During the winter sports season my first three years at OVS, as I was walking back to my room after a relaxing session of sitting around during “fitness,” I would look down at the field and wonder why in the world any of those students would subject themselves to such tortuous exercise in such cold weather.
It was a bigger surprise to me than to anyone else when I found myself on that field, in that cold, the first day of soccer my senior year.
I joined soccer for the sole reason that I was lazy and needed to start actually trying to exercise instead of lying on a mat and calling it Pilates. Not for a second did I believe that through the running and kicking some ball into a net that I would find myself enjoying it.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m extraordinarily bad at soccer, but I loved being on that field, in that cold, with those girls, waiting to do the next drill.
During the season, I injured myself, an irony since I evaded participating in sports by complaining of my fragility. As a result, I was only able to play in two soccer games, but the games are not the reason I enjoyed the soccer season so much.
Despite complaints of cold and soreness, I loved doing shooting drills – a drill I was always exceptionally horrid at – but more than anything, I loved the half-field run and five minute stretch done with the entire team at the beginning of each practice.
It was then that the team was together, huffing through the runs, but still laughing and talking amicably throughout it, and then gathering in a circle where we could all see each other, and continuing our conversations through chanted counts and stretching calves.
It was the sense of community I had been missing ever since I left the dorms for day student life my junior year. It is the sense of community I am searching for again as I gear up for track season this fall. It is the sense of community that makes me encourage the underclassmen who are just like I was, skating by through mandatory sports, to participate in something that seems so ridiculous.
Because you never know if you’re going to enjoy that sport until you go out onto the field and try it for yourself, but you do know that these teams need you, or else they aren’t really teams at all.
By Aria Ellett
Class of 2013