Sport, Society & Me

I've described myself as an athlete for as long as I can remember, dabbling in everything from running to soccer to basketball, before finally settling on rowing. The way I encountered crew was entirely accidental: before I moved into my dorm freshman year of college, my mother told me that my college experience would be significantly better if I joined a team of some sort, because then I'd have a group of friends with shared common interests from the very get-go. Naturally I, eighteen and headstrong, totally blew off everything she said. At first.

Three days into the semester, I realized that I wasn't meeting people who I actively wanted to spend time with, and rebelling against my parents wasn't nearly as fun once I didn't live with them anymore. On that third day of college, a boy came up to me and introduced himself. He said his name was Matt, and he told me that he was on the University of Colorado Crew Team. Both of my parents rowed in college, so I knew enough about crew to know that when he said the team could always use "girls like me," he meant that the team needed coxswains. I was a varsity athlete in high school, and I had just spent a month backpacking the Colorado Trail-- I was most certainly not coxswain material. And so I attended an informational meeting about joining the rowing team-- with the intention to row-- just to prove to this random boy who didn't even matter that there's no such thing as a "girl like me."

On the first day of water practice, I was terrified. Somehow, in my determination to be a serious rower, I had forgotten that the boat would be unset, that every tiny wake from the coaches launch would give me terrifying visions of me pitching over the side of the boat and into the Boulder Reservoir. Somehow, despite this fear, something clicked that first morning. 

The role that my sport plays in my life is starring one, fundamentally important to why I am the way I am; most of my close friends are the girls that I see at five o' clock every morning, sweaty and miserable but still somehow clinging on to a mutual idea that somewhere deep down, this is a fun thing to be doing. But the role rowing plays in my life isn't exclusively defined by the people with whom I associate; rowing has transformed and defined my college experience. Waking up at 5 am isn't part of a typical college experience, and neither is spending spring break doing two-a-day practices in glamorous locales like Nachitoches, Louisiana. But also the team atmosphere gives me something to wake up for. When I don't have practice, it's really hard for me to wake up for my 9 am classes, but somehow I can get up at 5 am every single day for practice. This comes down to accountability and determination, both of which are values prized in athletes, starting at a very early age and becoming more prominent as the proverbial playing field gets more globalized.

Sport, when in a cooperative environment, plays a very positive role in a person because it instills values that are beneficial in everyday life. Dedication, determination, commitment and problem solving can all be taught through sports, but are also fundamentally important in the workplace or academics. However, the increase in prevalence of sports in US culture is presenting a paradigm shift; instead of valuing occupations in fields like education or health professions, society at large has started investing immense amounts of time and capital into enterprises-- like sports-- that are virtually useless for anything aside from entertainment value. Athletes are put on these pedestals that elevate their status from athlete to celebrity to idol; as expressed in Eitzen's chapter on the duality of sport, the Super Bowl is a physical manifestation of "the highest Sabbath in American religion, the annual consecration of corporate culture…" (Eitzen, 3). Though operating in hyperbole, the intention of this statement is blatantly clear. Society at large invests a lot of stock into the sports culture in America, so much that it becomes barely short of a religious experience. This sentiment, extreme though it may be, serves to illustrate just how elevated the status of not just athletes, but their associates (coaches, team owners, etc) have become in society. Being from North Carolina and obnoxiously aware of ACC basketball, I think Coach K of the Duke Blue Devils is a perfect example of this: he's just a basketball coach. But somewhere along the line, his many successes turned him into an icon, the proverbial symbol of a culture much larger than himself.