Friends with Football

As a swimmer the world of football was foreign to me until two months ago. As a sports writer I have pushed to learn all I can surrounding America’s sport. All that field goals, two-point conversions and cornerbacks do. Forgive me if my lingo is still amateur as I have yet to finish “Football for Dummies”. No shame. Until this fall, I classified watching football as something punishing, unrewarding, and above all, confusing.

At this point people will be laughing for one of two reasons; one being my butchering of football lingo. Two being that Lauren has bashed football for the past sixteen years. But, I immerse as a new, informed, cultured American that sees the beauty of the sport that owns a night of the week.

After volunteering to cover a football game for our school’s paper, little did I know how little I knew. Minutes after arriving at the game I was overwhelmed on the sideline by tackles, cheering, angry shouts, happy chants, and vocal parents. I clenched my Football for Dummies book and prayed for a win. Win’s are easy; everyone wants to talk to you for an interview and the high spirits help ease the pain of writing until midnight on a Friday night. Of course, they lost.

I wrote the subpar article and received some slack for its deficiencies. But from that night on, I began to appreciate the sport. I began to cheer for teams rather than just mascots and colors. I began to look forward to college football saturdays. I picked a team and followed its successes and successors (go cards). Above all, going to friday night football games I had a new sense of pride for the greatness that shined beneath them.

Before, I only compared the football team’s record to that of the swim team’s purely out of experience. Soon enough I was educated about the competitiveness existing in the football region that was barely existent in that of the swim. Following our swim team’s second place finish at the 2016 Ohio State Swimming and Diving Championships, I was in awe that the football team put such an emphasis on the GMC/league title. But football is not swimming.

Football takes a team to advance to the next level where only 8/30 in the region clinch a playoff spot. In swimming, individuals excel and from there the team benefits. So it would be like seven, maybe eight members of the football team qualifying for a “playoff team”.

The two sport’s seasons cannot be compared because of the nature of the state tournaments and for that reason I offer my sincere congratulations to team 55 because they did something that no Mason football has ever done before; win a playoff game.