I’ve never been very good at soccer, but I love it. In the summers, and even sometimes on snowy winter days, I play weekly with a queer and trans soccer club. The group formed about two years ago with the central tenets of being safe, fun, and free. The title of Sai Selvarajan’s short documentary about Swish—Chicago’s first QTBIPOC-centered basketball group, which inspired our soccer club—captures their, and our, central conceit perfectly: We Clap for Airballs. New and seasoned players alike, anywhere from 20 to 50 years old, come together to just play, regardless of the outcome.
Athletics tend to have a competitive, costly, and high-barrier-to-entry track, but most, like soccer or streetball, have always been for everyone—played in alleys or on corners of parks with makeshift trash can goals. Strangers play together and get quickly comfortable, shouting names they just learned and shaking out the day’s stresses. From Davis Square to Chase Park, a few new people always join or watch us play, cheering at goals and passing the ball back when it goes out of bounds.
Considering our approach to this issue, the Reader editorial team wanted to explore sports and recreation free from profit and prestige, the movement and connection that makes us relax, focus, and clear our minds.
As we anticipate the summer, Paul D’Amato’s photo series “Water for the People” comes to mind; it captures the free pleasures of life (difficult now at a time when, as my friend says, you spend $20 every time you step outside). Shot partially in Chicago’s often oppressive summer heat, mostly in Pilsen and Lawndale, the series captures the communal joy and relief of cooling off in water. While green space and even shade remain inequitably distributed, sometimes water is one of the only solaces from the heat for working-class people.
So, as we discussed this topic, our writers and editors became naturally fixated on the spaces we move, exist, and live in, and the ways access to them—particularly parks—is restricted, policed, and politicized. Curfews on teens have been put in place, rims and nets have been removed from basketball courts, Riot Fest will continue to be in Douglass Park despite community concerns, and people are being actively pushed out of their homes in Gompers Park. People will find places to play or cool down anywhere, but blacktops and rims, pitches and nets, pools and tracks, all of it should not just be available to adults and pay-to-play groups—they’re for the people.
More in COLUMNS & OPINION
Thoughtful takes from the readers and the writers.
Solidarity to those of you who had to file someone else’s taxes this year.
Our Best of Chicago party this year was small but mighty.
Wayward or not, children shouldn’t have to risk death to be free.
A neighbor’s doorbell recording showed Sheila Albers that the official report was wrong. She turned to public records to find the truth.
An issue note from a Reader culture editor
Only six weeks into 2025 and we’re already at crazy time.
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2025-05-02 15:00:53
