School Sports

So, we’ve recently been playing a lot of after-school sports. Our school has one officialish (things don’t tend to be particularly official here in Tanzania) team each for netball, volleyball, and football (soccer).

Netball, as far as I know, doesn’t exist in the US. Here, it’s a girls-only sport. Its rules are quite similar to those of ultimate frisbee, but instead of a frisbee they use a basketball-like ball. (So, if you have the ball, you can’t move, but you can try to pass it to someone else, and one person from the other team is allowed to get up in your grill and try to block.) Also the ball doesn’t change possession when it hits the ground (whoever grabs it first takes possession), and goals are scored first by catching the ball in the goal zone, and then trying to get it through a basketball-like hoop (though it has no backboard) while one designated person from the other team tries to block. They play pretty aggressively – there’s a good deal of shoving each other out of the way, and people frequently get knocked down, and then don’t care because it happens so often.

Volleyball games go a bit differently here than I’ve seen it in the states – I suppose because of how much soccer is played here, they frequently use kicks in volleyball (I’ve even seen one bicycle kick [!]). Often it’s as a last-ditch effort when the ball goes somewhere they weren’t expecting, or the person in front was unexpectedly unable to hit the ball so the person behind goes in with a low kick to try to save it. In those cases, often they end up just kicking it wildly out of bounds. But a fair amount of the time, they can get it to go basically where they want it.

Football/soccer is the big game here, the one that people care the most about generally. Not much else to say really.

Apparently we’re in some sort of regional league thing, where we’re playing the other local schools and trying to determine which players from each school to put into a combined team to go to regional competition dealio. I’m not entirely certain of the details.

We’ve played one other school once (and I forget who won etc), and another school three times. Not sure why we played them three times – I asked one of the other teachers, and she just said “Because we are trying to win!”. The third time we played them, we lost a bit in volleyball, but won pretty overwhelmingly in netball and football. The students at my school went wild – they were yelling and chanting and singing and running around and generally having a really great time. The visiting students from the other school didn’t have such a great time though, and there was a wee bit of sand-and-rock throwing when it came to be time for the visitors to head back home.

Coming up pretty soon, my school is going to play one of my sitemates’ schools, so that’ll be fun to go visit and talk some facetious smack.