Writing the Self 2: Diversity on the Court

I sit on the floor of the chemistry classroom in the high school end as I slip on both of my black knee pads and my purple and white Mizuno volleyball shoes. I make sure to tie them in a double knot to ensure that the long laces do not get in my way on the court. The room is chilly as we have the window open and the breeze from the cool October air flows in on this Saturday afternoon. As I look around, I see all of my teammates, each in their black and gold short sleeved jerseys with the writing “Ituna Trojans” on them identical to mine, besides the big bold number on the front and the last name on the back. I get up to put my headphones in my ears and press play on my phone to begin listening to the song “Kinfolks” by Sam Hunt. I walk down the short hallway over to the gymnasium doors where the bright pink tournament score sheet and schedule are hung. I search for our team name, the Ituna Trojans, and when I find it, I see that we are the next game up against Yorkton.

I peek into the gymnasium and see that the second set of the game between Ogema and Punnichy had just begun, meaning we were playing again soon. I jog back to the chemistry classroom and tell my team that we should begin our warm up. We start by running a few laps down the hallway in the elementary end to not disrupt the game going on in the gymnasium near the high school end. As we begin doing our lunges in a single file line, I take the headphone out of my left ear and overhear two of the grade tens on our team behind me talking about the Punnichy team. They are talking about how the Punnichy team is not very good since the majority of their team are Indigenous people from the reserve. We have never played Punnichy before so I did not know anything about them, which made me believe that they were only assuming their skill because of their skin colour. I stick my left headphone back into my ear and as I stretch my ankles, I turn my focus back over the game. As we end our warm up with some arm stretches along the wall, I slowly follow my team back to the chemistry room where I grab my green and orange Gatorade water bottle filled with cold water. I take my headphones out of my ears to tuck them into the small pouch within my volleyball bag and I walk eagerly over to the gymnasium doors.

The previous game had just finished and when I looked up at the big white projector on the gymnasium wall, the scoreboard read 25 for Punnichy and 13 for Ogema, meaning that Punnichy had won by a landslide and they would play in the finals. Caycie, one of my teammates, tapped me on my shoulder and her voice filled with excitement as she explained to me that if we made it to the finals we would definitely win. I now realized that since the Punnichy team consisted of students with a different skin colour than us, my team got the idea that we were automatically better at volleyball than them.

It was now time for us to play Yorkton and if we won, we moved on to the finals, but if we lost, we were out. I grabbed the yellow and blue volleyballs out of the cluttered  storage room and ran over to my team waiting for me at our bench. The five minute timer was put up on the scoreboard and we lined up in single file lines at the net to do our hitting warm up. As I am getting ready to hit, I look over to the rows of bleachers full of people. I specifically look to the bottom row and I see the Punnichy team cheering us on. I hear one of them say “go number eleven” and a smile lit up across my face as I realized you cannot judge someone based on their skin colour alone.