I had heard all these great things about the sport of rugby but was never given the chance to ever make it to a game in America. My school back home, Penn State University, has a club rugby team but the only reason I know that is because prior to writing this paper I looked on the internet to find if we had one. Club teams in the United States are looked at as jokes because the three main college sports; football, basketball and baseball, are all multi billion dollar industries that make an extremely large amount of money for their respective schools. These three sports combine for over two hundred scholarships a year and all have a large fan base and are sponsored by some of the biggest sports manufacturing companies throughout the country. Club teams do not have a budget and often have to raise money so they can enter tournaments and purchase uniforms as well as the necessary equipment to play the sport. With that being said, rugby here is equivalent in its fan base and dedication as American football. As a result of this class I was exposed to many different levels of the sport that gave me a solid knowledge of it. In early May we took a field trip to watch youth rugby. I was very impressed with the amount of participants as well as the assistance of so many parents and volunteers. From what I could tell I would say that of the five or so fields that had games going on there were about fifteen players per team. That is over 150 youth boys playing rugby at the same time. The fields were broken down by age division and it seemed as though the older the age group the more serious and more competitive the game was. While this rugby was obviously not as intense as some of the other rugby games that I witnessed in Sydney it still gave me a general sense of how young children are taught to play the sport in this country.
The rugby game that had the largest impact on me though during my stay here was the State of Origin game that I watched on television. Even though I did not get to experience the game in real life I was still able to really appreciate the rivalry between New South Wales and the team from Queensland. These two teams hate each other and that was apparent on every bone crushing hit against one another. I have been to three professional rugby games since I have been in Australia so I can really appreciate the intensity of the collisions and the toll that it takes on their bodies. These hits in the State or Origin game were unlike any I had seen though. With every play they were literally out to kill one another. Even though the team from New South Wales lost this still gave me the opportunity to witness one of the most intense and long standing rivalries in Australia and realize that it is on par with some of the biggest sports rivalries in America.
With so many people living on Australian coastline the beach makes up a large portion of the sporting culture throughout this country. Of these beach sports the most popular and most mind blowing to me was the sport of surfing. Coming to Australia I obviously knew that this was going to be big here but I did not expect it to be as big as it really was. I will never forget the first day I showed up at Bondi Beach and saw hundreds of surfers sitting on their boards out past the break waiting to catch a wave. I was absolutely fascinated so I decided to make it a point to learn to surf and bought my own board. As the semester is coming to a close I must say it took a good two months but I caught on and am infatuated with the sport and can see why it has such a big following here. There are hundreds of professional surfers from Australia who make a living by going to the beach everyday and surfing. I would say there are thousands of jobs that are much worse than that. In America it is common for a father and son to have a baseball catch but here I see a lot of fathers and sons surfing together. Usually the father is teaching his young child the basics behind this great sport. To this day I still can’t believe the amount of young children I saw surfing every time that I have gone to the beach. There are little five year olds out there who absolutely shred waves apart. The surfing culture is also very catchy and has a large following here in Australia, especially in towns such as Bondi and Manly. The clothes, the gear, and the hair style are very prominent throughout the surf culture and help to shape the surfing identity. Just as baseball has its own look in the States, surfing has that here in Australia. Surfing is a life long sport just like tennis and golf and for that reason I am very ecstatic that I picked it up in my short time here in Australia. As I get older I begin to miss playing the sports that I used to play so it is always good to have a wide variety of lifetime sports that I can excel at.
While many more sports such as swimming, beach volleyball, netball, and cricket also make up the Australian sports scene, rugby and surfing have had the biggest impact on my six month Australian identity. I have become very entertained by the two of them and I cannot wait to take my surfing skills back home and get my friends involved in the sport as well. This class has given me the chance to learn background about the sports as well as gain an exceptional amount of knowledge to fully understand its place within the Australian identity. I truly cannot believe that my stay here in Sydney is about done but I am very fortunate to have been given this opportunity and my enrollment in this class really gave me the chance to learn about what I love and that is sports.
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