How joining an LGBTQ volleyball league eased my childhood anxieties about organized sports

For much of my life, I believed that sports weren’t for me. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when that belief crystallized, but by the time I reached adulthood, it was firmly established. Looking back now, I didn’t want it to be that way. As we all know, sports are an important part of Pittsburgh life. And like most people, I want to belong.

I left Pittsburgh after graduating high school in 2004, ready to explore other parts of the country. I attended college in California, then lived and worked in New York for almost 10 years. When the pandemic struck in 2020, the only place I wanted to be was with my family, who still lived in the Pittsburgh area.

Fast forward a few years, I’m still here and have started to put down roots. But most of my social circle, peers and friend groups reside in other places. I’m a social person and knew I would need those types of connections to be happy as an adult in Pittsburgh.

How exactly does one make new friends as an adult — especially in a new environment? For anyone who has tried recently, you know that it’s not easy. I was familiar with Stonewall Sports, a nonprofit that hosts recreational sports leagues for LGBTQ+ people and their allies. This seemed like something worth trying when I realized that my need for connection started to outweigh my long held belief that I’m just “not a sports person.”

Finding community

I joined a team in the summer volleyball league without knowing anyone on it. My incredibly friendly captain, Tim, welcomed me with open arms and introduced me to the basics of the league. When I started to meet the rest of the team, I was happy to see that everyone was there with similar intentions: to have fun, meet new people and spend time in a friendly environment with other queer people.

These — not hopes of athletic prowess  —  were my goals, too. But over the course of my first season in summer 2023, I discovered to my surprise I was actually enjoying the sport itself. “This volleyball thing is pretty fun,” I would catch myself saying, especially on the sand courts on a beautiful summer day in Highland Park.

It’s a ritual for all the teams to meet at a local queer bar, 5801, after the games are finished — a proud continuation of a long tradition of queer community-building in bars. What’s maybe obvious, but also easily forgotten, is that friendships and community are developed through repetition, and Stonewall fosters that repetition.

By the end of that first season, I was officially a volleyball convert. It was so fun to feel myself getting better at this sport. Our team even won the intermediate level championships. I ended the season with at least a dozen new friends and even more new acquaintances. I quickly signed up for another league, pickleball, and have continued with volleyball into the 2024 season.

Queerness and sports : a complicated relationship

It’s not a coincidence that many queer people leave childhood with a negative impression of sports. Youth sports leagues were the first place I remember feeling self-conscious about my body. It was the first place I started to feel like an outsider, like something about me was different from the other kids, that I couldn’t fully understand but felt deeply.

High school sports practice was the environment where I first experienced explicit homophobia. I’m not sure how true this remains today, but when I was in middle and high school in the late 1990s and early 2000s, hearing anti-gay jokes and slurs was incredibly common. I can remember clearly the first time that the slur was directed at me. It was at an after-school sports practice.

In this environment, is it any wonder lots of queer people make the sad calculation that this just isn’t worth it? That we aren’t welcome, and so why should we even try to be part of sports culture?

Reconnecting with the joy of sports

What I’ve come to learn through my experience with Stonewall Sports is that it is in fact worth it. That losing something positive because others try to make it negative isn’t right. That nothing about sports is inherently homophobic or transphobic or sexist. Many people in the past, and some in the present, have tried to make it that way, but the simple act of reclaiming what was once lost — the joy of playing a game — can be a powerful act in the fight against these phobias and -isms.

In the Stonewall Sports leagues, I experienced the camaraderie, excitement, athleticism and joy that I never got to enjoy in my first go-around at sports. Something as simple as an LGBTQ+ sports league has allowed me to connect with a small piece of the sports culture this city holds so dear, and in turn, allowed me to feel more at home in my hometown. I no longer cling to that feeling of being an outsider knowing that I have a place where I can belong.

Todd Feiler is the co-founder and CEO of Ringlet , a mobile app for easy social planning with friends and family. He’s also the co-founder of the Out in Tech Pittsburgh chapter. You can follow him on Instagram @tgfeiler or contact him at firstperson@publicsource.org

Read more essays on the Pittsburgh experience:

Pittsburgh apologizes for the inconvenience

Family health scares and a historic tragedy spur me to champion Pittsburgh, not leave it

Pittsburgh’s decaying ‘Death Stairs’ are an indictment and an inspiration

My American Dream ended on a deflated air mattress in a run-down Squirrel Hill apartment

Mulling an environmental disaster in a Colorado bar surfaced my deep (and complicated) Pa. roots

The post How joining an LGBTQ volleyball league eased my childhood anxieties about organized sports appeared first on PublicSource . PublicSource is a nonprofit news organization serving the Pittsburgh region. Visit www.publicsource.org to read more.