Behind the Wheel of the Van Murphys: A Mother's Day Tribute to Every Youth Sports Mom

In our hometown, you could spot the van from a block away. A two-toned blue beast, usually packed to the gills with kids in mismatched uniforms — cleats sticking out one window, a field hockey stick poking out another, a tennis racket balanced on someone's lap, a saxaphone case wedged behind the back seat. Inside, a rotating cast of Murphys and their friends, somebody half-changed into a leotard, somebody else trying to finish homework on a sibling's back, all of us hurtling toward whatever practice, game, recital, or scout meeting was next on the docket.

I later learned that some people in town had a name for that van and the chaos that lived inside it. They called us the Van Murphys.

Behind the wheel, almost always, was my mother. Babs to her friends. Grandma Babs to a still-growing battalion of grandchildren now. And to anyone who knew her in the 1970s and '80s, she was the patron saint of youth sports logistics — a one-woman dispatch center, equipment manager, snack coordinator, head cheerleader, and chauffeur all rolled into one.

She raised nine kids. Nine. All within ten years of each other. And somehow — somehow — every single one of us got to participate fully in the activities we loved.

The Schedule That Shouldn't Have Been Possible

I have spent a lot of my adult life building things. Companies, teams, projects with moving parts. And I still cannot understand, mathematically or otherwise, how my mother pulled off what she pulled off.

Across nine kids, our family calendar somehow held space for dance and field hockey and ice hockey and track. For Model UN and football and baseball. For piano lessons and guitar lessons and the school musical. For golf and tennis and Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts and cheerleading. There were uniforms to wash, gear to repair, registration forms to fill out, fees to scrape together, carpools to coordinate, snacks to organize, and on any given Saturday in the fall, three or four of us competing at the same time in three or four different places.

She made it all happen. Not perfectly, and not without stress — I remember the look on her face when somebody realized at 7:15 a.m. that their cleats were still in someone else's gym bag — but it happened. We made it to the field. We made it to the recital. We made it to the meet.

Look at our family Christmas card from those years and you can see the whole operation captured in one frame: nine kids on and around the van, each in the uniform of a different sport or activity, grinning like we had no idea how much work it took to get us all dressed and standing still at the same time. We didn't.

What She Gave Up So We Could Show Up

Here is the part that I think about more, the older I get.

My mother had her own pursuits. Her own interests, her own ambitions, her own things she loved doing. And she set most of them down — quietly, without making a production of it — so that her kids could pick theirs up. The hours she could have spent on herself went into folding uniforms at midnight, into cutting orange slices for halftime, into sitting on freezing aluminum bleachers in February so that whichever Murphy was on the ice that night would look up and see her there.

She didn't talk about it as a sacrifice. She just did it. And I don't think any of us, as kids, fully understood what we were watching. We thought that's just what moms did, because that's what our mom did.

The Lessons That Outlasted the Trophies

The trophies are mostly in boxes now. The uniforms are long gone. The van itself eventually gave up the ghost. But the lessons that came out of all those practices and games and rehearsals — those have stayed.

We learned how to be on a team. How to lose with grace and win without gloating. How to show up on the days you don't feel like it, because other people are counting on you. How to handle a coach who is hard on you, a teammate who is struggling, a referee who blew the call. How to balance commitments. How to push through something physically uncomfortable and discover you were stronger than you thought.

We didn't know it at the time, but every car ride to every practice was an investment in the kind of adults we would become. My mother knew. That's why she kept driving.

The Tradition Rolls On

Today, all nine of us have kids and/or a small army of nieces and nephews between us. And here is the thing that would make my mother smile the widest if you told her: every one of us is now doing for our own children and nephews/nieces what she did for us. Different vans. Different uniforms. New activities she'd never heard of mixed in with the old ones. But the same idea. The same love. The same belief that what kids learn on a field, on a stage, on a rink, in a troop, in an ensemble, is some of the most important learning they'll ever do.

When I see Moms, Dads, Aunts & Uncles standing on the sideline of a game, or hauling a nephew's hockey bag across a parking lot at 6 a.m., I see my mother. The tradition didn't end with her. She made it big enough to carry forward.

To Grandma Babs

Mom — there is no thank-you that fits what you did for us. You gave up so much of yourself to make our lives bigger, and we are so deeply, eternally grateful. Every joy we found on a field or a stage, every lesson we are still using as adults, every memory we now get to recreate for our own kids — it traces back to you and that van.

We love you. 

To Every Youth Sports Mom

And to every other mother out there who is currently driving the van, packing the cooler, washing the jersey at 11 p.m., sitting in the rain at the U10 game, coordinating the pickup, paying the registration fee, and somehow holding the whole thing together for a kid who has no idea yet what you are giving them:

We see you. The lessons you are making possible will outlast you in the best possible way. Your kids will carry them into their own lives, and one day into their own kids' lives. That is an enormous gift. That is the work of a lifetime.

Happy Mother's Day. From the Van Murphys, and from all of us at Youth Inc.

— Tim