My original plan for this week’s new activity was to attend a jiu-jitsu class. However, the class I ended up going to was for kids.
I felt it would be morally reprehensible to full-nelson 10-year-olds, so I decided to push off my desire to punch people for when it was acceptable. So instead, I went with my last-resort activity: soccer.
Like most kids, I bounced around every conceivable sport in order to find my niche, be with friends and tire myself out to the point where my mom did not feel it was necessary to give me Ritalin. The first — and only — time I played soccer was in the second grade. I don’t remember the details, but I do remember that I disliked it.
A couple of my friends here on campus are crazy about soccer. Not England crazy (that would lead to a criminal record) but they try to play soccer once every week.
For months now, my friends have been extending invitations for me to play soccer with them, but I would always turn them down. Soccer is for Europeans, not decent Americans like me. I normally only associate with proper American sports, like NASCAR. That’s a classy sport right there.
However, one week, I decided to go with them, because an eight-hour Netflix session left me feeling unusually sluggish and I felt the perfect way to get rid of that feeling would be to run up and down a field for a while.
My friends normally play at night, so we didn’t play on a field; we instead played on one of the courts at Ping.
I didn’t know what to expect that night, but I thought it was going to be a small game with a core group of people I was familiar with. Instead, it was chaos.
Dozens of people would move in and out of the Ping court with the sole objective of playing soccer. This wasn’t just a fluke, because my friends explained to me that these people would frequently come to Ping at specific times to play with one another.
I was fascinated with the experience before I even started playing the game. I have never seen such a diverse student body in one setting. I saw people of all sizes and ethnicities come together to play with each other.
I knew soccer was the international sport of choice, but seeing all these people together — people who would normally never interact — come together to play a soccer game was a perfect image, fortifying my previously held belief.
Friendship and camaraderie aside, the actual game of soccer was a nightmare. The people who I played with obviously play all the time and I don’t even like playing soccer video games.
I don’t understand why I was so bad. I know I have coordinated legs because I use them all the time to walk and make sure I don’t fall over. However, when it came time for me to kick a ball with one of my well-trained walking legs, I felt like I needed to wear a helmet and elbow guards.
While I was in the middle of the court still trying to figure out why I kept rolling my ankle every time I took a step, everyone else on the field was twirling, juggling, and doing other insane feats with the soccer ball.
Everyone was so good and I was miserably bad, it was like an actual FIFA match, except I was the groggy streaker trying to regain proper motor function after getting tazed.
Despite my lack of ability, I was surprised by how much I didn’t hate soccer. It was a lot more fun than I had expected and I don’t understand why I disliked it so much as a kid.
The first time my friends invited me to play soccer was several weeks ago, and while I don’t play as much as my friends, I still make an effort to play soccer every other week. And yet, I am not getting better at all.
Dennis Fulton is a senior studying journalism at Ohio University and a columnist for The Post. Was he right about soccer? Email him at df342709@ohiou.edu
