03.18.25
I’ve worked at an indoor beach volleyball facility in Long Island City since last Summer. I used to manage the bar/front desk and worked there four days a week for about six months, but now that I’ve gotten my mitts on a real full-time job, I have scaled back to one to two days a week (so I can keep my membership that I barely use — sorry my shoulder hurts…). I have also, by some grace of God, made some really lovely friends there who I still want to see regularly. Plus it’s very close to where I live, it’s good for me to have somewhere to be on days when I work remotely, it’s nice to have something on the side that’s so different than my actual job, where I’m on my feet and get to talk to people… You know what, I don’t have to justify myself to you. I still work at QBK Sports because I want to (if you had told me when I started there that I would be sticking around after I found a real job, I’d have had you burned at the stake — but my closest friend there, Connor, hadn’t started yet, and the many hours I’ve spent with him on the corner of the bar have been, I must say, a pretty major tune-changer).
Working at QBK reminds me of when Jaime Schultz was playing sports at my high school. Jaime was older than me — I was in eighth grade his senior year. But I remember when all the boys’ varsity teams got far in various playoff and championship battles that year, certainly far for us, and it was so obviously because he was just different. When you watched him play — soccer, basketball, and baseball (which he went on to play professionally for a brief time, as a relief pitcher) — he was on a different level than all the other kids. He was special and he stuck out. It felt like you were really witnessing something.
This is a feeling I experience seemingly all the time at QBK. I knew almost nothing about beach volleyball when I first walked into this place — I didn’t even know that it was important to make the distinction between beach and indoor (I always joke that I know one thousand percent more information about beach volleyball now than I did a year ago — I really stumbled into the facility off the street and said, “Hey do you guys mind if I make this place a HUGE part of my life?”). Now I’ve watched hours upon hours of it, at many different levels, from behind the bar, thirty feet off the courts. And I’ve seen some very, very impressive players. This includes watching people I talk to on a regular basis, who I feel I know relatively intimately and consider to be friends, display what feel to me like superhuman athletic performances, before my very eyes. They float through the air, they swing hard, they’re nimble and strong. I remember many instances in college when I would meet people and then discover later that they were like, a world class pianist or an orchestral composer or an amazing drummer or some other kind of unbelievable artist. And to be a total-not-volleyball person suddenly tossed into the throes of the volleyball world, making these kinds of discoveries on an athletic level is even more befuddling. Someone who I know and talk to…can do that?! It’s amazing to behold. And it feels like they shouldn’t have any interest in talking to me.
I have, however, sort of weaseled my way into this community based on absolutely no merit outside of the most basic charm. Connor and I talk often about what a feat it is to elbow your way into volleyball circles as a non-volleyball person, even if my elbowing was really more pratfalling through the door and making a self-effacing joke about it. Being a good hang will get you everywhere (including, I guess, in with the good people at the indoor beach volleyball facility in Long Island City, even though you yourself can hardly serve overhand).
