My Experience as the Bench Warmer

There I was, on that hot summer day, sitting back, slowly taking in the last vestige of freedom, with pre-school dread already starting to take hold. I hadn’t checked my school email since the end of last semester, as I didn’t want class notifications to bring on stress before it was necessary. Reluctantly, I logged in and, thankfully, only saw an email from the Athletics Department inviting students interested in trying out for a sport to fill out a form, after which someone from the department would get in touch. Usually, these are the kinds of emails I quickly open and then close. But something about this one was different. 

I played soccer and chess in high school, so I knew what it was like to be on a team, but for some reason, I never considered joining a sports team at YU. I sat there, thinking back to my time in high school and remembering all the good and bad memories of being on the soccer and chess teams. The cheers. The excitement. The nervousness. The anguish. The commitment. 

However, as my momentary flashbacks faded, the one thing that remained in my mind was all the incredible people I got to know when I joined those teams years ago. That did it for me. I eagerly submitted the form and quickly heard back from the head coach, adding me to the team’s tryout list. 

There were many things I didn’t anticipate when I signed up for the team. For starters (pun intended), I didn’t realize tryouts and the preseason practice schedule started a full two weeks before the semester! While I hadn’t played soccer in over four years and I knew I was rusty, which is something I explained to the coach, I figured it wouldn’t be hard to regain my skills from high school. I barely exercised over the summer, and running was not something I enjoyed too much. That was actually one of my biggest motivations for joining the team: to get back into shape. 

One of the other main obstacles was the colossal amount of forms, documents, tests and medical examinations required to just participate in a practice, let alone join the team. I wasn’t deterred. I eventually got cleared, and fortunately, over the next two weeks of brutal preseason practice twice a day, every day, I made the roster. 

I only knew one person on the team from before, and after looking around at the tryouts, it dawned on me that I, as an American, would be in the minority, not only in terms of nationality, but in terms of religiosity as well. I didn’t speak Spanish, so I already felt excluded from around 90 percent of the team’s conversations when hanging around the locker room or sitting on the bus. Fortunately, I learned Hebrew from my time in the IDF, so I was able to hang with the Israelis on the team. The interesting thing I learned is that a lot of these guys came to YU specifically to play soccer. Some guys on the team were in D1 schools previously, and some played semi-professional internationally. We had players from all over the world. During any given practice or game, you could routinely hear people yelling to each other in English, Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, French and Ndebele. 

My hopes of quickly getting back into my old soccer form went awry, and I didn’t play so well during my first month on the team. I showed commitment, but I was a bench player. I played when we were up by a lot or down by a lot, usually the latter. And it might sound crazy, but I was fine with that arrangement. I understood that the team is more important than I as an individual, so it made sense for me to be on the bench. As the season progressed and guys got busy, injured, or were unable to play because of red cards, my in-game playing minutes slowly crept up. I was constantly improving, and by our last game, I ended up playing for the full 45 minutes of the second half. 

I’m not going to lie and say that going to practice every single day, including Fridays and Sundays, was easy. When I found out there would be practice every day, I was nervous about how I would handle my classes and workload. Being a D3 student athlete is not easy. Games required us to miss plenty of classes, and the physical demands made us all sore and injured many of us. My non-athletic friends became all too familiar with my response of “No, I can’t make it to this event, we have soccer practice then…” to basically any activity scheduled for nighttime. The coaches and captains wanted us to feel as if we were on a professional team, but it also came at the cost of events I wanted to attend, such as the Oct. 7 memorial and the Jonathan Haidt event. I knew it would be hard, but I also knew that it was manageable and worth it. And I was right.

The short-lived soccer season is now over. Our games consisted of nail-biters, blowouts and often fighting against seemingly unfair calls from the referees. Ultimately, we didn’t make the playoffs, and we didn’t do as well as we thought we could. But that doesn’t matter. Over the course of the two-month season, I grew close to everyone on the team. I, once again, experienced losses, wins, disappointments, goals and celebrations. 

So why should you join a team at YU? Because you get a chance to represent your university in a way that makes you proud. Because being part of a team is healthy, and feeling a sense of camaraderie is unmatched. Because being held accountable for your fitness and having others rely on you instills a sense of ownership and maturity. YU is more than just an education; you can take part in teams, clubs, activities and events. In twenty years, when you look back on your college days, you won’t remember that random Tuesday night you spent sitting in the beit midrash learning. What you will remember are the adventures you go on, the memories you make with your friends, during practice when someone does something stupid and you all laugh about it; when you make a good play and it gets noticed by everyone on the team and the coaches give you a shoutout, and, if you’re lucky, the joy of winning a conference game.  

The friends you make because of the team are the ones you’ll remember long after college ends. I’m proud to say I have two new friends from Zimbabwe, of all places, and I would not have met them without soccer! How easy is it to go through YU, sitting around and doing nothing all day, other than attending class? What a waste. Whoever thought that these years are about passing classes as quickly and easily as possible had it all wrong. YU might not have the most successful, athletic or dominant sports teams, but that’s not why you do it. When you join a team, you take your college experience beyond the classroom. And that’s something you’ll never regret.

Photo caption: YU men’s soccer team members

Photo credit: YU Athletics