High School Sweats
There was a t-shirt for everything when I was in high school. Your biology class wants to make t-shirts to commemorate some budding inside joke? You’d order one. The newspaper wants to showcase the year fit to print? Yeah, you’d order one too.
When it came to high school sports, there was the team t-shirt and probably a summer training t-shirt. If not a summer training one, then it would be a second t-shirt needed at the end of season to remember some special moment. Over four years, I accumulated a lot of t-shirts.
Most of the ones I still have are now squares in a quilt. They are some remaining pieces of a high school experience. The rest of them have been donated somewhere along the way. They are the kind of finds I’d love discovering in thrift stores when I was in high school. I like to hope they’ve made their way into random dressers of teenagers around the country.
But it wasn’t just the t-shirts that piled up in high school. For every sports season, there was also team sweats. For me, that meant a lot of team sweats to order alongside all those t-shirts. My school wasn’t fancy, so sweats were usually a cotton hoodie and a pair of sweatpants.
Like most of the t-shirts, all of my old team sweats have moved on from my closets. I donated most of the hoodies when my mom was still teaching at the high school. She passed them on to a younger generation of Berkley Bears. They mostly went to cross country girls excited about wear vintage sweats. But I’m sure they’ve all been passed on again by now.
Through all the closet clean outs and donation runs since high school, I’ve kept one pair of sweatpants. One pair of thinning, pilling grey sweatpants with pockets surprisingly still in tact.
The cool thing to do to cotton sweatpants for most of when I was in high school was cut the elastic out of the ankles. So, every pair of cotton sweatpants I owned quickly had a little hole in each ankle hem and missing elastic. Except this pair.
By track season my senior year, I wanted my sweatpants to keep their elastic ankles. That way I could wear them pushed up to my knees and they wouldn’t weigh down with water running warm up laps around a wet track. I was a captain and had a say in the design. We chose light grey heather with a simple, navy Bears ’05 down one hip.
I’ve worn them thousands of times by now. I hope to wear them thousands more times before they stop passing as sweatpants. When that time comes, I’ll do what I can to help them carry on as something in my closet.
I have a favorite memory of these sweatpants, exactly as they are – except 15 years younger. The memory is from college, not high school, and I wasn’t even wearing them at the time. I don’t think of it every time I have them on. But when this memory does pop into my head, I always laugh out loud.
My sister came to visit me during my freshman year of college. She stayed in my dorm room with me, and I lent her pajamas. In the morning, with the waistband pulled up to her belly button and the elastic around her ankles, she asked my why I gave her the sweatpants that made her look ridiculous.
Her shirt was tucked into my grey sweatpants and I never thought she looked ridiculous until she started pointing out all the ways she thought she did. But as she went on for what felt like five minutes, showing me all the things wrong with my favorite sweatpants, all I could do was laugh hysterically and try to catch my breath.
I’m not sure if I caught my breath long enough to tell her that they were my favorite sweatpants. That I let her borrow them for the night because I thought of them as the best pair I owned. As my big sister, I felt like she needed to borrow my good sweatpants. I’m not sure she ever knew that’s what they were.
So, I still have this ridiculous pair of my favorite sweatpants. They are complete with a wonderful memory of just how hard my sister could make me laugh. It’s a laugh that still echos 15 years later at the most random of times. Especially when I’m wearing faded grey sweatpants with elastic ankle cuffs pushed up to my knees.
