So, this being my first post, it seems I should contextualize my reasons for wanting to be in this class so that people can better understand the sports background that I come from. I have always loved sports, grew up in a sports family and always played sports. I played soccer, softball and ran track, and living in Minnesota, also loved and still love hockey. The sport I fell in love with was basketball and from first grade on I played all year round. During the summers I would go outside and shoot hundreds of freethrows and dribble around the block. I was captain through high school and just always loved the atmosphere that surrounded the game. The people who play basketball understand the atmosphere: the crowd, the uniforms, sitting on the bench, the huddle, the big games, the swoosh of a perfect shot, the game plan and your role as a player on any given team. I always have tried to observe and take in as much as that atmosphere as I can.
I am also a sociology major and love to observe different cultures and subcultures and how they work and their habits and traditions. Sports have some of the most fascinating subcultures to me and I wanted to further explore sports and the bigger mysteries of what they are and why people play them.
I am one of the managers of the women's basketball team here at NU and am really interested in the sociological aspects of sports and teams and why certain types of people like certain sports and what sports do for people in general. I would like to incorporate the world of sports into my career somehow and hope that this class will help me discover more.
1 comment:
One of the other blogs (Adam's - http://adamonfirst.blogspot.com/) quotes a French/American intellectual who once said "Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball". People have complained about why baseball should be so special, but I think it's true that sports show insight into hearts and minds, and that this is also about all of the "accessories" to sports performance - the smells, the space, the food, the sounds - not just the formal level of the game.
What's interesting to me, in following an international sport, is how different cultures will actually play the game differently and surround it with different rituals: watching a game of cricket in Sri Lanka is entirely different to watching it in Sydney. At the same time there's a common language...
Post a Comment