Over time, I witnessed the glory of the blue shirts, the ability to knock down unsuspecting girls and how great it was to be part of a team named something extremely offensive. It sounded enticing and I realized that I really wanted to play.
“It’s arguably the most fun IM sport,” senior Sydney Stasch said.
Stasch and fellow senior Christy Henderson are the IM Sports Committee Co-Chairs and also play together for the team Multiple Scorgasms. The team is a group of independent senior women who have been playing together since their first year at Whitman. I barely knew anyone on the team and tried to fit into a group dynamic that has been developing for the last three years.
“We’re different than most teams because they have seniors leaving and freshmen coming in every year, but we’ve pretty much been the same group since the beginning,” said Henderson.
The Scorgasms are coached by three former Whitman baseball players, seniors Galen Cobb, Mitch Hannoosh and Joe Rodhouse. Cobb is the newest addition to the team, standing as their new offensive coach. For baseball players, they sure knew their football.
While running a lap with the team around the field to warm-up, I noticed several other IM football teams practicing on Ankeny. Compared to the larger teams, I wondered if the Scorgasms’ short roster was a setback.
“We really consider ourselves as the underdogs,” Stasch said. “We’re relatively small, so each of us have to play throughout the whole game in a lot of different positions.”
As a benefit, Stasch believes that the team is full of talented women who can play almost anywhere on the field.
The team started off with flag-pulling drills, which required more grabbing than I imagined. After I apologized several times for pulling on shirts rather than the flags, offensive lineman Laura Deering assured me that getting grabby was part of the game.
Next, we did hand-off drills that consisted of shoving the ball into the gut of your teammate while running past them. After getting the wind knocked out of me the first time, I got the hang of it and we moved on to practicing routes. Receivers ran patterns as quarterback Shellin Tran threw them the ball. I am proud to say that I caught the ball once. However, I quickly learned that once you receive the ball, you must run with it, instead of channeling your inner Ochocinco and announcing to everyone over and over again that you caught it.
Finally, we got to practice some plays. I was excited for the opportunity to take out anger and aggression out on people like Coach Cobb, who was standing in as an unsuspecting lineman.
“It can get ugly out there,” Deering said about the roughness of the game. “People play dirty and when they spot someone they want to take down they really go for it.”
Although I didn’t want to elbow anyone on the team, I could see how satisfying it would be to knock someone down.
On our last play at practice, Coach Rodhouse decided to stand in as quarterback and throw the ball to me. As I hustled that route, I quickly turned around and reached for the incoming ball . . . only to brush it with my fingertips and miss it completely.
Needless to say, I had a lot of fun and could see why everyone always makes a big deal about IM football. Sure, there are obscene team names that are hard to explain when Parents’ Weekend rolls around, as well as the potential for broken fingers during games (the Scorgasms are no strangers to that injury). But I found that it’s the tradition and bonding that makes IM football the “most fun IM sport.”
