I’m not a good soccer player—and I don’t have to be. Every week, under summer heat and even on cold winter mornings, I play with a queer and trans soccer league. The collective was established a couple of years ago with a simple aim: provide space for play that is free, fun, and safe. Our club was inspired by Chicago’s first QTBIPOC-focused basketball collective, Swish, and the title of Sai Selvarajan’s brief documentary about them is all you need to know: We Clap for Airballs. That vibe describes our team too—whether you’re a newb or a old salt, 20 or 50 years young, you’re welcome as you are.
While dominant sports culture prioritizes competition, pickiness, and cost, the essence of sport is—and has always been—about community. Soccer, like streetball, had its start in open, unstructured spaces: back streets, corner parks, wherever a goal or hoop can be temporarily set up. People come, assume each other’s names, and play as friends of years. From Davis Square to Chase Park, there’s always some new face, someone shouting encouragement from the sidelines, or some stranger throwing the ball inbounds with a smile.
For this volume, the Reader editorial team was interested in examining sports and recreation in their most pure state—not as product or performance, but as a practice of movement, connection, and release. Free from profit and prestige, what does it mean to play for the sake of playing?
Take the Garfield Park Skate Meetup on April 17. Near the middle of the gym floor, Patty Key glides smoothly, dance-skating in black suede skates with deep purple trim. She was off skating 25 years and went to a meetup a year and a half ago and never returned. For her, these parties are not a diversion—a hobby—they’re part of taking back a happier part of her past.
As summer looms, Paul D’Amato’s photograph series Water for the People keeps appearing in our minds. Captured in inner-city communities like Pilsen and Lawndale—often in Chicago’s oppressive grasp of summer heat—it chronicles moments of people splashing off in hydrants, hoses, and fountains. In a city where shade, water, and greenery are barely accessible, those carefree moments of relief are more than games. They’re a necessity.
In our editorial meetings, we found ourselves returning over and over to the places where we walk, meet, and live—and the many ways that access to them is being restricted. Parks are increasingly patrolled. Teen curfews are enforced. Basketball courts lose rims and nets. Riot Fest continues to push out residents of Douglass Park. And residents are pushed out of homes along Gompers Park.
Still, humans adapt. They’ll find a way to play, to assemble, to cool off. But it needn’t be so hard. Public spaces—blacktops and pools, pitches and tracks—should not be viewed as privileges or reserved for pay-to-play teams. They are public.
They are, and always have been, for the people.
