Title: Soccer Warm Up

General Information about Item:

• Customary Lore, Game, Ritual
• Language: English
• Country of Origin: United States
• Informant: Morgan Turner
• Date Collected: 2-28-18

Informant Data:

• Morgan Turner is a senior at Dartmouth College. She is 21 years old and was born and raised in Chicago, Illinois. Morgan is majoring in Economics and is on the Varsity Women’s Ice Hockey team. She started playing hockey when she was ten years old and she is an only child.

Contextual Data:

• Cultural Context: Bequests are something that connects the team in various ways. For this specific bequest, a younger player is chosen to hang out and release any pre-game jitters with some of the older girls on the team.
• Social Context: The varsity women’s ice hockey team does a team off ice warm up about an hour and a half before games. After this, there is free time to do what you want and put on your equipment before on ice warm ups. There are always four girls who juggle the soccer ball together, one girl from each class. This is a bequest and no real deciding factors go into who they chose other than someone who says they are decent at juggling the soccer ball and does not have any other real rituals they need to do at this time. Morgan was able to share this tradition with me over a meal together. She enjoys this bequest because she is able to connect with these four girls a lot of the course of the year while simultaneously having a little bit of fun before it is game time.

Item:

• This is a bequest where one player, from every class year, juggles a soccer ball before game-time. Morgan was bequested this ritual starting her freshman year. When she was a sophomore she got to choose the next group member from the freshman class and the following year that girl chooses the new freshmen to join, and so on. Each member of the group writes their number on the ball. While juggling the ball, they count how many times the four of them juggle the soccer ball. They have to touch the ball at least the same amount of times as the highest jersey number of the four players before they can leave. 

Transcript:

• “Sometimes it can be really hard trying to get 22 touches…sometimes we get 50 plus and others we really struggle and waste time. We have good days and bad.”

Informant’s Comments:

• It’s a fun tradition and the four of them get closer and have jokes as time goes on.

Collector’s Comments:

• Playing soccer to warm up seems like a fun way to get started and they always try to pick the freshman that seems to have the most potential in juggling skills.

Collector’s Name: Claire Bird

Tags/Keywords:

• Customary Lore
• Ritual
• Game
• Soccer Warm Up