Hello blog world! It’s been a while since I wrote a blog post, but (with some prodding and gentle nagging) here’s a short post on coming back to playing volleyball as an adult.
In January, I joined a 7-week session of indoor beach volleyball, hosted by Forest City Sports and Social. Specifically, I registered for their Queer League, which features gender-free spaces for people to enjoy sports together in a fun and social environment.
My only previous experiences with volleyball were mandatory gym classes in school where I hated it. I wasn’t very good at it and it seemed no matter how I hit the ball it hurt my arm. To be fair, I wasn’t a big fan of team sports in high school in general. So why did I register? Three main reasons. First, I had played dodgeball previously in the queer league and found an amazing group of people. Turns out having good people around makes team sports better! Second, this was indoor beach volleyball in the middle of a long winter which meant a sport I could play in shorts, bare feet and sand. If you know me at all, you can see how that would appeal to me. Third, it fit very nicely into my extremely busy schedule and was something I could realistically commit to. Again, if you know me you know that my schedule is always super busy!
Reflections on the season:
🍇My team was fantastic! One of our members does graphic design and prints shirts so we made ourselves shirts after choosing a name. We were originally “Purple Team” but by the second week we were “Raisin Hell” or affectionately “the raisins”.
🍇It is fun to be part of a completely non-competitive team sport (although we sometimes got competitive anyway, just for fun!).
🍇There were only four teams in this league, so we got to know everybody, even those who weren’t on our team.
🍇Turns out I like beach volleyball. I have registered for another session, which goes until the end of May, and I have also registered for a rookie league to help me learn to play better. So now I have two hours each week (back-to-back) of beach volleyball!
