By Mel Landers 
I’m not a sports mom. We aren’t a sports family. My husband loves video games. He doesn’t like football. I don’t like football. For the last Super Bowl party, we made a bunch of snacks—then didn’t watch any of the Super Bowl.
We often joke about how much we don’t like sports.
After I had kids, I started missing my dad. Not that I hadn’t missed him before. I’ve had twenty-plus years to be over that loss.
I’m not. I don’t think I ever will be.
But somehow, the loss hit me different, fresh, like a wound you think is healed until something breaks it open and the pain comes again.
Maybe this loss is normal and other people have that experience also, but I wasn’t expecting to feel the loss of my dad all over again. I wasn’t expecting to remember him being diagnosed with cancer or trying to figure out how to explain that loss to my children.
As my kids age, other memories come back too.
Memories of my dad folding laundry as he watched football. Dad wearing a basketball shirt. Dad working out in the gym with a bucket of sweat beneath him and heavy weights above him.
My dad was a sports dad.
A coach to his only daughter’s soccer team through a stunning season of perpetual loss—there was only one win that year.
A dad who tried to cajole an unwilling daughter to keep playing soccer.
I was not a sports daughter.
He wanted me to pass the Presidential Fitness Test.
I couldn’t do a chin-up to save my life.
But my dad and I had one sport we would do together: basketball. It was our game.
It was the game where we would spell out words if a person missed a shot. It was the game where we shot hoops and laughed and ran beneath the summer sun.
It was the game part of me was always waiting for him to come back and play with me.
Oddly, it was the game that my firstborn son developed a deep fixation on as he learned to walk and talk. No matter where we were, my son would pick out every picture of a basketball, point out every hoop, see every ball.
We are not a sports family. My husband and I often talk about how not good at sports we were as kids.
But this past summer, as I was again missing my dad, I signed my kids up for basketball.
And my non-sports family and my non-sports kids have been working on dribbling a ball and shooting hoops.
My kids have not enjoyed it a whole lot yet.
But after practice one night and a lot of persuading from me, our family found itself in the cul-de-sac dribbling basketballs, trying to steal balls, clumsily trying to catch balls passed to a flurry of voices.
We may never be a sports family.
Yet the laughter of that night as my husband was cajoling his son to try to steal the ball? It was the laughter of my childhood come back again in the eyes of my kids.
by Bambi Loveday 
by Kyle Means 
by Renae Zimmer 
