Why I Play Indoor Soccer Ten seasons. Ten. Ten seasons of playing indoor soccer, every Tuesday night, almost every week of the year. Ten seasons doesn't mean ten years though - each season is a maximum of 17 weeks, so it works out to about 3 seasons a year. Which means I've been playing for three and a bit years. It never ends, it never ends.

The funny thing is I haven't gotten tired of it. Nor have the rest of the players in the team. It seems like we've all just accepted that for the time being indoor soccer will be a regular part of our lives. I imagine this may change as we all start to become fathers (yes, only blokes on the team).

I have started to think about why I play though - trying to understand what enjoyment I get from it.

At the most basic level I enjoy the physical activity. When you're a child you run all the time. At school, at home, with friends, in class, during recess and lunch. There's all this excess energy and you just have to burn it off. Then of course in high school you only run in Phys. Ed. class - running isn't cool anymore. But you still run.

But then (unless you play a sport or you've picked up the habit of regular exercise) you stop running. There just isn't a place for it in your life anymore. You can't run at work, you drive everywhere. And even if you exercise regularly, you probably don't ever reach that speed - the flat-out run-as-fast-as-you-can speed that small children hit every day. Even people who are running to catch the tram or bus won't hit top speed for fear of looking ridiculous.

So indoor soccer is the only time I get to run flat-out. When the other team is attacking and the man with the ball has run past you have to turn and run as hard as you can to catch him before he shoots for goal. And when you get there your momentum might be such that the only thing you can do is mow him down.

Which brings me to the other less pleasant reason why I play. I get quite a buzz when I've charged across the court to intercept a player with the ball who's running down the wing and ended up smacking the ball out of play and sending the player crashing to the floor. There's something incredibly exhilarating in hard physical contact. I don't mean punching someone, but two people contesting possession of the ball, and in the contest crashing into each other. By the way this is illegal in all forms of soccer - it's not supposed to be a physical contact game. And if the player you are contesting against isn't expecting physical contact they can get quite irate.

(The trick there is to make sure you actually get your foot to the ball so that the ref can't possibly give a foul against you, and that inevitably means the player will get turn their anger to the ref.)

Of course the best part of the game is scoring a goal, which is something I tend not to do.

Running hard, hitting people, scoring goals. I think that sums it all up really - there are a whole lot of other reasons why I enjoy it, but they're all related to these three.

  ¶ 2:09 PM