Volleyball. Softball. Flag football. These are the adult sportsball leagues. I love sportsball - playing, not just watching. But there is this phenomena that occurs in some adult leagues that puts a bruise on an otherwise healthy system. It is this intense drive that some adults have that makes them get angry, abusive, and just downright nasty to the other team and their own teammates.
I get it. You played in high school. Or maybe you didn't and you're trying to recapture your lost youth. You gotta get that trophy...even though there aren't trophies and the only people that know you win are your teammates and the other teams in that league. But sports are serious business.
No, really. I love playing sports and I want to win. I play with a serious demeanor and I play like I'm going to be buying my teammates drinks afterward. In high school, I made not one, but two teenage girls cry because they were cheating at golf and they were disqualified because I ratted them out.
But one thing I don't do is be a poor sport. The other is cheat. I'm honest to a fault if, for instance, I touch a ball before it goes out of bounds and I do not razz my teammates OR the other team.
Recently, I joined a volleyball team. I didn't want to play volleyball. I wanted to play softball. Softball is intense in short bursts then there is a lot of standing or sitting around. It's fun and people usually don't get hurt; in fact they make the rules such that you get penalized for doing dangerous things like running through a basemen. Sadly, there no one contacted me as a free agent for that sport. But I digress.
The volleyball team has a few players that were on the ringer game I played for softball. I could tell then these people were competitive. Scratch that, hyper-competitive.
The kind of competitive that ends in a teammate refusing to play because another teammate yelled at him after he made an error. And our team hadn't even made that many errors that night so it was bound to happen statistically. Fast forward to volleyball. I sat out the first part of the game. The ball whizzed back and forth and just watching was somewhat overwhelming. As our team flailed significantly to score, the intensity of the angst among the hyper-competitive rose sharply.
And then I got put in.
My first time on front row and the dude next to me about runs into me trying to hit even though it was clearly in my position and not to mention stupid gender rules require a girl to hit it after a guy. A guy had just hit it. We played poorly, but more so we played way more aggressive to our own teammates than we need to be. People kept saying "pay attention" if I didn't immediately rotate. I'm sorry, do I look like I want to be yelled at by another adult? To answer in case it is obtuse: no, I do not.
Afterwards we were standing around and discussing practices. He reminded everyone that we never had had a full practice as a team.What the hell, pardon my french? This is an adult league that plays once a week for twenty minutes at best. I have a life outside of volleyball and a training schedule (yes I have a personal trainer) I don't really want to practice and take up another evening with this anxiety and getting yelled at for making mistakes.
On a personal note: the white women on my team are a bunch of clique-y biatches. I single out them being white because they remind me of stereotypical sorority girls. The other ladies are awesome. They are friendly and not ridiculously competitive. This chick, who I feel is making up for her misgivings by being a complete wanker to people, afterwards kept mentioning she smelled a smell (what's that smell? It smells gross.) and walking away from me and glancing at me while she was saying it. Actually, it was someone who brought BBQ chicken into the bleachers by the court and it smelled like vinegar. I know I smell, but that, my dear, was not me. So *raspberry sound* jog on, as Ed says in Shaun of the Dead.
I likely will not choose to play with these team again unless I cannot find anyone else. Playing is better than not and I can make the best of jackasses by just not caring what they think. I just hope next practice (uggggg) is better than our game.
