Confession: while I like watching soccer, I hate playing it, along with just about all team sports.
Backstory: like a lot of kids, during the summer I played soccer. Probably like a lot of kids, I didn’t find it to be a particularly enjoyable experience. I don’t know if I was good at it – for most of my time playing it, I played halfback, which is the line that picks up the slack for the forwards and acts as early defense for the fullbacks (or, the last line before the goalie). For the last year or two, I spent part of the time at halfback, part of the time in goal. Most of the time, I believed that I was no good at at the game, and that I was messing it up for everyone else.
One year in particular helped reinforce this (perhaps mistaken) belief. That was the year that the house league team I was on was also the elite team for the area, meaning we had to do a lot of traveling to tournaments. During house league games, I might play for half the game, but only if we were ahead or playing a weaker team; at tournaments, I’d be lucky to play ten minutes all weekend. What it said to me was “you’re not good enough to play, but we’re stuck with you because there was no other team to put you on.”
It sucked – HARD – to know that my parents had had to spend the weekend traveling and staying in hotels so that I could go to a tournament that I knew I had no chance of playing in, unless everyone ahead of me got injured or that we were blowing the other team out of the water. The team won – a lot – but I never had anything to do with the outcomes.
To this day, I still don’t like team sports for the same reason: I feel like if I’m not playing really well, then I’m letting everyone else down. I don’t even like group activities, which is why I stopped going to the running class, why I don’t go to fitness classes, and why I haven’t joined the Ultimate Frisbee team a friend invited me to a few years ago. I still go to the gym, but prefer solitary activities.
(There is one sport I enjoyed: fencing. I started in the first year of my undergrad and did it almost until my last year. If it hadn’t been for some pretty serious injuries in important bits (like, by back, ankles and wrist) I would have continued with it. Sure, there’s a team component, but when you’re on piste, there’s only you and your opponent – no one else to let down.)
Back to soccer… some of it probably had to do with the fact I was painfully shy and not very competitive. My excuse now is that I’m basically an introvert who prefers to do things on my own than with others. I won’t say that I’ll never participate in team sports ever again, but it’s going to have to be a compelling reason to end my self-imposed ban.
Woo, fencing! I did that all through university and a couple of years after. I came in last in the first tournament we had, I won the “shroud of death”, a big black sheet I wore all weekend. The reason I lost is because they forced us to fence in a VERY closed in area, but that was the exact opposite of my style. Every tournament after that I won. So much so that the first prizes I won were pretty cool, then the prizes later were either nonexistant or really pathetic. They just didn’t wanna keep giving me awards.
I was in competitive swimming for about 7 years. My parents would only go to the local meets, or the ones that were a couple hour drive. I don’t remember them ever staying in a hotel. It was stupid too though, a long swim is 2.5 minutes. The whole meet the longest part of the swim was the “warmup” which I now know means “the bit at the start to just sap your energy cause your first swim is in 2 hours anyhow and you’ll be cold by then no matter what, ya idiot”. So I highly doubt my parents got their money’s worth.
I hated soccer when I was a smaller kid, I was a bit clumsy with my feets, but in highschool I liked it, cause I somehow became good at it.
I was never the biggest, strongest or fastest person, but I always had the best “battle sense” of anyone I knew. So I liked team games in some ense because I used to direct people and that would lead to victory. I’d get majorly frustrated when people didn’t do what I wanted though and we lost, cause then I felt it was my fault someone else sucked. I still direct in online video games, which are much less impact than real life games.
The important thing is that I wore an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time.