Category: Uncategorized (Page 5 of 34)

Five panelists for a freshman Orientation presentation found themselves crowded around a smartphone in a compact wing of a stuffy auditorium. The mental health counselor, enrollment advisor, disability services specialist, assistant dean and technology coordinator weren’t reviewing notes or checking email.

They were watching soccer.

With Germany’s 1-0 win over Argentina on Sunday, the World Cup has come to a close, and one of the most united sports experiences I can remember concluded.

No, I wasn’t in Brazil. I was in Massachusetts the entire time. But for one of the first times in my sports fan life, most of the people in my life were all invested in the same event. We may not have all been cheering for the same team, but we were all concerned with the same event.

Unlike the Olympics, it was a lone sport we were focused on: soccer. Games weren’t tape delayed or live in the middle of the night. There was one sport to pay attention to, and not several to divide our time amongst. That lone sport was one that almost every single person has played – either in our yards, in gym class or in youth leagues. Soccer is a gateway sport, one of the easiest to learn in the earliest years of our youth. There’s no jumps or judging, and it’s not a sport that you might partake in only certain parts of the country.

Unlike the Super Bowl, we had concrete rooting interests: most of us were rooting for the United States because we reside here, and if we weren’t, we were rooting for the nation of our parents’, grandparents’ or great-grandparents’ birth. Sure, growing up in Western New York around a certain four 1990s Super Bowls, many of us shared a rooting interest in the Buffalo Bills, but then you always had those outliers who didn’t like football or had decided they liked the Dallas Cowboys just to be contrary (but then couldn’t tell you who Emmitt Smith was.)

We could all easily be fans of the World Cup, and so many were. My colleague stood there with his smart phone during the United States’s June 26th 1-0 loss to Germany, and we were all huddled around it in the auditorium wing, swapping out spots as each of us went on stage to give our presentations. These were colleagues I never see at hockey games, ones that had never seemed that concerned with the Super Bowl or World Series parties we had put on for students, ones that never spoke about sports at all. Nevertheless, we were all invested in the outcome of this game.

There were the contrary amongst us (the Dallas Cowboys fans of my earlier example, if you will,) but their tune was increasingly tone-deaf. Calling a sport boring when bars were filled with cheering, groaning and hand-wringing observers? Waving off soccer as the domain of the “rest of the world” when we’ve never been more connected as a planet thanks to shared economies and technology? Building columns and hours of radio based on your dislike of a sport never felt more out-of-touch.

The outliers did have one correct point: even with the World Cup’s mass popularity, soccer has a few miles to go before it gets a vast amount of media coverage and fandom in the United States. But the perfect storm of this World Cup – where watching and following games became a truly “social” social media experience, where kids out on summer break could easily watch a game on a channel most Americans have access to and then run outside and emulate what they saw – propelled that popularity forward significantly.

And what else propelled that forward? That being unified in the following of the World Cup was fun. Standing shoulder to shoulder, watching a smartphone with my colleagues and silently rooting on the United States was fun. Cutting out of work a few minutes early to watch a game at the local bar was fun. Cheering on the same team was fun. I, a part-time sports writer, could enjoy a sporting event alongside someone who rarely follows any sport. It was unifying and enjoyable.

It was what sports are supposed to be.

When a colleague asks how you’re remaining so calm after losing your engagement ring, and you respond, “Because it’s not the worst thing that has happened in the last 24 hours,” you know it’s been a bad stretch.

The month of January has left me defeated. My Grandmother passed away days after my 32nd birthday, after I believed I’d have at least a few more months with her. I struggled with my most important relationship. I lost my engagement ring in the snow outside of Ristuccia Arena while trying to get cell service to post a score update during a BC High-St. John’s Prep hockey game. I lost one of my favorite writing jobs because of my own gosh-darn stupidity and belief I can do everything in the world in a mere 24 hours a day. I completely bombed an interview for a writing job that could have changed my life. I pulled all-nighters. I typed so much my fingers hurt. At my full-time job, I had many people question my decision-making and planning abilities, and people who said they would help with events never following through and then blaming me for their lack of success.

And on top of that, I continue to see people who I believe I have just as much talent as passing me by in the sports media realm.

I was tired, discouraged and had many times where I wanted to just stare into space and let woe overcome me. Sitting in my loveseat cradling a bag of generic Chex Mix and tons of beer looked like the most viable option.

But there was also great points that never would have happened if I let myself wallow. I covered the US Figure Skating Championships, something I’ve wanted to do since I was a VHS tape collecting, Blades On Ice subscribing, jump memorizing teenager. I met journalists I had always looked up to, and was able to prove to them that yes, this random girl who appeared in the mixed zone out of nowhere actually knew about figure skating. I had headlines on the back page and entire spreads in the Boston Herald. I had papers contacting me from all over to freelance when they found out I was at Nationals.

