I graduated from High School a little over five years ago. My year had over 250 students enrolled, and while I did not get along with a select few of them, the majority of the people in my year I got along with fairly well.
Flash forward five years, and I am only in touch with about 7 people from my School on a week-to-week basis (and one of them is my Fiancée).
These are the friends I’ve grown even closer with since High School, and the memories and experiences I have shared with these friends are a large part of who I am as a person today.
How have we managed to keep in touch while studying different fields, pursuing different careers, and ultimately living our own lives?
The answer: we started a Basketball team!!
This is the first of five reasons why I would recommend men and women of all ages start playing a team sport. It is social! (That is our team on the left).
Whether it be Football (soccer for those who wish to call it that), Basketball, Hockey, Cricket, American Football, Lacrosse, Netball or even Volleyball! Participating in an organised team sport will help you keep in touch with your friends. It doesn’t matter if its competitive, semi-professional or even a social competition! Playing a team sport allows a couple of hours a week for you to gather with your buddies and enjoy yourselves.
Before I get into the second reason, I want to elaborate on this. My team and I play in a social amateur competition at our local sports centre. We play every Monday evening. This is pretty much the only time in our busy schedules that we have to catch up. Some of us work long hours, some of us are in relationships, some of us are studying or working hard to save for a down-payment on a house. Basically, as you get older, your lives begin to move in different directions. We are all beginning to travel down our own paths. The fact of the matter is that playing basketball together has allowed us all to remain in touch with one another, and maintain the friendships that we have developed growing up.
Now I know some of you are reading this and thinking “I can’t freaking stand the people I went to High School with Luke! Why would I want to keep in touch with them?!” Granted, you may not have any desire to keep in touch with high school friends. However, you may have old College friends, old room-mates, ex-colleagues that are now your friends. What I am getting at is, even if you see these friends a lot more often than in my example, playing in a team sport will only create another way for you to bond, and will ultimately strengthen your friendship.
Moving on to reason number two : It is exercise!
Some people I talk to complain that they never have time to work out and exercise, or they never have time to catch up with the boys. I always suggest a team sport to these people. Kill two birds with one stone! Gather your buds, decide on a sport that you all share an interest in, and play! Before basketball, the same group of my friends and I participated in indoor-soccer tournaments. Then we switched to basketball. None of us had ever played basketball before. In our first game, I have to be honest, I had never sweated so much in my life! (it would have helped burn off some of the entire pizza I ate the night before). I have played Football (Soccer) all my life as a left sided midfielder. For those of you who don’t know what that means, it means I have a decent amount of stamina, as I would be running non stop from end to end. But basketball had a different class of intensity to it that I had never experienced before. Each team sport requires a different category of fitness or toughness. As we played more I noticed my energy levels went up, I was feeling better about myself, and I felt healthier as a result.
You won’t only be keeping your friendships healthy, you’ll be keeping your body healthy too!
The third reason is a bit less obvious than the first two reasons. As I mentioned already, we all shared a common interest in Basketball. However we had never played before. We started our team and had kits made. We called ourselves “The Blouses” (anyone who watches “The Chappelle Show” will appreciate our team name). We registered for the local competition and in that first season, we sucked! We lost all 14 games we played. Doesn’t sound too fun, does it?
A lot of people tend to lose interest in a sport (or pursuing a goal) when they obtain little to no results. My friends and I, on the other hand, stuck with it, started practising a bit more, and in the second and third seasons, we made the play-off’s and narrowly missed out on getting to the championship game. In our fourth season, we went 14-1 and won the championship game! And this is the third reason that I believe everyone should play a team sport: character building! Playing a team sport teaches you to persevere and not give up on your goals! When the heat is on, stay in the kitchen!
We could have easily blown up and said “Man, screw this game! I don’t wanna play anymore! Losing sucks!”. But we were still having fun, and we knew we could get better at it if we didn’t give up on it. Going from a team that couldn’t buy a win, to a championship winning team in a little over two years is a pretty impressive achievement. And it would never have happened if we gave up at the first hurdle! Not to mention that it felt GREAT!!!! This is our team photo after the championship game, we were all so psyched and satisfied with ourselves, because we achieved something that seemed impossible two years earlier.
On to the fourth reason: the importance of teamwork!
Whether you are hosting a family Barbecue, playing in a team sport, or completing a project at work, you need to work as a team with the people around you to make your project a success. I do not believe there is a better way to learn teamwork first hand than to play a team sport. I’ll take you all back to my basketball team. One of the main reasons we were so bad in our first season was we would literally dribble the ball up, make maybe on pass, and whoever received the pass would shoot from wherever they were on the court. Often we were failing to work as a team to get the ball into an area where we could make an easier shot. We were playing as individuals, not as a team.
Flash forward to the championship game, and we won 35-28. About three or four of our players recorded multiple assists, we defended well as a unit, shared the scoring around, and we were able to work better as a team than our opposition (and the majority of their players were taller and bigger than we were). At times we didn’t even have to communicate verbally. We all knew our roles, when to move, where to move, when to pass, where to pass, and we worked together very fluently without having to instruct one another. That comparison from this game to our first season demonstrates how we learned to work together on the court. Teamwork is a massive part of playing a team sport! You simply cannot succeed in these games if you’re greedy, or not a “team player!”
Moving on to the final and probably the most important reason: it is so much fun!!!!
While myself and my team are far from being able to dunk like LeBron or break ankles with a mean crossover like Uncle Drew, we still enjoy ourselves and have an absolute blast!
There you have it! Five reasons why everybody should play a team sport. Men, women, even your kids. Get involved in team sports, and you will develop skills that will serve you for the rest of your life!!!
Life As Luke Knows It 
This is a great post and very inspirational 🙂 I think playing team sports and working out with your friends is great as you make time to see each other and you also motivate each other to work hard (if exercise and health is what you are aiming to achieve)! Loved this and it is very well written xx 😀