

I drove across state lines a few weeks ago to take my son to a sixth-grade basketball tournament. When I see it typed out plainly like that, it seems really stupid. It also felt really stupid at the time. We drove eight, nine, ten hours (who knows?) on Friday, played two games on Saturday, two games on Sunday, and drove a presumably similar number of hours back home on Sunday afternoon and night. His team lost all four games.

During the second game on Saturday, our head coach gets ejected for a verbal altercation with the other team’s coaches. I sit in my assistant coach’s spot on the bench, staring straight ahead while the argument escalates, trying my best to blend into the scenery.

The referee suddenly appears in front of me and says something to the effect of, “You’re coaching now.”

I’m like, “Okay.”

So there I am, the assistant coach who typically does nothing other than fill a chair, standing up, shouting meaningless things like “GET BACK” and clapping my hands like a trained seal. Our team somehow cuts the lead from 20 to 5. The other team’s coaches, who weren’t ejected for some reason, are now inexplicably mad at me. I refuse to acknowledge their existence. Our team comes up short in the end. Definitely wasn’t the coaching.

Our head coach returns for postgame handshakes. I’m expecting more fireworks, but instead, he wraps the opposing coaches in big bear hugs. They clap each other on the back and say jovially, “It’s all love, man!”

I’m even more confused. About basketball and competitive youth sports and life in general.

I’m ready to drive 12 hours or so home and never look back. Instead, we return to the team Airbnb and eat tacos. I sleep on the basement couch in the same room with about 10 boys.

We lose two more games on Sunday. I drive home in the dark. It rains the entire time. I feel nothing.

I think about the house. If it could see me peeling my body out of the car after 19 hours on the road in three days, after the otherworldly weirdness I’ve experienced, it would genuinely believe it was the sane and normal one in our budding relationship.

It would be right.

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Words by me, Andrew Knott. Best known for duck… and Baby-sitters Club.

My books:

Love’s a Disaster - contemporary fiction about a marriage proposal gone wrong, complicated families, mini-golf, second-chance love, Florida, sword fighting, and punk rock music.

Fatherhood: Dispatches From the Early Years - essays and humor about the very early years of my parenting journey