Voices of Youth

Growing up in New York City in the immigrant neighborhood of Jackson Heights, Queens, 21-year-old Nathan Einschlag has witnessed things many young people have only read about or seen on television. "I saw young abused girlfriends pushing strollers on the way to the local elementary school to pick up their kids. It was routine to pass prostitutes on my way to the subway late at night. I knew what happened to the drug and alcohol abusers in the hood: they died. I was from a neighborhood where I'd trained my senses to be aware, to stay out of harm's way. I always watched a block ahead, spotting shadows, keeping my distance from men on the corners. I walked with my head up and a swagger that can only be learned in New York City."

Nathan says he made a decision when he was young to be focused, to not be dragged into the street life. "I put my heart and soul into basketball, and the senses I had honed walking those late-night blocks all my life would not fail me. It was love. Basketball embraced me and I embraced it." Sophomore year he made the varsity basketball team at Fiorello H. LaGuardia's High School of Music, Art and Performing Arts. As a junior and senior he was a starter. His senior year the team won the division championship. It was a high point in his life, right there, at the end of high school. What would leaving the city and going to college bring?

I was going to a small liberal arts college in Baltimore, where I expected to walk onto the men’s Division III basketball team. I thought I was ready. I had no idea that college would be so much different from high school. Things changed drastically for me my freshman year.

Girls approached me all the time. Drunk girls. Eyeliner girls with eyes half shut, balancing red plastic cups full of beer. Those same girls would be all over the lacrosse players who would call them sluts later that week. Girls didn't see the guy I was, just a freshman trying to get to know people. They saw the basketball logo and didn't need to know anything more about me. They thought I must be like all the other guys who pushed up the girls' skirts as they walked by or pretended to trip while grabbing girls' breasts. "Dude, get a drink, stop being so uptight," they'd say. I didn't want a fucking drink. Where were the kids who wanted to listen to music and get on the dance floor?

I once came back to my room and stepped over two girls lying on the floor in the hallway. They could have been waiting for me, or for anyone who walked by and was interested in quick, easy sex. College was nothing like I had expected.

The kids on my high school team were among the most creative and talented teenagers in New York City. We didn't pound 40s on a Monday night. We didn't drive drunk for fun. All we needed was a ball and a court. Nothing made us happier. Off the court we argued about who had the flyest sneakers or who was a better rapper, Nas or Jay-Z.

We didn't buy 16-ounce Miller Lites instead of 8-ounce cans, thinking that the girls would get drunker because they have twice as much alcohol. "The girls don't notice," my college teammates assured me. It wasn't fun for me to hear male dancers at my school called fags. I wasn't enjoying being affiliated with the team. To outsiders looking in, I was only seen as a freshman on the basketball team who needed to be broken in. When I turned down drinks, girls would ask my teammates what was wrong with me, why was I such a weirdo. They called me that because I would not objectify them. The gender roles at my school were like nothing I'd experienced. Girls were doing male athletes' laundry while the players poured beer on them and called them names. Bitch. Slut. Weirdo.

One day it just hit me; I understood. Everything I had questions about, everything I had stressed about for a year and a half of my life, finally seemed to have an answer. I simply wasn't like them. I stuck out like a weed in concrete. In the locker room, on the basketball court, in the words I spoke, by my actions. Everything about me was different. I saw things differently. I was from a different place. Mama done raised me different.

To make matters worse, my coach was not playing me. He hadn't seemed to take a liking to me either. At practice I was serious and I listened, two qualities I had learned from playing on other teams. The other freshmen were rowdy and rude. Some upperclassmen were hotheaded and didn't look Coach in the eye when he talked to them. It was weird for me to watch this happen, but he seemed to respond well to their bad behavior. He took my silence as a sign that I was lethargic, unmotivated. I had such desire to play, but my coach would decide instead to question my masculinity. "I need to HEAR you NATE! TALK LOUDER!" he'd yell. "GODDAMNIT! SCREAM!.... SOMETHING!"

