Playing with People You Don’t Know Well

You have been playing with some of these people for years.

You know their game. You know who drives to the right and who drives to the left. You know who will take the big shot and who will look off when the moment gets big. You know their athletic tendencies with the specificity of genuine familiarity.

And you may know almost nothing about their lives outside the game. Their job. Their family. What they are going through this week. The context in which they exist when they are not showing up on Tuesday nights in the same gym as you.

Read this passage slowly.

Let that sit for a second before you move.

If either of them falls down, one can help the other up. The community that forms around shared physical activity is a genuine and underrated form of human connection. It is not as deep as the friendships built on years of life-sharing. It is also not nothing. The person who shows up consistently in the same physical context as you, who competes with and against you, who experiences the same good and bad nights that you do — that person has a relationship with you that most adult community doesn’t produce.

Adult recreational sport is one of the few contexts in modern life where people form community across the normal social sorting mechanisms — profession, neighborhood, income, age — through a shared activity that requires genuine engagement. The software engineer and the plumber who happen to play on the same recreational basketball team have a connection that their professional networks would not have produced.

That community is worth more investment than it usually receives. The person you have played with for three years and know primarily through their game is a person whose full life is worth knowing. The relationship that exists in the game can extend into something more if either person decides it is worth the extension.

The named person is the relational invitation. Some readers will take it.