From the Gridiron to the Pitch: My Life with Soccer

Soccer has been a foreign concept to me for most of my life. As a child my father always told me that soccer was a game for “lawn fairies” and that the real sports to play was the big American three: football, basketball, and baseball. Yet, as a kid, you do what your friends do and in my small home town in Wisconsin that was to play soccer.

I was in elementary school when I first started to play. I don’t remember much, just that it was fun running around with my friends, trying to kick the ball as hard as I could. I was (and sadly still am) a toe blast champ. But once middle school rolled around soccer became less about how long yo

u could run for and more about the finesse of your foot skills, which I never acquired. Anyways, middle school also opened the door to tackle football, so who cared about soccer?

That was my thought, that is, until the end of high school. There I started getting quite close to a German exchange student. She was a huge

Bayern Munich fan and watched and kept up with them on a regular basis. So, for obvious reasons, I started watching the soccer games and they were actually a little more exciting than I thought they were going to be. Schweinsteiger still is my favorite international player. Yet, like most high school romances, things don’t last long and then there was no reason for me to watch anymore.

Little did I know what Macalester had in store for me.

I was paired up my freshman year with a guy that was recruited to play soccer for Mac. I was going to be playing football; he was going to be playing futbol. Our room could have been the perfect set for a television sitcom. Suddenly though, through massive amounts of exposure to FIFA and high attendance to the Mac soccer games, I found myself fascinated by the sport that was sweeping the nation. I was learning the lingo, following the teams, and actually interested in the sport I moved away from.

I’ve learned through these experiences and my view on soccer has completely flipped. Soccer has turned out to be a blast to play. I get pumped to go out and play indoor; kicking a ball around is wonderfully simplistic and because of that it’s pure fun. Though there may not be as much physical brutality in soccer as there is in football, I would not like to be on the receiving end of bad slide tackle. And though being in football may make me stronger, I could never have the endurance of my roommates.

Soccer is a great game that is just fun. No helmets, no pads, no mitts or bats. Just one ball and you have a hell of time.