This year marks the 10 year anniversary of the Alberta Bart Holaday Scholarship, the scholarship which allowed me the incredible experience of getting to live and study in Oxford for two of the most amazing years of my life. To mark the 10th anniversary, all of the Scholars have been asked to write a retrospective on their time in Oxford. The prompt was very broad and basically allowed us to write whatever we wanted. Since football played such a huge role in my life in Oxford, it was pretty obvious I was going to write about football. This is what I came up with. If anyone has any insights as to changes that I should make (particularly if I made any grammatical or spelling mistakes-- don't want the guy who thought I was smart enough to get his scholarship to reconsider-- although I guess its too late now!) please let me know.
“Some people say football is a matter of life and death. I assure you, its much more serious than that.” Legendary Liverpool coach Bill Shankly expressed this sentiment and, as both a serious footballer and a Liverpool supporter, I agree wholeheartedly. But while growing up in the United States, where “football” is a sport played primarily with your hands and a lemon shaped object quite generously referred to as a ball, I was often in the minority when it came to my love of the sport that the rest of the world calls football. This is just one of the many reasons that I was excited to learn that, through the generosity of Mr. Bart Holaday, I would be given the opportunity to study at Oxford University as a member of Exeter College. I couldn’t wait to immerse myself in the culture that understands, appreciates, and literally invented the game of football. In my time at Oxford, I spent an admittedly excessive amount of time playing football for the Oxford University Women’s Association Football Club Blues first team, Mansfield Road Football Club, a city team in a regional league, and for the Oxfordshire County Representative squad. In that time, football provided me exposure to the British culture and was the lens through which I viewed that culture. Furthermore, my experiences with British football provided me with tools and skills that have already helped me in my Air Force career.
Upon first joining the Oxford football scene, the hardest adjustment was merely picking up the changes in vocabulary. Rather than preparing to play a game in a uniform and cleats on the soccer field I was instead getting ready for a match in kit and boots on the football pitch. Once I figured out all the terminology, I was able to look deeper and see how the culture of football specifically, and sport in general, revealed aspects of British culture and its differences from American. In both America and the United Kingdom, football is religion (albeit their definitions of football cause that religion to be two different sports). People live and die with the successes and failures of their clubs. Passion for sports and the deep seated and bitter rivalries that sports encourage are the same in every country. Whether it be Liverpool vs. Everton in the Merseyside Derby or the Packers against the Vikings, the yearly contests between the Oxford and Cambridge athletic teams or the annual Commanders in Chief competition between the American service academies, the passion and excitement of a well fought rivalry victory doesn’t fade even years after the game has been played. From kickoff to the final whistle, everyone in the stadium is united in their desire for one thing: a victory for their club. Sports transcend religion, class, and social and economic divisions, and that is consistent in every country I have ever been to.
“Some people say football is a matter of life and death. I assure you, its much more serious than that.” Legendary Liverpool coach Bill Shankly expressed this sentiment and, as both a serious footballer and a Liverpool supporter, I agree wholeheartedly. But while growing up in the United States, where “football” is a sport played primarily with your hands and a lemon shaped object quite generously referred to as a ball, I was often in the minority when it came to my love of the sport that the rest of the world calls football. This is just one of the many reasons that I was excited to learn that, through the generosity of Mr. Bart Holaday, I would be given the opportunity to study at Oxford University as a member of Exeter College. I couldn’t wait to immerse myself in the culture that understands, appreciates, and literally invented the game of football. In my time at Oxford, I spent an admittedly excessive amount of time playing football for the Oxford University Women’s Association Football Club Blues first team, Mansfield Road Football Club, a city team in a regional league, and for the Oxfordshire County Representative squad. In that time, football provided me exposure to the British culture and was the lens through which I viewed that culture. Furthermore, my experiences with British football provided me with tools and skills that have already helped me in my Air Force career.
