Annotation 1

The east field on the student recreation center is home to intramural football games on Monday to Thursday nights.  From the perspective of a former athlete this is the closest representation of team that is present in or around the recreation center.  Sitting out there watching the games or even playing in them it made me think that the four year high school sport career that I had ended way too quickly.  Watching the games triggers memories about all the games that my teammates and I played in and how we can not those moments back.  The family environment that we all had with each other is no longer as strong as it once was because we all went our separate ways.  As stated in the news article written by Edward Schauder "after the players have gone their separate ways they seldom have a chance to interact with each other" (Schauder 1).  The team is what made sports so memorable and that is what I observe, being a former athlete, that the rec center lacks.  Now I know it is hard for a group of random people who are playing on a team together to bring together a sense of family, or what Warner and Dixon from East Carolina University and The University of Texas at Austin call a ""sense of community"" (Warner Dixon 1).  But there are ways to bring about that sense of team and community simply by getting to know the guys that are on the team.  Just playing together once a week does not fit the bill of being a team; there needs to be more chemistry built between the players.   A solution that I saw while at the fields multiple times are teams going out with each other after their games, other teams running mini practices with each other before their games, and then teams having meetings after their games.  All of these tactics do work to bring a team together but it still does not have the same affect that a four-year bond once had for a group of people throughout high school.

 Teams Warming up for an intramural game [Jackson Harley]