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Carlos Owens Rebecca Agosta ENG. 1101 11/09/13 ITS FOOTBALL TIME!!!! The bright lights on Friday nights, the rumbling of the stadium and the fans cheering, the sound of pads running into each other; the excitement runs high for a good old game of football. Probably the most popular sport in America today, football has such a large following here in America that it has grown popularity in other countries; like England for example. Every football fan has, does, or wishes that they could play the sport, like every other sports fan. I guess our violent nature as humans is why we love seeing people hit each other for the purpose of scoring touchdowns or stopping the other team from doing it. I am guilty of all of the above because I love everything about football, even the physical contact, and I do not like losing either. However, this paper isnt about a high school football game, nor college or professional, this particular paper is about the Discourse Community of Intramural Flag Football and the connection that we all share. Yes I said the Intramural Flag Football community here at UNCC, its not as flashy, physical, or loved as the sport of football that it is based off of, but it is the next best thing because not everybody can have an officiated football game. Honestly I would rather prefer the backyard football games over flag football but that is what I have right now so I will deal with it because it is still football, just less physical. I can go out and enjoy myself and satisfy the football fever that runs through my veins at this time of year because everything around me screams football so that is good enough for me. My playing style of football would classify me

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as a bruiser, which is someone who runs through contact to produce as an offensive player. Because of that I cant really play football my way when playing flag football because Bruisers like to run through people in feats of strength and the good old theory of the player that has the lower center of gravity almost always wins the head to head battle. First off let me say that it is really hard for me to sit back and watch football for two hours straight so my observations were spread out between the times before, during, and after my games when I wasnt really doing anything but watching the game. From my scattered observations of watching the Flag Football Community, I can see what teams are very professional and well prepared for their games because they practiced a lot and run plays together on the field and work together like a well-oiled machine, which can lead to success over other teams that showed no symmetry with each other and turned out to be a hot mess on the field. Sad for me to say but the latter description is what I have seen from both of my all mens and co-recreational (male and female) teams havent had much time to work on practice with each other because of conflicts with schedules or never getting to play our games because of the other team forfeiting games or our team being forced to forfeit a game. Forfeited games are very frustrating for me because I am there on the field and ready to go and the other team not having enough players will leave me angry for the rest of that day. If I combined the schedules of my mens and co-rec teams then we would have had a total of eight games played thus far but only three of them have been played because of forfeits which has led to us being very inexperienced as a team because we havent had the time to play with each other and get some kind of symmetry. I can kind of do all of the positions and/or necessities for football like blocking; to protect the quarterback (the player who throws the ball) or for other teammates that are running with the

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ball trying to score. I can catch about ninety percent of passes that are thrown within my reach, and I dont have getaway speed to simply outrun my defender so I have grown to improvise by making quick cuts to create separation from them. Cuts, as a football term, are when you dig your foot in the ground and make a sharp change of direction that can create space to get open enough to get passed the ball. That being said, my skills when it comes to flag football are limited because of my speed, height, and not being able to use my bruiser trait. Now the season is over for flag football and we are moving on to the playoffs for the mens divisions and the co-rec divisions. The co-rec team turned out to be a disaster this year because of us not having enough girls that were committed to playing. From my experience with playing intramural sports here at UNCC, I have learned that girls here tend to forget about the games and make other plans for that time that they wont change to play in the game, so they end up leaving their teammates hanging out to dry. It also hurts them more when it is a game where they need that girl to play in order to keep the team from having to forfeit the game because of not having enough girls on the team at the start of the game. I am mentioning this because this exact incident happened to our team last week when our last two games were back to back on a Wednesday and I sent out a message to all of my teammates to remind them about the game that night. My team was already limited with the number of girls on our team because one girl decided she wasnt going to play any of the games and then another got sick and wouldnt play because of it, so that left us with just three girls left on the roster that were going to be available for those games. But one of my female teammates texted me back saying that she had completely forgotten about the games and said that she was sorry but couldnt back out of her plans for that night which left us with only two girls that couldve made it to the games so we had to forfeit both games. With both of those forfeits, our team record dropped to 2-4 and our sportsmanship

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grade, which we needed a 3.5 in it to make the playoffs, dropped to a 2.5 so our co-rec flag football team was just a disaster all season and the forfeits at the end dropped us out of the playoffs. I interviewed a friend of our team, Robert, about what he saw when watching us play together. Robert is one of those people that grew up around sports so I figured there was no one that was better for this interview that wasnt a member of either team than him. When combining the mens and co-rec schedules, we played in only three out of eleven scheduled games so we didnt have much experience to bring up during the interview. Our team was not very organized because of lack of experience from not practicing enough and not getting to play our games (because apparently people dont take flag football serious enough to show up at their games). The majority of our male players knew what they were doing when it came to football because some of them were former high school football players who knew more about the game than I did, and I was the captain of the team. Our female players on the other hand, needed so much coaching from the rest of us, except for one of them because she played a lot of sports. It was like teaching children how to play football because all they knew were throwing and catching pretty much, and they did have trouble catching simple passes. From what I have seen this season, the main reason for all of the forfeits in the co-rec division revolves around the female players not showing up because they have other priorities that they needed, or just wanted, to do instead of showing up for the games said Robert.

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Works Cited Bryant, Robert. Personal Interview.18 Nov 2013