Off the court people treated me differently, too. "Dude, if you weren't on the team I'd probably make fun of you too. Fuck it, though. You're cool. Bitches seem to like you." Thankfully, girls did show me attention. At least I was a cute weirdo, on the basketball team, and not some freak fag like a theater major. I couldn't tell my teammates that I was minoring in theater. I didn’t need to give them any more ammunition.

I loved basketball, but it was ruining my life. At the time my desire to play was overwhelming. I wanted to show Coach that basketball was my priority. I stopped telling him I’d have to miss practice for tutoring sessions or class requirements. Often I would show up at study groups late, still sweaty from practice. I’d convince the ushers at the theater to let me in late. I feared missing practice.

Coach seemed to love most of his players' attitudes. They were rich kids who didn't think about their parents' money or care too much about education. Their father's business would hire them, so what did a C- or a D+ here or there matter? My priorities were different. I didn't have time to stay and bullshit about "bitches and beer" in the locker room. I didn't care if Susan was wearing a low-cut shirt today in Philosophy, or that she almost fell down the stairs last night at the soccer party. It wasn't their fault that they gave her the beer. No one told her to drink so much. This is college, not kindergarten. I had reading to get done; I had papers to write. I always felt like the odd man out, but now I started not to care. This isn't what I wanted from a basketball team. I didn't feel a part of a team, even if the school saw and treated me like I was. Something was changing; it was me.

I'd talk to old friends on the phone about school. I'd lie and tell them things were going well, I was adjusting fine. The next party I went to, I bought in for a red plastic cup. It was soon full of beer. Maybe they're right, and I do need to loosen up, I thought. I had practice late the next day, and wouldn't have to worry about being hung over. If I teased a few girls that night, cursed and yelled, tried to be like one of the guys, maybe I'd finally get some playing time. If Coach saw that the guys liked me more, maybe he'd take notice of my game and play me more.

Not only was I slow in practice the next day, but Coach laid into me extra hard. The guys didn't see me in any new light, and I still felt like the odd man out. Nothing was going to change the situation I was in. My teammates were sexist and ignorant. It would be so easy to be like them. I could just kick back, get wasted, and blame my actions on intoxication. But I wasn't about to let that happen. I would make a decision that would have important consequences, and it would cost me one of the things I held closest to my heart.

I quit the basketball team after a year and a half. Feeling more comfortable at school now, I shed the basketball reputation. I am no longer the cute, weirdo athlete on campus, but Nate, "the quiet kid who I see in the library who is gonna be in the play next week." The girls are a little shyer when they approach me now, especially the ones from the parties I used to go to. I'm not like the other guys and they feel embarrassed and a little ashamed. I still hear them whispering about when I was on the team and what they thought I was like, but I also hear the truth now. "That's Nate. He's such a man."

Had I known what a shock I was going to be in for when I started college, had I known it was going to be so much different from what I was used to at home, in high school, I would not have stayed quiet around my teammates' unruliness and obnoxious behavior. Had I understood the hypermasculine jock culture that existed in Division III sports before I joined the team, I would have promised myself that I'd be more vocal, challenging the things my teammates thought were fun.

But I was silent; I let people categorize me, let them think I had the same beliefs and interests as the guys on my team. I never told my coach how I felt until the day I quit the team. He'd had the wrong impression about me, about how to approach me. I will always look back and wish I had been more honest with my teammates and the staff about how I was feeling.

Still, I will also look back at my college basketball career as one of the most influential times of my life. I learned more about myself during that year-and-a-half of struggle than I did during my entire life before that. By turning my time on the team into a learning experience, and growing from that experience, I know I made the right decision to leave college basketball. Have the athletes at my school stopped their sexist behavior? No. But by sticking to my principles and not letting people categorize me I was able to succeed in fighting gender stereotypes with my words and my actions, and to show that there is another way for men to be.

Nathan Einschlag will graduate from Goucher College in Baltimore in December and plans to become an elementary school teacher in New York City. Since stopping playing basketball, he has performed in college theater productions, including Shakespeare's The Tempest, in which he played Caliban. This essay appears in the forthcoming anthology Men Speak Out: Profeminist Views on Gender, Sex and Power, edited by Shira Tarrant (Routledge, November 2007).