Sports

One of the things that made Durham really attractive to me was how popular intra-mural sports are. Something like 80% of the students participate in some kind of sport. Because Durham is broken up into colleges, like Oxford and Cambridge, this makes sport even more exciting. Every college has a number of teams in every sport, and they all form giant leagues with other colleges. So instead of just playing with friends, you are really representing something, your college, which is really fun.

The sport I was most excited to play was soccer, or as I am forced to call it here, "football". On a side note, the nomenclature really is a lose-lose for me. If I call it "football" people assume I'm talking about American Football, because I'm American. But if I call it soccer, out of habit and in an attempt to avoid confusion, they scoff and say things like "soccer?" or "you're in england now, you better call it by its real name". I normally just call it literally "football slash soccer".

Anyway, back on topic. My college, Van Mildert, has over 1000 students, and thus has 8 football teams playing in the various university leagues. An A team, B team, C team, D team, E team, a women's team and two practice/indoor teams. You have to try out a first year, and they put you onto one of the teams for the season (the whole school year) based on how good you are. After seeing how many first years ("freshers") turned out to training- around 60- I was pretty overwhelmed and nervous. My goals were to not be the worst player, not to embarrass myself too badly, and to make the E team.

The field complex, where we train, is unfortunately about a 30min walk from my college. So by the time we got there on the day of the trials, I was already a bit tired- not a good start. They had us do some warm ups, but we pretty quickly jumped into a few small sided games with all the captains wandering around and observing. There was a bit of pressure, but I managed not to embarrass myself. After a few more drills, I got subbed out of one of the games early. I thought it was because they could see how tired I was. But the captain said he'd seen enough, and wanted me on the B's. I was pretty surprised, but happy. Not happy that I'd made the B's exactly, but happy that they pulled me out of the game, because I was ready to collapse.

I had a few trainings with the B team, and the level of play was very high. These were obviously kids who'd been playing their whole lives, and really took it seriously. I wasn't neccesarily the worst player, but I was far from the best. I play forward, and that's pretty much the only position I can play, unfortunately there were two strikers above me on the depth chart. So in our first match, I started on the bench, and wasn't subbed in until the 80th minute (out of a 90 min game). At the next training the captain decided that I should move down to the C team, just so I could get more playing time.

Life on the C's has been really good. It's much more fun being one of the better players than one of the worst. Training is more fun, and we joke around, it's not serious and pressure filled. We may be having too much fun though, as we lost our first match 3-0. I'll provide more updates (and maybe picture) on here as the season goes on.

Tomorrow I'll explain about college basketball, the other sport I'm playing, which is, to say the least, very different from college football.