To me, every day is like an athletic event, maybe because I am writing about or watching sports all the time. I arrived at the soccer game at halftime, just in time to see pee-wees falling over, chasing the ball and trying to knock it around with their size 4 hoofs.

I laughed at this sight and began to reminisce about my introduction to the wide world of sports — kickball.

My first sport, if you will, was technically catch, but I don’t really remember that. My memory’s ineptitude is probably pretty normal because I was about two years old when the first ball was thrown at me. My earliest actual memory of catch dates back to when I was three on my way to Reno, Nevada, with my mom and my Uncle Joe to visit my Great Aunt Polly.

Kickball, however, was the first game I ever understood.

In my kindergarten class at our little private school, we were introduced to athletics in what was then known as gym class.

Honing coordination skills at a young age is always difficult since kids lack full body control and we were too young to get too much out of it besides skipping, galloping, running and jumping.

On the playground, the sport-advanced boys played kickball while the girls jumped rope or played tag.

Being a bit exotic for a kindergartner, I also unintentionally used recess to demonstrate the affects of the media on the mind with my friend Erin. She and I skipped around the playground and kicked our legs up to the tune of a pantyhose commercial.

But I think we had to do all these things because girls, full of cooties, were not allowed to play kickball.

And for quite some time, this didn’t really bother any jumper-wearing kindergarten girl too much. We enjoyed our own types of entertainment.

But eventually, we wanted a piece of the action. We wanted to play kickball, but we weren’t quite ready for it.

Unfortunately, even when I wanted to play, I didn’t know how. It was not only affecting my recess life, it was affecting my outside play time at home.

I complained to my mom, as children and college students do, and she decided to help me out after I came in the house a few times crying about it.

My mom, who has big feet perfect for booting the ball, rounded up the neighborhood kids in our backyard. Wearing my polka-dotted swimsuit and tennis shoes, I joined the neighbor kids.

My mom then explained the game objective and the rules to me and we all played. It was so cool to watch my mom kick the ball over the fence.

And a couple years of gym class and recess later, the guys finally let girls in on the recess action and I could enjoy the game at home and at school.

By the third grade, I had moved up from the last pick to one of the first-picked girls because my left foot had the punch to roll the ball beyond the bases.

Kickball was later replaced by other sports. And so it goes. But kickball remains the game that made me neighborhood friends, ended gender segregation at recess and opened up athletic possibilities for kids at St. Paul’s School.

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Amanda Fier is a senior in journalism and mass communication from Davenport.