How putting community ahead of competition revitalises sport – Alice Soper

Year 7 and 8 students from St Kentigern Girls' School play at the College Rifles Rugby Club on Friday, November 13, 2020. Photo / Photosport

It was in my early 20s that a lot of my friends took up sport for the first time. At school, they had been drama kids, music kids and so loathed our PE lessons with fervour. While they thought what I did was cool, they honestly didn’t really understand it. Why would you give up your holidays and weekends to chase a ball around?

When they found their way into sport, it was through social alternatives. The likes of indoor netball and football, offering reliable all-weather activity in our windswept town. The exercise was a welcome break to the monotony of the workdays. It locked in a weekly appointment with friends in their increasingly busy schedules. But above all, it was fun. A word they had never associated with sport before.

Their way in was social but it was still very much sport. These born-again competitors would tell me all about their rival teams, the dodgy umpire calls and player rotation strategies, their eyes alight as they shared their joy their new hobby brought them. However, their ambitions were to play, not win. With no thought of a high-performance ladder to climb, the sign of success was holding a team together. Week on week, season on season. Retention, not ascension, was the ultimate goal.

In many ways, their later-in-life discovery reflected my own early experiences with sport. The moments that founded my love of the game. My junior years put a heavy emphasis on participation, much to the frustration of some overly eager parents. A naturally gifted individual, I had to be taught about the power of the collective, to learn what it meant to be a part of a team. Of all the sporting success I would go on to achieve, it was the trophy I received for being a good team player that my mum was most proud of.

That both my friends and I had lost sight of the fun of sports in our teen years isn’t surprising. Even my high school, which wasn’t known for sporting prowess, couldn’t escape the heating-up of competition. This was amplified by social pressures dictating that it was cool to be good at something but not to be seen to try. We could only publicly engage with things we already had some level of mastery over. So while some of us rose up the ranks, more still fell out of contention.

From here I no longer played sports but competed. I chased championships and higher honours. I practised skills alone for countless hours to deliver for my team. I developed, I travelled and my relationship with sport fundamentally changed. The social element was now incidental, the happy accident of a room assignment or the mandated team-bonding activity. I still loved sport but some of the magic was missing.

I hung up my boots a couple of years ago, but recently I’ve felt the old pull. Not to glory but to fun. I would like to play again, with heavy emphasis on the alternate meaning of that word. To take part in a regular group activity and not have to aspire to anything beyond connection. I relish the idea of not having to be good to have a good time. It’s the community, not the competition, that I miss.

It may be the less visible part of sport and yet it’s the one most of us engage with: thousands of adults around the country each week just playing with their mates. It’s what I loved as a kid and my friends found in their 20s. The magic of social sport, for all who want to play.