He grabbed a water and took a sip as he sat alone on the small bench alongside the first tennis court. He stared out at some random point in front of him, but he really wasn’t looking. He seemed so alone to me, but I knew he would not want me to try to reach out to him in that moment. His court was only the first of three that would need to fall to deny him a district championship as a senior, but the writing was on the nets down the line, and it became clear to me that his season was over…His high school tennis career was over. His youth sports career was over. 

My youth sports coaching career, along with his basketball career, ended a few months ago with our CYO High School basketball semi-final loss. And now, fifteen years of baseball, basketball, soccer, track, and tennis were over—for him, for Benjamin, for Andrea, and for me.

There was a pit in my stomach. A set of emotions that I had never felt in my life before. It was a profound and deep sense of loss that overwhelmed me. I stood off to the side, away from everyone else, trying to fight back tears and make sense of this feeling in my gut. With the end of their sports, I was suddenly made incomplete. A piece of my identity…a piece of my very soul just evaporated into the near-perfect spring afternoon.

And my mind ran through the last 15 years.

Cold spring mornings, standing next to a grass t-ball field, watching these small kids with oversized mitts doing everything but paying attention to the baseball. Pacing the sideline of a noisy set of basketball courts where somehow six teams managed to play at once, trying to make sense of the intensity of 3rd and 4th grade basketball. Dreary, rainy days braced against an autumn cold, watching a soccer match in the Pocono Mountains. High school basketball games, fall cross country meets, Tennis courts, and tracks raced through my mind. And, of course, miles and miles of driving, endless searches for uniforms and equipment, and trying to figure out how to be in two places at once. Our lives were dominated by youth sports for better or for worse for a decade and a half, and just like that, they were over.

While sports had become a significant component of my relationship with the boys, and certainly, an element of my pride and ego was wrapped up in it, it was not the driving force behind it. It was always exciting to see what they could do with the next game or match. It was about the joy of watching them succeed and getting back up after they lost. And more than that, the joy came from watching them learn how to succeed and to work hard for that. The joy of watching them learn from their mistakes so that they could do better next time.

Our lives for the last 15 years have absolutely been wrapped up in sports. Aside from school, it was the one constant year in and year out. Their uniforms and equipment may have changed from season to season and year to year, but sports were always there. 

A few weeks later, as I stood in a cathedral in Allentown for Matthew’s baccalaureate mass, a realization came over me. This was not about sports in the last 15 years. It was about the previous 19 years. I was no longer “daddy” or “Papa”…I was just dad in the same way that my father was dad to me. They had stopped calling me “daddy” years ago and “papa” many years before that, but it was the sense of no longer being a daddy to children…I was now a dad to two young adult men.

I was not mourning the end of their sports…I was mourning the end of their childhoods and all that came with that. 

An empty house is coming with the echoes of their childhood laughter bouncing off the walls. Memories will play out from all corners of the house as evidence of their childhoods lies everywhere. A random Nerf dart found under the couch. Pinewood derby cars on their shelves. A long-forgotten program from a Christmas concert in an old pile of papers. There are no more games or plays or masses or school events or school pickups or parties to drive them to or any of the million things that are part of being a dad to children.

I know I will always be their dad. I will always be their coach. I will always be, somewhere deep down, “daddy” and “papa”, but now I am a father to two young men who are likely closer to their own kids’ first day of kindergarten than they are to their own first day of kindergarten.

That feeling that hit me on that tennis court that day was not about his sports career ending. It was about his childhood ending. What I saw there, on that bench, was not a toddler wildly swinging around a racket nearly as big as him trying to emulate his mother, but a man looking beyond the court in front of him and, perhaps, looking at a future that is so big that it can no longer be contained in the service box.

In a quick ten-week stretch this spring, he had been accepted to the University of Notre Dame, turned 18, finished his tennis season, and graduated from high school with honors. His future materialized, and his past faded away in what felt like an instant. And I could not be more proud of him. But I’ll always miss the tiny little boy who would curl up next to me on the couch. I am beyond excited for what lies ahead of him, for what he may do next, but at the same time, I mourn who I once was to him…and Benjamin. 

It was more than just about Matthew. Ben stood near me at the tennis court that day. He had just finished his first year at Georgetown with nearly all A’s. He was/is happy and excited about his life. I watched him talking to one of his old high school teachers, who had come to watch the boys play in the district final tennis match. It wasn’t a conversation between a kid and his teacher. It was a conversation between two adults.

I believe in the years ahead when I look back at the moments my children became men, what I will always remember is the image of Benjamin standing in the grass in the backyard with a smile on his face and Matthew sitting next to that tennis court staring out into the future.

While all four of us begin this new chapter in our lives, I know they will still come around in the summers and holidays. Andrea and I will visit them, wherever they may be. There will be graduations and weddings and births and so many new memories to be made, and I genuinely look forward to that. Even as I reflect and mourn the passing of the past, I get so excited about the future and what lies ahead. I don’t attempt to hold back…I push them forward towards what I know they can be.

However, they will always be those two little boys running around the driveway after the first day of basketball practice, trying to learn how to dribble a ball or holding a pencil with their full fists sitting at an oversized desk and chair doing their homework. I know I will always be their father, their dad, their coach. However, I am no longer daddy.

However, I do, very much, look forward to the day I become Pop Pop, though.