Casey Ryder, Contributing Writer |
I began playing soccer at the age of 4 and continued until the end of high school. Ultimately, I decided to hang it up because I felt the college athlete lifestyle of getting up at 5 in the morning and going on runs wasn’t for me.
After high school, I spent 2 years at Suffolk Community College on Long Island as well as one long year doing SUNY Oneonta classes from home due to the pandemic. As a result, this fall is my first semester on campus, and I decided that I wanted to start playing again. The only logical thing to do was join the Intramurals club.
The Intramurals club is currently in soccer and wallyball season. Wallyball is simply volleyball played on a racquetball court. If you’re on a team you’ll likely have games 2-3 times a week over the course of the season. Soccer plays during the afternoon while wallyball typically plays at night.
As for the games themselves, soccer games are 8 against 8 with two twenty-minute halves while wallyball is 4 against 4 and uses the same points system as regular volleyball. Both sports are co-ed and for soccer you must have 3 girls and 3 guys. In wallyball you must have 1 girl and 1 guy on the court at all times.
Alissa Salerno, president of the Intramurals club, says that she’s very satisfied with how things have gone so far this year. “I think it’s been great. Wallyball was never a really popular thing that we did. It was always full of workers who did it because we all loved it but now that we’ve gotten it out there everyone’s taken to it really well which is amazing. Soccer has always been great but the teams this year are great because they work together, act like a team with themselves but then they also support each other which is always appreciated with intramurals because it’s all just for fun.”
It’s also Salerno’s belief that the club can be of great benefit to students. “I think it benefits students because it gives them a way to work out with people that they don’t know but also to just get to enjoy the games that they may not have played since high school and it gives people new experiences.”
I was looking to get on one of the soccer teams and prior to the season starting, I managed to get in touch with another student on campus named Chad who knew about 6 people who wanted to play. Likewise, I knew 3 others in addition to myself who wanted to be on a team so we combined these two groups to create the team that we have today.
I don’t have a bad thing to say about the experience. First and foremost, it’s great to be able to play the game I love on a regular basis with other people who also love to play. Secondly and perhaps even more important is the social aspect of being involved in Intramurals. Being on the team has allowed me to build relationships with my teammates that I hope to have for the rest of my time at SUNY Oneonta.
My advice to any Red Dragon reading this article that is thinking about joining the intramurals club is this: get on a team and play!
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