I problem solved in all lines of my jobs. A U.S. Senator came to an event I planned (don’t ask how that came about, because I’m not even sure.) I eulogized my Grandmother and didn’t sound like a bumbling idiot. I somehow kept my apartment clean. I stole an hour away here and there to hang out with two friends who have been so giving with their time and ears. And just yesterday, I snagged the Holy Grail of cell phone numbers of a most elusive interview subject and got him on the phone to talk for 25 minutes.

January was awful, but in another way, it wasn’t. It proved to me that I’m resilient. It proved to me that I have some big decisions to make, and I can’t keep putting them off. It gave me a chance to make peace with the fact that this might be as far as I get in sports writing. I realized I need to be a better friend. It taught me to stick up for myself, but to admit when I’ve made mistakes.

January could have been a lot worse.

In January 2002, a girl who is five-foot-one on a good day became enamored with college basketball.

I had just arrived at Binghamton University after transferring from Ithaca College after having some grand “life realization” that I didn’t belong in sports media, but in education. (Life realizations made at age 19 should probably be taken with a grain of salt, but try telling 19 year old me that.) I decided to transfer to a state school because I knew any education career path included graduate school, and thus I needed to make better decisions about where I spent my Federal Student Loan money.

Transferring to any school mid-year is a lonelier endeavor than sitting alone in a movie theater watching a film on its last day at the second-run dollar theatre. Fortunately, I had mastered being alone from years of being the sports obsessed geek at a performing arts high school. What was free that I could spend my time doing around campus?

Watching Division I basketball.

Despite my swearing that I had left the sports geek 48 miles down New York’s Route 79 and was no longer going to entertain myself watching games or reading Sports Illustrated, I found myself attending games by myself at Binghamton’s West Gym. It was January, so the Division I Bearcats men’s basketball team was firmly in the thick of their first season in America East, playing University of New Hampshire, University of Albany, University of Vermont and, a school that would end up being a giant part of my future, Boston University.

The other BU had not been on my radar for undergrad because of its distance away, nor had it been on my radar to transfer to. But that first time Boston U. visited Binghamton U. in 2002, I sat there on the wooden bleachers and blindingly bright florescent lighting of the West Gym and thought, “Huh, I totally forgot they existed, but maybe I should look into them when it comes time for grad school.”

A lot of those style of thoughts came to me during that winter of basketball because I never sat with other students in the bleachers. I was too shy. I sat by myself and got lost in the play. My knowledge of college basketball had been limited to whatever I saw Syracuse do growing up, having lived an hour west of the Orange. A lot of my sitting by myself was me trying to teach myself aspects of the game I didn’t know, combined with trying to convince myself to not to give into the loneliness, drop out of college, jump on the next bus out of the rundown Front Street Greyhound station home to Rochester and just become a preschool dance teacher.

Not your typical basketball game thinking.

It was while watching Nick Billings (The Alaskan Giant and therefore, the most recognizable guy on the Binghamton campus) and his fellow Bearcats that winter that I realized my time loving sports wasn’t over. Maybe that decision made at the rolling hills of Ithaca was made in haste. Even if I wasn’t going to work in it, I could still enjoy watching it.

I didn’t get to as many games as I wanted the next two seasons because of the two jobs I had during my junior and senior years, but I always followed the team. I made sure to go to that last regular season home game my senior year, one of the first events at the still-construction-dust filled Events Center: B U. versus BU. I had received my graduate school admission to Boston University just weeks before, and barring Harvard’s decision (which turned out to be no), was headed there in May. And I wrote about that game in my then less than a year old blog, which I had started because I realized while in Binghamton that not only was I not done watching sports, I wasn’t done writing about them either.

So to wake up this morning and have the BUs now officially split – Boston U. a member of the Patriot League and Binghamton U, left in America East – feels all sorts of uneasy. I work at Boston U. now, and I knew the school was thinking of jumping years before they actually did. I work and hang out with people who despise America East because of many reasons, some valid (the ruling Boston U. ineligible to participate in postseason play after they declared their intention to move to the Patriot League) and some less so (that Boston U. is “too good” to play with those “not as classy” SUNY schools. And yes, someone has said that to my face, of which I had to answer, “I went to one of those SUNY schools you speak of,” and watch their face turn 16 shades of red.)

My reasons for missing America East may be purely nostalgia filled, which may make them less valid for the money and “keeping up appearances” filled nature of college sports. But there was always a little bit of poetic justice in the idea of state schools like Binghamton, Stony Brook and Vermont being equals on with the monolith Boston University has become on some plane. My undergrad could play with the big boy schools where one year of tuition equaled cost the price of my entire undergraduate education – and they could sometimes win.

My current iPhone background is a photo I screen-captured from the Internet feed of the America East basketball tournament of the two BU flags next to each other for the last time. I’ll miss the days of seeing my undergraduate flag displayed at the campus I now work, or the video boards at the gym and arena misspelling Binghamton. They were always a reminder of the time I made it through the loneliness of a new adventure and realized that maybe I wasn’t done with sports – as a fan, and eventually, as a member of the media.