Saturday 11 October 2008

Day 8 - Let's play American Football!

A new day, a new adventure. Luckily I had no hangover in the morning, as today was the American Football taster day. It began at 1pm, but baring in mind where I live and where the training takes place, I would have to leave my flat at about 11:30am if I wanted to make it there on time (this is mainly to do with the traffic and unpredictable bus services in Leeds).
As I got to the front Uni steps I could tell who was there for American Football, as quite a few people were wearing their team jerseys. I myself was wearing my Bucs shirt (thank you Jack for buying it for me (L). I began speaking to a guy wearing a Patriots Brady shirt who said all his friends say he is a glory seeker for supporting them. Though his reason was that he just liked the team. There was also a guy wearing an Eagles Jersey (So you can be happy now Mike) and someone wearing a Dallas Cowboys shirt. Think it was T.O too (probably wasn’t just wanna annoy Mike). Anyway, most people reading this probably don’t know what I’m going on about as they don’t really care for American Football, if that’s the case I’d advise you to just stop reading here tbh, since this whole day is based around the sport.

As I arrived on the field, I got an unexpected phone call from Rob asking how I was doing. Wish I could have spoken to him longer, but training was just about to begin and I didn’t want to draw too much attention to myself on the first day so we had to keep it short and sweet. (For those that don’t know, which is probably all of you, Rob is going to York Uni, which is close to Leeds, so we’ll probably be seeing a lot of each other over the years). My first impression when I saw the other players was,
“….Oh shit”.
They were all either really fat, really fit looking (not in a gay way) or really muscular. Didn’t help most of them were wearing those skin tight shirts which are meant to cool you down when playing sports. However, we were all there to train, so I sucked up the courage and got over it.
First part was fine, just doing laps and stretches, then we split into what groups we wanted to be in. Seeing as the only real skill I have in American Football is speed (though as I later found out I seemed slow compared to some of the others) I went into the runnerback team. Got told by the coaches how even though the team is good, non of the QBs there can throw for shit, so they are a running based team and the runnerbacks are likely to get a lot of the glory, and to be targeted most of the time *whimpers*.
The next 2 hours consisted of doing different running drills and plays. I messed up about 60% of them, either fumbling the hand off or running the wrong route when the QB shouted them. I won’t bother explaining the codes words for the routes as it’d mean I’d have to then go on to explaining the rules and positions of American Football. And seeing as I got most of them wrong on the day, chances are I’d explain them wrong here too.
Needless to say, by the end of the day I was shattered. My legs ached the most having always used them and them having a rule that you are never allowed to walk on the field, always gotta jog or run. But still, was a fun training session. Unlikely I will join the team this year however as it’s just too inconvenient for me to get there and back 3-4 times a week. That, and after that day I found out I am not even that good at the sport at all, so don’t really wanna be training for a year only to be benched each game and never really get to play. Maybe next year.
After waiting about 30 minutes for a bus to arrive, I thought I’d be a gentleman and let everyone else get on before me (really they all pushed and shoved to the front but I was too knackered to care). After 5 minutes of people getting on.

“Single to Clarence Dock please”

“Sorry mate, Bus is full”

*people on bus* “Haha, gutted”.

¬_¬

Luckily this anger only lasted for about 15 seconds, as a 2nd bus came round the corner straight away. I got a whole one to myself and pointed and laughed at everyone else on the other bus as I went pass them as they were all packed together like carbon atoms in a diamond. Not too sure what I did that night as I’m writing this about 2 weeks after it happened, but ah well. The aching and pain for the training lasted about 4 days, THAT I can remember…

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