Upon first joining the Oxford football scene, the hardest adjustment was merely picking up the changes in vocabulary. Rather than preparing to play a game in a uniform and cleats on the soccer field I was instead getting ready for a match in kit and boots on the football pitch. Once I figured out all the terminology, I was able to look deeper and see how the culture of football specifically, and sport in general, revealed aspects of British culture and its differences from American. In both America and the United Kingdom, football is religion (albeit their definitions of football cause that religion to be two different sports). People live and die with the successes and failures of their clubs. Passion for sports and the deep seated and bitter rivalries that sports encourage are the same in every country. Whether it be Liverpool vs. Everton in the Merseyside Derby or the Packers against the Vikings, the yearly contests between the Oxford and Cambridge athletic teams or the annual Commanders in Chief competition between the American service academies, the passion and excitement of a well fought rivalry victory doesn’t fade even years after the game has been played. From kickoff to the final whistle, everyone in the stadium is united in their desire for one thing: a victory for their club. Sports transcend religion, class, and social and economic divisions, and that is consistent in every country I have ever been to.
However in the world of college sports, there are some extreme differences between the United States and UK. In the United States, sport plays a tremendous role in university life, bringing significant revenue to the school. College athletes are highly recruited and competition is fierce between universities as to which one can sign the country’s top prep athletes. College athletes are supposedly amateurs, yet countless scandals of American football players being paid under the table for their services belies this idea of amateurism in American university athletics. However at Oxford, with the exception of a small handful of Rugby players and rowers, I didn’t know anyone who chose Oxford University for its athletic program. The focus is primarily academics, with athletics being a distant second. Sport at university is about fun, fitness, and social involvement, not about preparing for a career in the professional leagues. As much as I loved and valued my college athletics career, seeing how university sports are handled in the UK has revealed that there are fundamental problems with the balance between sports and academics in American institutions of higher education.
I have always played soccer/football for the love of the game. Sports have provided me with opportunities to grow, learn, and develop life and leadership skills, but that has always been a secondary benefit of athletic participation. While in Oxford, though this was not my intention when joining my football clubs, my football career exposed me to environments and gave me experiences that I have directly built on during my admittedly short Air Force career. In my second year in Oxford, I had the honor of captaining the University Women’s Football team. While I had been captain of the team at the Academy and therefore thought I knew what to expect, captaining Oxford was an entirely different experience. Due primarily to the previously mentioned emphasis on University sport, the women’s football team is entirely student run and led. I was responsible not only for the on-field leadership of the team, but also for many other tasks, including hiring a coach, holding tryouts, selecting a team, booking and organizing practice locations, arranging for transportation to and from matches, purchasing, organizing, and washing the team uniforms, organizing the yearly match between Oxford and Cambridge (which included arranging lodging for the squad, and all of the other logistics for the event), and finally selecting the team and lineup for each individual match. This experience of running a student and athletic organization helped me tremendously in my role as class leader of my UPT class at Sheppard AFB. I have built on what I learned as the women’s captain and have been able to adequately handle the job of class leader with no undue stresses or difficulties.
Additionally, the culture of football in the United Kingdom prepared me for the culture of an Air Force flying squadron. In the UK, football is predominantly a man’s game. While almost every British boy grows up with a football permanently attached to his foot, the girls in the UK more commonly grow up playing field hockey or netball (a version of basketball). So by joining the football world in England, I was jumping into an environment dominated by males: testosterone riddled, competitive, results-driven males. I never would have thought that the hours I spent playing 5-a-side matches with my guy friends or in pubs watching football with the members of the University and Mansfield Road men’s teams would prepare me for my Air Force career, but, in a way, they prepared me almost as much as any professional military education I have received thus far. While women are afforded many great opportunities in the Air Force, the flying world is still predominantly dominated by males. There are no other females in my UPT class and there is not a single female T-38 Instructor Pilot at Sheppard AFB. I am constantly surrounded by the
same type of competitive and results-driven men in my flying squadron as I was in the
pubs and on the pitches of Oxford. Learning how to be a woman in a man’s world while
in Oxford made the adjustment to life in the Air Force remarkably easy and smooth.
Coming to Oxford was everything I dreamed about and more. From the engineering classroom to the football pitches; from the libraries to the stadiums, the education I received in and out of the classroom was first rate and I learned more than I could possibly have imagined. I have already put what I learned in Oxford to good use and I hope to continue to do so throughout my Air Force career. All of my memories of my time spent under the dreaming spires will be with me forever.
Coming to Oxford was everything I dreamed about and more. From the engineering classroom to the football pitches; from the libraries to the stadiums, the education I received in and out of the classroom was first rate and I learned more than I could possibly have imagined. I have already put what I learned in Oxford to good use and I hope to continue to do so throughout my Air Force career. All of my memories of my time spent under the dreaming spires will be with me forever.
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