I was closing in on the end of my second season as a team manager when I first seriously asked myself what was so enchanting about DI. I'm a computer geek, for Pete's sake, and therefore not the most outgoing or engaging person in the room—probably, let's face it, not even in a crowd of two. Then, somewhere during the post-season funk, it became clear to me: This is stuff straight out of my childhood.

About half of my growing-up was in Corinth, Mississippi, about 20 miles west of where the Tennessee River cuts off the northeast corner of the state. There were five or six thousand people living there then, schools were 15 minutes away by bicycle, hang-outs a few minutes closer, and friends a few minutes closer still. Gangs were you and your friends doing things after school and before dinner that you were confident your parents didn't know about but that the parents usually had all discussed to their satisfaction before you sat down to eat.

We lived at the end of the road in one of the new neighborhoods so we were at the tip of a finger of houses poking north from the edge of town into the surrounding fields, some plowed and some not. Other neighborhoods jutted into the countryside every mile or so as you went around that side of town. Home was where you took about five minutes every day after school to wolf down a snack while you told your parents you did “nothing” all day at school. Then out the back door until supper to your friends and all that openness beyond your yard.

There were all those fields, for starters. Hundreds of acres of nothing but dirt and raggedy grass and occasional small clumps of shrubs or trees, completely uninteresting until something moved. An old, shallow, tree lined trench ran along the edge of the back yards of the houses of the east side of the neighborhood “finger”. It failed to follow the slope of the land for a hundred feet or so beyond our back yard before falling into line, a leftover from the battles fought there during the Civil War and still affording the same advantages in the 1960's, absent the violence of war, that it had nearly a century earlier. It was impossible to lie in the leaves and twigs of that trench and peek ever so slowly past the roots and trunks at its edge without seeing, however briefly, shadowy old soldiers with long rifles moving in the distance. Phillips Creek, never quite dry, meandered along the other side of the corn fields the trench was undoubtedly so effective in helping prevent westerly advances across. There was a small forest of pine trees on the opposite side of our “finger” being raised for pulp that provided raw stock for building all sorts of shelters, forts and what-have-you. When it rained, the challenge was to see how deep the “gang” could pile up water behind a dam of sticks, rocks and mud before supper.

East of us, the next “finger” of houses jutting from town was Parkway Village. They were snobs because their neighborhood had a name and ours didn't and even though half of the friends of who lived in one neighborhood lived in the other. Anyway, the distinction suited everybody because it gave us all enough reason to stage an epic battle with mud balls once or twice a year at the old, rundown barn that sat out in the open just about halfway between the neighborhoods.

What had become so clear in the aforementioned post-season funk was that the guys on our team were coming together for their weekly meetings much like we used to after school--to clarify the quest and pursue it according to our own devices. And, make no mistake, we prepared for and executed those battles with Parkway Village with every bit as much care and diligence as the teams prepare for tournaments.

What I have come to strongly suspect is that the influence of this connection to childhood just might be pretty similar for a lot of folks. So I am starting this topic on the hunch that I am right and that other folks just might want to talk about their DI “roots”. I just have to believe that, no matter who you are or where you're from, there are things that you did when you were a kid that were just fun and cool to do, in the purest DI sense, and, looking back, you just might feel like you wouldn't have missed those times for anything in the world and that, lastly, these are things the rest of us know absolutely nothing about.

So I hope you will share them...