This afternoon I took myself to the park with a book, because it was nice outside. I didn't stay long, because this is Britain and ten minutes after I got there the sun disappeared and it was 65 degrees, cloudy, and windy. But before I left, I witnessed the fairest, most equitable method of picking teams that I have ever had the privilege to see in the world of kids sports.
As a devout non-athlete, my entire childhood PE class experience was basically one long miserable episode of boredom, exhaustion, and physical inadequacy, punctuated by moments of extreme anxiety that were usually induced by someone hitting a ball in my direction (who do I throw it to??), being forced to attempt to climb the rope in front of the entire class even though we all knew perfectly well that I wouldn't even be able to reach the first knot*, or having the PE teacher line us all up to be picked for teams.
Being picked last for a team is super embarrassing, even if you have absolutely no interest in playing whatever game is about to happen. But these little kids in the park today were on point with their team-picking method. The two captains stood a little ways away out of earshot, and the rest of the kids assigned themselves numbers. Then they lined up in front of the captains, who took turns calling out numbers without knowing to whom they were assigned. THIS WAS THE LEAST STRESSFUL THING I HAVE EVER SEEN and I wanted to stand up from my blanket and give them a round of applause, but then I thought that would be weird, and even at twenty-nine years of age, I feared their judgement. So I pretended to still be reading my book but inside I was thinking, "Well done, grasshoppers. Well done."
*Remember the Presidential Fitness Test, you guys? There's the pull-up challenge, and if you can't do a single pull-up (I couldn't) they had you do this other thing they called the flex arm hang, which means that you stand on a chair in front of the bar, grab the bar so that your hands are up by your shoulders, and then they take the chair away and you see how long you can hold yourself up. Every year I was the only one who had to do the flex arm hang, and every year as soon as they took the chair away I dropped to the ground like a back of rocks. True story.
