A recent headline in African sports caused me to wax nostalgic about my short, undistinguished career in junior high athletics. The story, from Madagascar, described a record-setting 149-0 win in a soccer game between the nation’s rival teams.

Granted, the goalie didn’t keel over and die, but the losing team did kick the ball into the goal it was defending 149 times — a creative protest against a referee’s call.

A large part of my athletic career was spent in inadvertent protest that it existed.

No matter how hard I concentrated, I would always manage to collide with a teammate, run the wrong way down the court or go into man-to-man defense when my team had the ball. The primary reason I ever had an athletic career, as undistinguished as it was, is because I spent most of my childhood shuttled between various small Iowa schools. So small, in fact, that our kindergarten was housed off the wing with the high school lockers, treating us to varying degrees of makeout during passing periods.

These schools were so small, despite six degrees of consolidation and sharing, that there were usually more letters in the district name than the number of buildings that housed said district.

And, these schools were so small that my incorrigible klutziness notwithstanding, I managed to start every game my seventh-grade year, simply because I was a seventh-grade female with a pulse. Having only enough girls in my grade to field a team, our long-suffering coach did not have the luxury of recruiting for talent. Instead, he got me.

I recall vividly our first-ever seventh-grade basketball game. Roadkill Flats-Stinky Valley-Plumtree vs. Applefield-Loess-Central Irving-Oslo. R-S-V-P vs. A-F-L-C-I-O. The Fightin’ Rabbitettes vs. the Scrappy Lady Coyotes. The uniforms had to be extra large to accommodate the district names.

At this point in our career, we hadn’t actually played a full game of basketball, and concepts like fouls, free-throws and out-of-bounds were not on our radar screens. Our coach had tried valiantly to concentrate on the “fundamentals,” something God hadn’t bothered to do when he gave me ski-feet, erratic flailing of arms and legs and the instinct to duck every time a ball came through the air toward me.

Well, the Fightin’ Rabbitettes didn’t have a flippin’ chance. The Scrappy Coyotes had not only gotten the “fundamentals” down pat, but had moved onto foreign concepts like “plays” and “scoring.” We never had a prayer.

I’ll never forget our coach’s instructions, shouted in vain, echoing across the empty gymnasium. The smug parents of the home team cheering their girls on as they made lay-up after lay-up. One of the girls on the other team kept slapping the ball right out of my hands, and my response was never to try to grab it back, always just to watch in amazement as she went in for two more.

At halftime, the score was something like a dismal forty-zip. Later on, we somehow managed to score eight points, possibly when the opposing coach rotated in the thirdgraders.

I had never been so embarrassed in my twelve years of life. Our team struggled on, committing inadvertent acts of self-sabotage at every turn.

That’s the worst feeling in the world — being stuck out in the middle of hostile territory with so much time left on the clock and the opponent’s score rising geometrically. Parents yelling, suggesting words like defense, a concept foreign to us. And every time the ball comes my way, I obey my ducking instincts and one of the Coyotes gets it.

The final score — 78 to 16 — was burned into our memories forever. The bus ride home was pretty quiet, a departure from the typical junior high frenzy.

Even though most of my teammates had never heard of Madagascar, we were all ready to move there to escape the humiliation we’d suffered at the hands of A-F-L-C-I-O.

But I guess that even in Madagascar, you can’t escape an outrageous loss. The only difference is, they seem to know when they bring it on themselves.

Rachel Faber Machacha

is a graduate student in international development studies. She is a member of the Daily’s editorial board.