Stop telling her not to cry...

The NCAA men’s basketball season ends tonight with the championship game between Kansas and North Carolina. For half the players on the court , it will be one of the most amazing experiences of their lives.  For the other half, heartbreak.  Tears will be flowing on both sides.

My daughter’s basketball season ended with a whimper last month.  There was no championship game, no culminating moment that brought the season home for her.  But there were plenty of tears

Emily had been down for the count with a nasty cold since last Thursday and missed the last tournament of the season because she was too sick to get off the couch, let alone play basketball.   She cried that morning, knowing her team was in Pine Bluffs without her.  We got updates from the team as they advanced through the tournament, and a photo of all of them wearing medals for winning the championship round.

My daughter took one look at her friends’ happy faces and promptly burst into tears.

We decided to make the hour-long trip north for the last game of the season.   Emily wasn’t at 100 percent, but she was good enough to try playing.  Her team won the game, but she managed to run up and down the court twice, coughing and looking miserable the entire time.  She asked to come out and spent the rest of the game on the bench looking miserable as another girl played the post in her place.

Emily cried on the way home.

She cried because the season was over. Because she couldn’t play.  And she cried when her teammates brought her home a medal from the tournament she couldn’t play in and told her “you’re our teammate and you helped get us here this year.”

This isn’t the first time she’s cried over basketball.

Earlier this season, about half our team was in tears after a two-point loss in overtime to a team that outsized them by 6 inches and 15 pounds on average.

It’s bewildering to some, this crying over a sport.

They don’t think sports are worth crying over.  And some people just don’t deal well with tears in any capacity.  Others in our lives see us cry and they don’t understand.  It makes them uncomfortable.

But tears aren’t weakness.

Let me say that again.

Tears aren’t weakness.

Not the genuine tears, anyway.  They’re just one way our body handles big feelings.  Sometimes our hearts are just bursting with emotion, good and bad, and it flows up our bodies and leaks out our eyes.

I welcome those kinds of tears. Tears of sadness, of frustration, of disappointment.

It means you cared.

That it meant something.

That you wanted it so, so much.

My daughter cried because she really, REALLY wanted to be on the court with those girls.  She’s fallen in love with basketball and was heartbroken her season ended on the couch instead of on the court with her girls.

And isn’t that what we WANT from our athletes?  Our students?  Each other?  To care about something and be invested and engaged?

Give me a team full of girls who love a sport and each other so dang much they cry when they fall short of their goals or feel disappointed.  Those are my girls.  My players.  My tribe.

So the next time you want to chastise a player, kid, coworker, or friend for crying, just stop.  Stop and think about where those tears came from and why.  And instead of making your daughter or son or colleague feel stupid for a physiological response they can’t control, try to understand those tears and the passion for the subject behind them.  It’s probably not manipulation.  Tears mean they cared.

It’s okay to cry, friends.  It just means you gave a damn about it.

And I’ll take intense emotion over indifference or detachment any day.

Chin up, #14. Your basketball future is very bright indeed