From my session on Friday, I found out from other CIEE students that there were pick up games every Monday at 7 at the same field right next to the school. When I went over I stopped by the school first to see about logging into their wifi, which I had had a problem with. While I was there, I saw a group of three or so guys walking walk passed me, all of whom seemed athletically dressed up, it was possible I would be seeing them again soon. Following shortly behind them, though, was one of the guys I had Met on Friday, Brian. He decided to wait up for me, some walked overtone field together. As it turned out, last Friday had been the first time he had gone to one of those sessions, and today was going to be the first time he had gone to a Monday session as well, so we were both new to this whole ordeal. When we arrived at the field there were already a good number of guys scattered throughout the field passing various balls back and forth with each other. There were the three guys from before. As we walked on to the field and started getting our gear on, I noticed that more and more people kept arriving. More, and more and more. Eventually there were more than 30 people in total there. I walked up to some random guys, luckily enough they spoke English, they had said that there had not been this many people before and that this was too many. Half of the group was various CIEE and random people, the other half, as one man named Mathias, I think, said that he belonged to a ‘company’ that was practicing and that there was another ‘company’ they were going to play against. I asked for confirmation on what company meant but I didn’t really get a straight answer. What I really wanted to know was if he meant ‘club’.

Because we were too large of a group, we were going to half to split the groups into the two divisions mentioned earlier. Frankly, these other guys, who were Germans, didn’t seem to want to have anything to do with us. So my group, the CIEE plus, took one half of the field, divided, very slowly, into two teams, and eventually started playing to the goals horizontally along the field. I was, of course, very disappointed to see this happen, I had desperately been craving playing with some Germans, but here I was with Americans and a couple Italians I think they were. At first, as the game began, it was so sloppy, people didn’t know which way to go, know one was passing to anyone else, people weren’t taking it seriously, it was awful. I tried to lift up the tempo and get everyone focused, but the strangest thing happened in the process. My boots, which were brand new, kept slipping of, even from the slightest change in direction. This was incredibly infuriating, because this meant I was surely going to have to acquire new ones. In the meanwhile I performed surgery on my shoelaces and managed to come up with some strange concoction to try and suffice in the meanwhile.

The level of play amongst this group was a little disappointing, there were some skilled players to be sure, but there was no chemistry, which is an essential part to the game, especially in pickup. I would occasionally glance over at the other side of the field to watch the other group play, from what I saw, they were definitely a higher level than what I was dealing with, mostly because they all appeared to be players, whereas some of the guys in my group were just random students coming out to have some fun. I am totally fine with this, I was just disappointed that if we were going to have to segregated so harshly, I would have rather been on the other side. While I would occasionally look one way at the other group, in the opposite direction, along the sidelines, a new group began to form. This was a group of 40 to 50, maybe even older, year olds. Someone amongst us said something about us having to give up the field for them, but that sure wasn’t going to happen while I was around. Eventually when enough of them showed up, they asked if they could play against us; they had nine, later eleven, so we would have to have subs. As sure as I was that this was going to be a slaughter, I did welcome this, it would be a change of pace from what was going on and we could at least play ‘against’ rather than with, some Germans.

When the game started up, I  was surprised to see that these fellows all played with fire! They may not have been able to compete with us athletically, but they’re weren’t going to back down from the competition. As they game went on, we got into our groove and we started to turn the whole thing into a one sided affair. Yet they still never gave up. They kept on motivating each other, as well as communicating with each other organizationally. It was inspiring to see. I picked up on words like rechts and links and linga, which I figured out meant line. As it got dark the lights for the field turned on and we kept playing into the night. These guys just wouldn’t quit. Their hard work eventually paid off for them as they managed to get a couple quic, successive goals. They desperately wanted a third, but when it wouldn’t come and we regained the momentum we had, they decided to call it quits. It was 9 pm. The other group had stopped playing and all left quite a while ago and I had not even noticed! Things may play out differently next time with the teams, but I will surely keep coming to this pick up on Mondays.