When Varsity Sports Just Aren't Worth Your Time

Have you ever felt like sports at your university were taken a little bit too seriously? This was one of my first thoughts after I finished my second three hour tennis practice on the D3 Brandeis Tennis Team. Being a part of this team was one of my most short lived college experiences. However, despite my complete disgust with the way this particular varsity team was coached, I did manage to learn an important lesson from my brief experience with Brandeis Tennis.

As you may guess from the previous paragraph, I really did not like the tennis coach. Although he was very nice off the court, he did not have a sufficient knowledge of how to prevent common tennis injuries or how to build team unity. He was twenty five; merely a child. You could see his immaturity when he would say things like "WHAT THE f#@K ARE YOU DOING?!?!" almost every time a player missed an easy shot. In addition to his slight anger problem, the coach was not sensitive to the team's needs and desires. Since it was a D3 team (which means no one was getting any scholarship money for playing tennis) no one wanted to be out there practicing 2-3 hours a day 6 days a week practicing, let alone at 6 am... The result of my coaches mistakes were predictable; a very disgruntled team that was not enjoying the sport.

However, our captain was a pretty nice guy, and attempted to make one effort to build team bonding. On a Thursday evening in early October I received an email providing details for a men's and women's tennis team beer pong tournament. Little did I know that this little team get-together would turn out to be quite the interesting Friday night...

I arrived at a slightly broken down looking house with two other freshman promptly at 9:30 pm; the time that was mentioned in the email. We were greeted in a friendly yet soft spoken manner by the captain, who hurried us into the living room. Upon sitting down on a very unpleasantly colored green couch I immediately noticed two very strange aspects of our tennis team: Firstly, our assistant captain was there, drinking with us... (I don't think I need to explain any further as to why a freshman may find this strange) Secondly, I finally realized that the reasons none of the 6 seniors on the squad of 11 that made up Brandeis tennis were such good friends; they were all in the same frat.

After sitting awkwardly around the large screen TV for a few minutes, the captain decided to tap the keg and begin playing beer pong. At this point all eight or so of us moved into the small kitchen and began throwing white balls at red cups (a very usual college pastime). No one was speaking much. The frat brothers were making small talk with each other, while the freshmen were trying extremely hard to fit in. I did the socially awkward thing and stood in the corner, pretending to take some interest in what was going on around me. I was not very happy, standing around with a team that I spent roughly half my free time with, yet unable to make conversation with any of them. It was at that moment I decided that Brandeis Tennis was not for me.

Anyway! As far as a moral of the story goes it has to be this: If you are not having fun on a D3, or even D1 sports team for that matter, DON'T KEEP DOING IT! You only get to go to college once, and I think that you owe it to yourself to try and maximize the amount of fun you can have during this four year period of life.