Published Jul 10, 2005
If you’re a football fan like me, eagerly awaiting the arrival on TV of those sweet, sweet games you’ve been waiting for all year (and, even better, the start of your Fantasy Football game), then you may know that we’re now in football training camp season. As an intellectually pompous youngster, I used to go to nerd camp — right down the street from the Redskins’ training camp.
Nerd camp took place at Dickinson College in bucolic Carlisle, PA. Every day was filled with classes, and, after classes, there were all sorts of activities available; some of these were even athletic. Now, I know you’d hardly expect nerds to want to play sports, but it was actually quite relieving to:
- Play sports with individuals who were, um, at my skill level
- Learn that there actually were athletes who were smart, they weren’t all evil and socially oppressive
So, most afternoons, my friends and I would head over to some of Dickinson’s practice fields to play Ultimate Frisbee. And, along the way back, we’d walk past Dickinson’s football field. There would always be twenty or thirty Redskins players and coaches on the field, warming up for their second two-a-day. We’d often stick around for a few minutes and watch, but we were all nerds and didn’t really get what was going on. Plus, I was from Baltimore, and the Redskins were our mortal enemies.
For three years, I got to see the Redskins at training camp; then, a couple of years later, I actually learned to like football. If I could go back, I’d ask nerd camp to teach a class in “Appreciating Football”. Nerd camp, and the ‘Skins, are still in Dickinson, and, dammit, school nerds need to learn to be sports nerds too!
And here I always thought the point of football was to provide a yearly platform for interesting advertisements. g
Do Ultimate Frisbee players really count as “athletes” in the “high school jock” sense? It seems to be the sport of choice of nerds and hackers. There was a Friday afternoon UF game among the M$ interns, when I was there, and we played UF fairly often at AIO, the CTY-recommended camp I attended for several summers.