Intramural basketball isn’t for the faint of heart.
Wednesday night in the Sullivan Gym, I found this out first hand.
And while my fondest memories of intramurals from high school include goofy uniforms and shoddy officiating, my newly-acquired impressions are vastly different.
In the course of an hour and a half, my team managed to get dunked on, beaten by 100 points, and pull various muscles while playing on the ice-rink-like floor of the gym.
But, remarkably, the experience wasn’t wholly a negative one; though at times things did get quite testy.
During two games I was able to lose my cool and regain my composure; to out-right retire and then reinstate myself; to make a few new acquaintances while accruing a few foes.
Intramural sports, it occurred to me, are very real-life situations.
You’re put in a room with a bunch of people you don’t know and you’re asked to compete for something, but what exactly it is, you’re not really sure.
The competition gets heated, sometimes lopsided, and it’s unclear how the whole situation is going to play out. But, nonetheless, the game ensues.
In intramural basketball, you’re asked to call your own fouls; to officiate your own game; to take accountability for your actions.
And while this seems a little abstract, it’s really not.
I’m not going to say that intramurals are a microcosm of life, but they’re not far off.
They are, if nothing else, a forum for practicing how we should conduct ourselves on a day-to-day basis; a venue for learning how to win and lose with respect and dignity.
It would have been easy, amidst our obliteration, to pack up our things and leave – to cry foul.
But we didn’t.
And likewise, it would have been just as easy for the teams we played to take advantage of us – to run up the score, but instead, they did the right thing.
Last Wednesday night when my team of wanna-be basketball stars took the floor against a former captain of the USM team, a two year player for the Huskies and a former high school standout, the proverbial cards were stacked against us. But somehow, some way, it was fun.
Sometimes the competition of the real world becomes an abstraction, something way off in the distance that we hear the rumblings of but do not acknowledge.
By taking part in some sort of activity, be it intramural soccer, unicycling, riding horses or playing hockey, competition becomes real.
I didn’t realize this before I took part in the Sullivan Complex’s version of David versus Goliath (although Goliath decisively prevailed in this case).
I had forgotten a lot of what I knew about competition – and cardiovascular health, for that matter.
It is important for all of us to find time between jobs, schoolwork and other obligations to stay active in competition and sport – because intramural basketball isn’t for the faint of heart, and neither, for that matter, is life.