Written by Jessica Ardrey
Sports are a fun way to strengthen friendships with club mates and to build them with members of different social clubs. Most of the games are good-spirited, but it is not always all smiles. Some of these matches have a tendency to get a little rough, and some of these clubs are not messing around.
If you have ever been to a women’s club sporting event, you know they can be intense. Blood pressures rise, and so on the sidelines, girls usually look to club athletic directors and beaux for direction, but the time for that has passed.
This year Ju Go Ju decided to step up its game. After its first game, it enlisted the help of Harding University’s quarterback coach and recruiting coordinator, Gray Yates.
“We were in dire need,” Ju Go Ju athletic director Tori Dobbs said. “The first game we were out there running around like chickens with our heads cut off.”
After losing their first game, Dobbs told Yates, a friend of Dobbs’s, about the match. Seeing her frustration, Yates offered to help.
As it turns out, Yates is also a former beau for Ju Go Ju. When he was in school, he helped coach Ju Go Ju’s football team, and it did really well. Needless to say, he was excited to make his return.
Yates worked with the girls on passing and some offensive plays, but he mainly focused on defense, emphasizing that if the players keep other girls from scoring, they would have a better chance at winning.
The girls were excited after the practice, ready with a new grasp on the somewhat foreign sport. Like other girls’ clubs, not everyone was well versed in the ways of the pigskin.
“For most things, like volleyball, softball and basketball, we have girls that played in high school, but football is kind of left field for everybody,” Dobbs said.
Ready for the competition, the girls put to work everything they had learned from Yates in their next game. Unfortunately, Ju Go Ju lost by one point in overtime to Shantih. Nevertheless, Dobbs was still positive.
“It was a good game, and we all enjoyed it,” Dobbs said. “It wasn’t even a bummer that we lost because we still played well. We were able to figure out what worked and what didn’t. It actually felt like a team.”
The social club football bracket is double-elimination, so Ju Go Ju is done for this season, but next year is a different story. Dobbs is a senior, but she will keep the plays Yates gave the team and pass them off to the next athletic director.
