Travis from We The Kings posted his weekly Old School Sunday a bit late. When he was a freshman in high school, he tried out for the varsity soccer team… Read the story after the cut.

Old School Someday

It’s so hard to think of something to write after the last Old School Sunday when I revealed almost everything about my life.

There is one thing that comes to mind that I feel like you will get a kick out of…

I was a freshman in high school and I tried out for the varsity soccer team. At the time I stood about 5 feet 2 inches tall. For some reason my body decided not to grow until my senior year of high school, but regardless, I went head to head with everybody else from the school that wanted to make the team. A little backing history is needed to understand the story… I wasn’t great or terrible at soccer, in fact I felt like my job on the team was to be comical relief for games we would lose. Tryouts were rigorous and nerve wrecking. It was almost as if every move I made was critiqued by a panel of judges that would decide my fate of the soccer team. Tryouts were 3 days long, testing different abilities from passing and shooting to running and endurance.

It was Monday morning or in other words the decision day on who made the team. At the beginning of tryouts, everyone received a number to look for on the final list. The coach also taught Chemistry so everyone knew where to go to find their name on the list. I remember waking up at 5am due to how nervous I was… I raced to school as fast as I could and when I got there, no list was posted. It took until seconds before the 1st period bell rang for the coach to put up the list. I scanned it up and down and sure enough, there it was, the number 37! I made the team with 4 other of my friends :)

A week after that we had a meeting at one of the sponsor’s houses. I showed up thinking that it would be a “welcome to the team” event. I couldn’t have been more wrong, this meeting was for the parents upstairs and downstairs awaited the seniors of the team ready to shave everybody’s heads. Since I was the shortest kid on the team, they decided to start with me. I was terrified, thinking that they would slice my head open since I had never shaved my head before. They got done shaving it, then decided to sign my head with sharpie and told me to leave it on until the next day of school.

I, being the trooper that I am, left the sharpie all over my head and went to school the next day. I remember looking a lot like “powder” which is probably why they wrote that on my forehead. I was proud for being on the team and I was stoked that I didn’t look as bad as some of the other players with a shaved head haha. The next day at school, I was called down to the dean’s office and questioned about who wrote on my head. I guess it was a distraction to the other kids in class. The dean asked me to identify everyone who signed my head, and since I knew that they would get suspended if I told, I didn’t say a word. Actually, I told him that I did it myself. All in all, I was sent home, asked to take a shower and wash off the sharpie and come back to school the next day.

I told the team what happened and the seniors gave me a little bit of sympathy since I didn’t rat them out. So when it came to initiation, I got about half of everyone else :) Now that I think about it, if I were able to go back, I would probably go back and beat the S@#T out of all of the seniors, not even caring if I won or lost.

Overall, I played Varsity soccer for 3 years and quit my senior year to play in a band….I guess I made a good decision!!

Daily Advice:

Wedgies suck.