A Complete College Experience

I decided to come here and have a complete college experience, independence, to break away. Choosing to live further from home helped me to do that. So have team sports.

The big difference is that I can’t go home every weekend because I have practice or games. Even though I don’t have the time to go home, I think we have more fun than students who choose to go home every weekend.

I mostly hang out with people on my team, partly because a lot of other students go home every weekend and partly because we spend at least three or four hours a day together practicing. In some ways, you could say that I am not mixing as much as I could with other students, but we have a lot of fun together.

With team sports, you get to know more people more quickly. I find team friends are more intimate friends than others who might be just party friends since you get to know your team mates very well. You are together on the ice and trust them and know who you can trust the most. This spills over into the rest of your life. Your team mates are some of your best friends. For example, this week my friend had really difficult things to cope with that were happening at home. And the rest of us were there to listen and to help. We might not always give the best advice, but we help her out to the best of our ability. Just having someone to talk to is a big help. Helping out might just mean going to a movie or out to dinner, something to get her mind off of problems. The team is the biggest support group I have. They know my biggest secrets and I know theirs. One of us might make a bad choice at times, but the rest are there to pick her up, get her back on track, and keep her going.

Team sports also give you balance in your life. You are forced to organize your time as you often have to discipline yourself more than those not on sports teams. And if you have trouble with that, your team members will help you. We have classes, lunch, maybe a nap, hockey practice, then dinner, then hang out time, then work time. But the days I don’t have practice or a game, I sit around all day. So we use each other as a support system to motivate each other to go to class, even when we don’t want to go. We get through this as a team.

Sometimes you are forced to be more creative than other students on campus. For example, we can't drink for three days before a game. So we can't party as much as others. So what do we do? We invent new things to have fun doing such as tying a toboggan onto a car and skidding around, or just going on drives around town looking for something different that could be fun. We love to explore everything the town has to offer. You work with what you have and at times can find a new fun thing to do. It’s great for bonding and sometimes you strike gold and find something truly fun. Sometimes this means just going to a toy store and playing with all the toys or going to a local market and talking with the locals. Other times this means having a BBQ in front of our dorm and chatting with the other students walking by.

So my advice for first years would be not only to live in residence but to live far enough away from home so that you can’t commute. It forces you to get more involved. It forces you to break away from your friends at home and experience more of the world. You should be involved in something other than academics because university has endless opportunities, most of which you will never have again.