One of my best friends is a hooker. There are a lot of other interestingly-named positions in rugby (loosehead, scrummy, fly), and when I first started playing, I was completely thrown-off by how alien the sport and its jargon were. Initial confusion notwithstanding, my introduction to rugby was a pivotal experience in my life.
I did not find rugby like most people do; no one in my family has ever played, I am not of British-isles or Samoan heritage, there was no team in my town. In my sophomore year, a large group of friends and I decided to quit the state-champion high school football program. The football team’s focus was winning, its coaching militant, and the culture toxic. Tired of this, we went looking for something that could provide us with the true brotherhood and sportsmanship we wanted. This is why I chose rugby; no other sport places more emphasis on fraternity and camaraderie. After playing several disorganized pickup games in the muddy fields behind school, my friends and I reached out to a parent who had played
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To get the team through its infancy, I spent weekends maintaining the field and helping at grocery-bagging fundraisers. I knew that in the beginning we would be beaten by older, more experienced teams, and we were: losing all but one game in our inaugural season. Through all of this and a black eye, though, I began to see the losses as motivation for us to work harder. My friends and I realized the potential we had and threw our collective weight into improving. Practicing for hours in the cold mud and still managing to have fun, I realized that along with becoming an exceptional team, we were breeding an exceptional culture. Intending to find a new sport I ended up discovering a powerful work ethic, an ability to see opportunity in adversity, and a new appreciation for the comfort of mid-thigh
Support and encouragement by family members, especially by parents, are important in young athletes’ initial involvement in sport.” (Leff 187). Billingsley’s father, a former Panther State champion, is shown to be mentally abusive, running onto the field on the first day of practice to yell at his son for “not holding onto the football.” Winchell and his mother study football strategies at breakfast, all the while with her asking him if he’s going to get a scholarship. When a couple scouts come to speak to Winchell, his mother inserts an answer for him and when asked by one of the scouts if he thinks football is fun, Winchell is slightly hesitant to answer.
Bloody, bruised, and battered, Falls Church’s football team fought on in the fourth quarter. A football flew through the air as players crashed into one another sprinting to the ball, except I wasn’t on the field, nor was I on the sideline. I was a freshman watching our varsity footall team lose 0 to 48 on homecoming night, a familiar sight to many Falls Church students for the past 40 years. Those past 40 years are what has made Falls Church football the laughing stock of our conference, and since our school was one of the smallest high schools in the area, we never had the speed, size, or numbers to compete with other football teams. Our own school saw the team as a joke, 0-10 was a common season record, and being a Falls Church football
We lost our first game of the season. That game chanleged us all. Would continue to stare at the dirt or reach for the stars. We continued to strugle as team. It was my turn to take charge as a leader for this team, but I letting everything just go bye.
On a cold, frosty, snow cover night in November at Welcome Home Stadium, was when my life changed. That night, two teams played for the chance to call themselves champions of 6th-grade football. All game, my team and I battled against the mighty Wilmington Hurricanes. We fought all game to win and finally we got the ball back with less than under a minute left and down by 4 points. The crowd was quieter than a church mouse as my coaches huddled us up during a timeout, and in that timeout, my coaches looked to me for answers.
Months later, the sting of losing still haunted us. Summer came and no one dared to speak of the game, yet you could tell it burned in the back of our minds as we pushed ourselves harder than ever before. Attitudes and efforts changed. There was a sense of urgency inside of every
Despite the newspapers and previews saying we would not contend for the state title that year, I kept in my head that anything could happen. Going into the year I told our team “lets focus on what we can do to improve, and not worry about anyone else”. At the beginning, other teams were too strong for our inexperienced runners to compete with, but we didn’t change the focus. Practice after practice, I made sure we were doing everything we could to be at our best for the end of the year. I didn’t care what other teams were doing because we had no control over that.
However, I began to see the game as more than just a win or a loss. Losing gave the team the opportunity to closely look at what we did well, and what we needed to improve on. We were then able to focus more precisely on what we needed to do in order to succeed. I was able to learn that being successful and winning were not necessarily the same thing. We had success in a smaller sense; we worked as a team, played clean games and were noted for our sportsmanship.
The era of Football in America is slowly coming to a close. Football has been known as America’s sport next to baseball for many years now. The general physicality of every play isn’t(B3) matched by any other sport on the planet, and that is why football causes more injuries than any other sport on the professional, and youth levels. Parents are pulling their kids from their teams, even in the middle of the season because of the information that has been released over the past decade illuminating a big problem for the game.
We blew teams out. We got blown out. Despite some early struggles, we were able to advance to the semifinals, but lost in a thriller. Even though we lost, it was the best game we played by far; the kids learned to play together as one team. The season was always filled with excitement and anticipation, one play after the
I came back with a team that was craving a championships and a positive season because we were a good team this year and we all believed we could make it all the way as champions. Our soccer team overall record was 7-7-1, We achieved only one goal that year and that was to have a positive season but we didn't achieve our second goal which was to be champions. We could have been able to make it to the playoffs but we had students that were ineligible when we had crucial games to play and ended up losing those crucial games. If we had no players ineligible we would have achieved our second goal and possibly would have been champions of the Tri Valley league. Senior night which was our last game of the season we played against skyline which if you didn't know were the champions last year and killed us last year.
“Congratulations, this is the 2013-2014 Mission Vista Men’s Varsity Soccer team.” I still remember the words coming out of my high school coach’s mouth as he spoke to the new varsity team after tryouts. I was the shortest and one of the youngest players on the team, but my passion for the game was not any less than anyone on the team. I was one of the only three sophomores on the team with a team dominated by juniors and seniors.
In the documentary “Football High,” Rachel Dretzin explores the world of high school football in Louisiana, using various rhetorical devices to convey the emotional and physical intensity of the sport. Dretzin uses hyperbole and repetition to emphasize the significance of football in the lives of its players and community. Hyperbole is employed to create an exaggerated sense of the importance of the sport, such as when a coach states that "football is life." (30:28) This statement emphasizes the role that football plays in the lives of players and their families, highlighting the sense of identity and purpose it provides. Repetition is also used to drive home the emotional weight of the sport.
In 2017, my football team came third in Division 1, we have placed in the top 3 ever since the team was started in 2013. This is an outstanding feat as it shows my team is able to compete with the best by playing football at an incredibly high standard. Pumped up after halftime we wait for the whistle to blow. With a kick of the ball, we run off like cheetahs chasing prey. Running circles around the other team getting goal after goal.
I kept going for the guy next to me performing to the best to his ability. Success was the result of all the hard relentless work done throughout June into August. I acknowledged that my team had a good group of seniors who were high character student-athletes I spent most of childhood with. Ultimately finishing with a record of 3 wins and 7 loses taught me many lessons on becoming a better person and
We stunted at almost every game, and cheered at every game all season. Without Ms. Traska pushing us to be the best we could we wouldn't have done as much. People were always impressed when they saw us perform. We practiced everyday and never gave up. This experience taught me that even when something gets tough, I can overcome it.