Manna from Heaven for a Sports-Averse Teenager

By ALEX FRANK
FOR UNLEASHED

Narrowing it down to a single, earthshaking turning point isn’t easy.

There was my first at-bat in Little League, when I was beaned in the back by a 45 mph fastball courtesy of my best friend. I got on base and, eventually, attempted to score a run that, unbeknownst to me as I shot a celebratory finger skyward, had been rendered null by a third out, long before my cleated foot trod that big plastic hunk. We were the Red Sox, but at that point, I was the star player of the Red Cheex.

Still, I don’t think that was the event.

I’m pretty sure that moment came when I was 10, during a YMCA basketball game. Through some miraculous mental slip by one of my teammates, I was given the ball after a particularly hardscrabble series of rebounds.

Dopily smacking the ball downcourt, I clod across the parquet of the third-floor gym, lacing the classic Clyde Drexler crossover lay-in that I had practiced so many times in my driveway. As the ball dropped through the impossibly high net, I wondered briefly why it had been so easy, as, up to that point, even two points in a game was for me a massive achievement.

That brief sense of wonder at my own burst of athletic skill was brought crashing earthward when I heard a chorus of high-pitched 10-year-old teammates screaming at me for draining that beautiful shot in the wrong hoop. I had scored for the other team. Van Gogh sunsets have seen less crimson than my face at that moment.

So, I became a writer.

If lay-ins and home runs weren’t going to be my thing, why fight it? Thus, it’s with eternal gratitude that I acknowledge the Yakima Herald-Republic for establishing Unleashed, essentially the finest nonsports team that a smart-but-clumsy kid with a gift for writing could ask for; and my mother, for pushing a then-reluctant eighth-grader to apply for a position.

While I doubt many of my peers on Unleashed shared my shame-ridden youth sports history (which, to this day, turns my bearded cheeks a bit red), they did partake in what was undeniably a defining element in my adolescence.

Not only did I learn how to report and write from some of the best mentors a burgeoning journalist could’ve asked for — serious props to Maisy Fernandez, John Taylor, Adriana Janovich, Jane Gargas and Kim Nowacki — I developed an evaluative, questioning mind that I maintain today. I made great friends with many of my fellow Unleashed staffers, and shamelessly macked on the cute girls. The fact that I ended up as a journalist throughout college almost seems secondary to the amazing experiences Unleashed provided me in my teens.

From shaky interviews with my punk-rock heroes, to sorta-satiric columns about well-known Time magazine writers who ended up actually writing me back, to congratulations from parents’ friends who I barely recognized about a story that I somehow forgot would be read by more than 40,000 people, Unleashed became for me what traditional high-school activities — yes, varsity athletics, I’m looking at you — could never have been: a source of undiluted, well-earned pride. My cheeks were red, but for entirely different, entirely better reasons.

Just as importantly, Unleashed gave me a sense of belonging. Punk bands and goofy school plays aside, writing was my thing. When I arrived at a big, scary Midwestern university’s journalism school, the kid from an unpronounceable town on the wrong side of a remote state’s mountains, I found I could hack it. And when I ditched the journalism degree for a crunchy liberal arts education a little closer to home, my background as a reporter not only helped me with that unending torrent of papers bestowed upon English majors, but kept me marginally employed as a freelance music writer and section editor of the student newspaper.

So, Unleashed, here’s to you.

You transformed me from a 14-year-old, journalistically inclined failure at sports into a 23-year-old writer with an eternally inquisitive mind and strong sense of confidence, who, undoubtedly, is still a failure at sports. I fell in and out of love across the pizza crust-strewn tables at your meetings, and learned about who I was, and am, while faced with a blank Word document’s blinking cursor, struggling to meet your deadlines. You gave me a place to belong, an identity, and, above all, something to call my own.

Now, who’s blushing?

— Alex Frank, a 2003 Davis High School graduate, was a member of Unleashed’s inaugural team. He also served as student editor of the section.