Ripon College midfielder Taylor Ziebol was killed in a car accident earlier this week. When I heard the news I immediately got a lump in my throat. Not because I knew Taylor, but because, as a coach, you send your kids home to their parents every spring knowing you'll see them again in August. To not have that be true, to have a hole in your lineup and your heart before the season even begins...well, it just made me feel horribly sad for the Redhawks family. Not to mention the Ziebols.
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Making the decision to have a child - it is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.
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Before the lump faded my mind rewound to an August many years ago. Moments of it still stand so starkly in my memory that as I type this my heart is pounding. Four days before preseason began my junior year of college the phone rang in my apartment just as I was getting home from work. One of my best friends from high school had been killed in a car accident.
Thinking about it later that week one of the biggest surprises was that I didn't burst into tears. Instead I felt as if the reckless invincibility that had defined our teenage years evaporated in the span of a few sentences that began with "I don't know how to tell you this" and was replaced by a emptiness in my chest that immediately felt as if it would never go away. After four days at home in Minneapolis attending the funeral and seeing friends and not knowing what to say when my mom just looked at me and cried, I couldn't wait to get back to school and start the soccer season. I never had a feeling of dedicating the season to my friend (he was a swimmer and not really into sports that involved running around on land) but somehow I knew that the only thing that was going to make the emptiness in my chest go away was between the lines on that grass field. Class and studying were useless--I just couldn't concentrate, food tasted like paste, having a couple beers with friends just left me feeling sad and crying in some dorm room somewhere. But there was something about running around with my teammates, working together, that made the emptiness disappear most of the time. I started that season with an intensity I'd never felt before--I cried too often, and yelled at my teammates too harshly, but the field was the only place I found where I could feel anything close to "good" for weeks and weeks and weeks. Soccer stopped being fun to me and became necessary.
By the time that season ended the emptiness in my chest was mostly gone. My team had saved me. I don't think it's a coincidence that that winter I got serious about wanting to get a teaching degree and spend my afternoons and weekends coaching. That season taught me that team sports mean a lot more than just wins and losses and fun with friends. They can provide a lifeline and a family and a new focus just when a kid needs it most. If I have one wish for the Ripon Red Hawks this year it is that they find in their field the same imperfect sanctuary I found in mine.
I recently read that the parents of deceased children often simply wish for people to mention their kids' name. I know I spent months wishing someone would ask me about Lloyd so I could tell them how much he loved life, how goofy he was, how he was always doing ridiculous stuff like stealing a stoplight and then almost being electrocuted when he tried to hook it up in his parent's basement. Or about the summer morning he and two other friends picked me up at my house with an enormous red rubber ball they had bought at Target and we spent all day driving around Minneapolis dropping it off things--4 storey high parking ramps, Mississippi River Bluffs, warehouse roofs, and laughed all day about how stupid and fun it was. My friend's name was Lloyd Collins. He was named after his grandfather who outlived him.
Taylor Ziebol won't be on the field for the Red Hawks this year but I hope all of the teams in the Midwest Conference support the Ziebol family and the Ripon family and say her name this season. Acknowledge her absence and try to remember her presence. She was #25 for the Red Hawks. She grew up in Burnsville, MN, just south of Minneapolis. She was getting ready to return to Ripon for her sophomore year and rejoin her teammates on the field. Even though we never met her, we join the Red Hawks in missing her.
