Veni, vidi, vici, city lights, Avicii
Get to it if it please me, nothing worth doing’s easy
-Glaive
It’s 2018. It’s 2022. It’s 2025. I’m an Ice Hawk. I’m a Bobcat. I’m a flamingo.
I’m alone.
I’ve always had a complicated relationship with sports.
Actually, that’s not true. There was a time when my relationship with sports was very simple— I hated them. From the ages 0-15ish, I was adamant that I wanted nothing to do with the athletic world. I vividly remember being frustrated with the expectation that as a boy, I was expected to enjoy sports. I never liked to fit in a box. When my mother made me do Tae Kwon Do in elementary school, I actually spent most of the time crying instead of learning.
But times change, and so did I. In high school, one of my friends was desperate for people to join the club hockey team, and I impulsively decided to join. I had done a brief stint as a figure skater in elementary school, and had maintained adequate skill as a skater. My experience with the high school hockey team(s) was transformative, completely changing my mind on the process of being a part of a sports team despite my continued lack of skill and inability to connect with my teammates.
In college, I decided to join club rugby to keep myself busy while I waited for the hockey season to start. Things did not exactly go to plan, and I found myself embedded into my freshman year of rugby and absent from hockey, despite the fact that I was somehow even worse at rugby then I was at hockey.
(Fun fact: to this day I’ve never scored a try. Even in practice. Yes, seriously.)
I wasn’t exactly one of the guys, but my fellow rookies were fun to be around. Well, except for this one dude, a young man who the team was desperately trying to recruit because he was huge. I had gone to every single rugby event that year and I was hopelessly jealous of Big John because I knew that the moment he stepped onto the pitch, he’d be better than me, despite my months of practice.
(He was, by the way. He knocked me clean off my feet day 1.)
But still, Year One of rugby was a net positive. I was having fun. I was involved. It seemed like a good thing.
I’d love to say that Covid was the thing that derailed everything. But the truth is, even before March 2020, I’d started losing my spark. Deteriorating mental health was isolating me from the team, and soon enough, I was drifting away from the group. THEN Covid hit, and everything went to Hell.
Obviously, for about a year, we couldn’t do anything. When we got back and rugby resumed, everything was wrong.
My lack of rugby skill, combined with my social awkwardness and periodic absences due to my mental health put me in an extremely strange position with my peers. Things were very hot and cold.
One day, I was invited to a movie night, and lauded for my sarcastic remarks about A Clockwork Orange. I would never be invited back for another. Every time I had an idea for the club, it was rejected. I wanted to help… to matter, to be a part of things… but for whatever reason, it was never the right time to George or the others to implement anything I suggested or work with me on things that mattered to me.
It’s hard for me to reconcile the largely positive ways my rugby teammates interacted with me outside of rugby with the frustrating experience of being a club officer. It was so frustrating that my mental health would dip and I’d have to spend some time away. I also was falsely diagnosed with a heart murmur and forced to miss most of my senior season, adding further ammo to arguments against my Vice Presidential ideas. “We’re not trying to exclude you,” I was told. “We just decide stuff after practice and you’re not there.”
Except when I was there, I was just as invisible.
I turned to taking Polaroid photos at socials as a cheap party trick to feel relevant. If I couldn’t be a part of things, I could at least help immortalize things for everyone else. It worked, more or less. I became a sort of historian, documenting a world I couldn’t be a part of.
Again, my rugby teammates were not exactly dicks to me. Bilski drove me to the airport constantly. Andrew met up for lunch with me periodically. Several others trickled into my dorm for the periodic party.
But in the context of rugby and rugby club, I was frustratingly helpless.
I graduated from college feeling completely demoralized athletically. I harbor a lot of resentment and bitterness about how things shook out towards the end. It is what it is.
When I moved to Fort Collins this year, I tried to give rugby a fresh start. Unfortunately, by then/now, I was completely out of shape, even worse then I’d been in college, and isolated in a strange new place. Mental health reared its head, and I began to disappear from rugby once again despite my fervent desire to participate and be a part of something again.
The smallest things became excuses not to show up. I went for a run, logged it on Strava, and posted my time on my story, only to be DMed by one of my new teammates and told I’d have to drop my time to play with the others. It was a well-intended, friendly challenge, but it hit me like a punch to the gut, and I vanished once again.
So here’s where I’m at.
I love rugby. I love the culture, I love the people, I love the game. And at the end of the day, the only part of rugby I think I don’t like is me.
I’ll always blame myself for not having good enough ideas to be a part of the group, for not being charismatic or daring enough to chat with the others, for being so ineffective as an athlete.
But that’s who I am. And, as I often say… there is no shortcut. There is no magic reset button. I can’t just choose to be good at rugby, I have to choose to show up over and over again, to practice, to conditioning, to games, to everything. I have to give up on perfection. I have to accept that I’m a makeshift person, and I have to build my path as best as I can, regrets be damned.
Because its a cliche, but in the end, the only person holding me back is me. So maybe it’s time to commit to the tackle, grab onto the things that make me doubt myself, and drag them to the ground.
I can’t promise myself I’ll score a try, finally. But I can promise myself that I’ll try.