THIS IS YOUR GAME
Name: Summer Myburgh Age: Twenty One Class Year: Junior Position: Backliner, #30 Hometown: Birmingham, England
THIS IS YOUR MOMENT
TW: death, implied abuse
Summer would give anything in the world to remember the family he had for those four years before foster care. In those early years, it didn’t occur to him that anything about his living arrangements was anything other than normal. He assumed that all the kids he went to school with, that he played with at the park until sundown, went back to homes that were run by a group of adults who managed dozens of children who came and went like leaves in the wind—that Summer was no different from anyone else.
He knew vague details about his parents, but they got lost and confused as he and his files were ferried to home after home after home. He knew that they were young when he was born, they had no education or career, but he was well cared for. They didn’t have time to build a future for him and left nothing behind for him, not even a family member to raise him, when they were killed in a car accident.
In the constant confusion of ever changing families and environments, Summer didn’t know how to grow up normal. The older he got, the more self-conscious he became about his situation and the angrier he became that he had to live with it. Other kids picked on him for coming from that side of the city; for having to share clothes with the other four boys that he had to walk to school with every day; for not having parents or money or anything that they had. It made him defensive and reclusive, turned him from a friendly and sociable child into a furious teenager that snapped if you caught his eye at a bad time.
Summer’s shortening temper and raging attitude did nothing to help him when it came to making friends or finding any kind of permanent home. Schools couldn’t handle him for more than a couple of months and foster families were even less patient; he found himself increasingly often coming home with bruises and suspension letters for fighting, sometimes arriving home in police cars with ever growing threats of he’s pushing his luck. It didn’t help that his string of homes all came with their own problems and couldn’t be described as anything else other than terrifying and chaotic. Summer was bad, but he wasn’t the worst; he knew first-hand what some of the other kids he had to live with were capable of and when he had less security in his own home than he did in school, it only made him fight harder to run from both of them. By the time he got to fourteen, it looked as if he was going to end up like so many of the other boys he’d grown up with in the system: no qualifications, social skills, aspirations, or future.
Then something unlikely and wonderful happened, and it came in the form of Gwen Myburgh.
Gwen had taken in more children than Summer had had hot meals, she’d seen so many personalities and backgrounds that there was no way she was going to let a kid like Summer turn her into a failed foster parent. She was tough, strict, refused to take shit from anyone, but she loved all the children in her care and Summer was no different. She went out of her to make him feel at home, going as far as to mildly renovate her garage so he could have his own bedroom, hoping some personal space would do him some good. She helped him find out more about his parents and even researched to see if he had any living relatives he could reconnect with—and she introduced him to Exy.
Since it started becoming popular, Gwen had used the local Exy team as a way of getting her kids to put some of their pent-up energy and emotions to good use, and it had more of an impact on Summer than anyone could’ve predicted. He loved Exy, and though he’d never been one for sports, he took to this one like he’d been playing it his whole life. The more he played, the more he calmed down and his angry outbursts went from happening every day to maybe once a month; he befriended his teammates and got out of the house in a way that didn’t end in him coming home in a police car. His grades picked up, he became friendlier, he completely turned his life around. What no one had managed to achieve in over ten years, Gwen had achieved in two. She’d given Summer purpose and somewhere he belonged—and the cherry on top was their decision to make his fixture in her life permanent.
SEIZE IT WITH EVERYTHING YOU’VE GOT
The two years following Gwen’s decision to adopt Summer were the busiest of his life. In between the adoption process and working as hard as he could at his A Levels to get into a decent university, he and his entire Exy team were working to raise funds so that he might just get the opportunity to play for the Palmetto State Foxes. It’d turned into Summer’s dream as soon as he’d gotten into Exy, and since it was his first and biggest ambition, everyone in his life figured they should do what they could to make it happen for him. His scholarship got him into Palmetto, but the money that his friends and family raised would help support him for the next several years. It was harder than he thought, uprooting himself to South Carolina, considering how much he’d been moved around during his short life—only this time it was by choice.
Even though Gwen had given him everything, Palmetto was a new start for Summer, one that he’d needed for years, but that wasn’t to say it hasn’t been without its struggles. Summer is a completely different person to the boy he was before Gwen, but his fear of scaring away his teammates with his temper—(or just his personality)—means he’s kept the team at arms-length. He tries to avoid confrontation at all costs, but he knows it comes through on the court, even during practices he’s been known to snap and has had more than his fair share of stern conversations with Coach Wymack. Despite this, no one can say he isn’t trying; every harsh word is followed up with an apology later that day and he’ll be damned if he lets a player on another team go after one of the Foxes. Summer knows he’s lucky to be a Fox and that he can’t afford to ruin this opportunity for himself, so he plays his best and will continue to do so as long as he’s part of the team.
SUMMER MYBURGH is portrayed by FABIAN GRAY and is CLOSED