Our team (of 4 players for the finals but 6 for the season plus our captain) won our division in squash singles in the Toronto & District league! This was a big deal for me. Let the record show that my very first year playing competitively in 2018/19 I did not win a single match – just one game (we play best out of 5) (no, I will not give you the link to the records).
In the season after, just before COVID hit, I did a little better. I won 3 out of 16 matches although two of them were against a woman in her 70s who only won one match herself all season. This year I won all my matches except one.
But the real story for me was, as much as I am passionate about playing squash, I almost quit playing singles competitively last year because I could hardly play a competitive singles match without being overwhelmed by performance anxiety. It wasn’t from all the losses although surely that didn’t help as it appeared from day one.
The dread would start up in the afternoon of the day of the match forcing me to continually try to cope or solve the problem until the match was over until the next week and I’d go through it all over again. I was really starting to wonder what I was doing it for and thought if I can’t get a handle on it I should stop. And I couldn’t get a handle on it. I did so much work to figure out what this was.
But to quit would also feel like failing. The competition is what gives purpose and joy to the practice.
I’ve always worked hard to improve my game since I started competing, but this year I’ve done a LOT to work on my mental game, from research and journaling to nutrition and supplements to meditation and visualization, preparation and focusing rituals, ‘controlling the controllables – letting go of the rest’, and more.
It’s a bumpy road. I think it helped to win more but there were matches where I stayed anxious even when I was winning and way up in points. Why? Why does the mind and body have to be so damned… slippery?
But in preparation of the upcoming playoffs as a way to “confidence load”, I made a list of all the things that I had done to prepare myself over time, and wow, it really was a long list. I feel like I can write a book 
.
I thought to myself: no one has got to be more prepared than I am.
That’s a good state of mind to go into finals with.
From the outside maybe it all seems a bit much for amateur sports, but I think that competing in sports can reflect other areas of your life, teach you a lot about yourself and others and what it means to be human if you let it. Also: self confessed squash addict, so…
You don’t really choose to win because at the end of the day you don’t know what your opponent is going to bring to the table. But I was thinking of a couple of mental hurdles I had to cross yesterday. The forgetting of something that I relied on to keep me calm and focused. Things said earlier that I had to fight to get out of my head. The noise and the crowd all watching. My team so wanting the win. My wanting to prove something to myself. I’ll admit, I did have a moment of why am I doing this?. But for the most part, the nervousness I felt, felt right.
We each play the best of 5 games for a match. My opponent and I were tied up at two games to two. I was down in the 5th, and she only had a few points to go before she’d win the match. I had let the pressure and a lapse in focus get a hold of me and I served a serve way out of bounds. I might be imagining it but I think the crowd groaned. Maybe it was just me. Either way I didn’t want to have given an important point away for free at a such a critical time.
But didn’t panic, didn’t choke. Didn’t tell myself it didn’t matter, or that it did. There wasn’t a bunch of internal chatter, or mental scolding. The frustration from an earlier doubles match in the week was gone. Just focused. I knew what I needed to do. One shot at a time. This is what I have been working on.
And that’s what I’m proud of: the long game of preparation, navigating successes and failures and practice that got me to that final moment that allowed me to win, or at least not lose. The accumulation of moments that made me think about playing up a division next year. Not quitting.
We are all playing the long game at something in our lives in our own way. It can just be so hard to appreciate at times along the way.
I remember talking to my mom who is in her 80s awhile ago and she casually mentioned some self-improvement thing she was working on and I was a little dismayed. I thought: can’t you get to a point in your life where you can just say, this is good enough? I am good enough? But maybe I missed the point. That maybe that is what we are all about. The effort, struggle and joy in growing.
I think just lived my own version of a sport movie.
Of course, after its all over, you don’t leave the theatre and go have dinner. Rather, its like the day after Christmas, you suffer a dopamine drop and you’re bummed out, lol (at least I think so- I’m still feeling good at the moment and still have a houseleague doubles final to play next week), but hey. That’s life too.
Either way, it looks like we are moving up to C division next fall where I can become reacquainted with losing all over again. 
