For certain sports, the differences between professional teams and college athletic programs may no longer seem apparent, if drawing that distinction still makes sense at all.
To illustrate this difference more fully, I think we can begin at the end of an informal spectrum of sports: the college club sport. The perspective of this kind of organization should help us to better understand what it is we demand from collegiate and professional sports. Rather than make broad generalizations about the University’s club sports, I will focus on one: the men’s club soccer team.
The Virginia men’s club soccer team exists as a contracted independent organization, which provides some monetary and formal benefits but also makes extending the life of the club more difficult because of a high turnover rate.
The 2008-09 season provides a good example. Before the season, president Michael Messer said, the team was not sure what to expect because the team’s roster was depleted; there were holes in the midfield to fill, and most of the players who did come back felt like the 2007-08 season was a “wake-up call,” in part because the team did not play as many games, treasurer Eric Scofield said. A coach, which the team lacks, could mitigate the effects of such uncertainty by providing stability, long-term planning and a constant and critical eye on the sideline.
A coach, whether from within or outside the University community, would also help counteract the club’s limited institutional memory; however, Messer and Scofield expressed hesitation at the suggestion of the idea.
Scofield said a coach would not necessarily fit with the club’s self-image, which seems to be very aware of its responsibility to itself. A coach would “require a large restructuring of how the club is set up, and how the [non-executive] members would interact with the team,” Scofield said, adding that a coach would be “someone we have to impress.”
Traditionally, the team’s president has acted as a combination of manager and coach, and the relationship between the president and the players can be more casual because they share the experience of being University students. Having a peer for a coach introduces an open atmosphere and a “camaraderie” that a coach would stifle, Scofield said. “It inspires people to work harder because we don’t have a coach,” Scofield said. “We don’t want to blame whatever performance we have on not having a coach. We take pride in accomplishing these things by ourselves. I think [not having a coach] has benefited us.”
For the 2008-09 season, Messer was an on-again, off-again player as he struggled through injuries. In part a testament to his commitment to the team, he took on many of the coaching duties. “He couldn’t play, but he contributed much more as a stand-in coach,” Scofield said. Because the other players could relate to Messer’s role, “I think everyone accepted [his leadership] because he is one of us, and he would kill to play.”
In the past, the team’s “coaches” have also done a lot of the playing, Messer said. “I think because Eric [Scofield] stepped up, it didn’t affect the team as much, but it is definitely good to have someone who can handle substitutions, watch what is going on, what we need to work on. Because you’re so focused on playing, it is hard to do anything else.”
This last statement strikes home at what allows the team to continue year after year: the satisfaction of creating something yourself, even, and perhaps especially, in the face of a myriad of other commitments.
The team began its season with matches close to home, against Richmond, James Madison and a tournament at North Carolina in Chapel Hill, which Messer said the team played in “to get a few games under our belt.” After compiling a 2-1-2 record through the week before Fall Break, the team planned to travel to Clemson during the break. Because the team operates as a student organization, professors do not necessarily excuse team members from class because of a tournament, Messer said. The team traveled to Clemson with only 14 players — for a sport that demands 11 players on the field at a time — because many players had commitments, “other, large significant things that the rest of the team understood,” Scofield said. The team performed beyond its expectations, coming in third and qualifying for the regional tournament with wins against Kentucky and Florida State, which were both ranked ahead of Virginia at the time.
“I would say that was the turning point of our season because we came with so few players [and] we were so tired,” having played late Friday night, Saturday morning and afternoon and Sunday morning, Messer said. Scofield agreed, stating, “When we went to that tournament that really ignited us as a team.”
Three weeks later, the team traveled to the regional tournament, where it avenged an earlier loss against N.C. State to advance to the semifinals. Virginia lost against a then-undefeated Florida squad, playing them all the way to the last 10 minutes of the game, when Florida scored the go-ahead goal. The team’s performance earned a spot at the National Intramural-Recreational Sports Association National Campus Championship Series National Soccer Championship, held 2.5 weeks later in Tuscaloosa, Ala.
For those weeks, the team showed motivation and coherence that had been built from trust and reliance on each other. Like games, practices are also run by the veteran members of the team, center back Keith Campbell said, “because it takes all of us working together to produce.”
“At the beginning of the next practice from a tournament, we talk about the things that went wrong, the good things, how we created scoring chances, where we need to improve,” Campbell said, although “a lot of that goes on the fly,” during games, when the defenders and forwards talk about what they see from the other end of the field.
Virginia traveled to Alabama the weekend before Thanksgiving, tying its first two games before losing in the national Sweet 16 in sudden death overtime to Penn State 3-2. This result put Virginia club soccer among the top-16 teams in the nation, which is an admirable feat and certainly one that these players will remember for the rest of their lives. And now that the season is over? “We work concessions at JPJ to help pay for tournaments,” Messer said.
The team draws its motivation from its sense of accomplishment in that this team is theirs, and as equals, they have taken part in something larger than themselves, even without the satisfaction of highly publicized results. Though tempered by the realization that this may be the highest level of competitive soccer at which they play, and that they are not always “playing beautiful soccer,” as Campbell put it, the team’s sense of responsibility to itself seems to provide the bond that brings together their varied interests in the club: simply playing soccer, satisfying a sense of competition, being part of a group of friends, representing the University.
When fans partake in odd and seemingly arbitrary rituals, when professional athletes — even those who seem to love money more than themselves — put their very bodies on the line week in and week out, when reporters and fantasy sports nuts obsess about every little statistical trend, they take responsibility for every win and loss as if it were their own. The difference for the Virginia club’s soccer team is that when the ball drops, they have only themselves to answer to.
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