Why do I play sports?

Sport is an essential part of Australian culture. Rachael Holland explains why she loves running around on the grass with her team mates.

Everyone who knows me knows how much I love playing sport. I jump out of bed on a Monday, Wednesday or Thursday, whistling gleefully, ‘Oztag day today!’ I’m the first to offer to fill in for someone else’s team and the first to start organising a team for the next tournament or gala day. I’ll spend my afternoon strategising about whether there is any way I can play Oztag at Wenthworth Park at six o’clock and still make it to Daceyville for a seven o’clock game of touch. (The answer is yes, provided I run from the field right on the final hooter, change my jersey at the traffic lights on the way and be given some grace for being a few minutes late to game number two).

Why do I love playing sports so much? Sure, I love how it feels. I love the feel of a pass that comes perfectly out of my hands, spinning on its axis into the hands of a player running into the gap. I love scooping up the ball downfield after a long kick, picking up speed as I curve my hips outwards, hoping to step one, maybe two players. I love standing my ground as muscular thighs come charging towards me, the satisfying rip of Velcro stopping them in their tracks.

But it’s more than just that. I love the fact that on the sports field, for those forty minutes, everything else about me disappears. On the sports field I am not my job, my age, my world view or my future plans. And neither is anyone else.

Social sports teams are often a mishmash of people pulled together from here and there. There’s some guy a friend went to school with, some woman that he works with, someone’s dad who really needs to be getting out of the house more often. I’ve played whole seasons with people without even knowing what they do with the rest of their week.  Because when we’re playing sports the socially obligatory questions of ‘who are you?’, ‘what do you do?’ and ‘what have you done?’ are bypassed. Or at least they are asked politely then quickly forgotten.

We’re all just there, for forty, sixty or eighty minutes, to run around on the grass, ball in hand, on bat or on foot, calling to our team mates. We become the playful, childlike versions of ourselves, stripped of everything else we otherwise do. We are our personalities and our senses of humour instead of all the other stuff we think makes us who we are. And that is very freeing.