Play as identity

A sport that I grew up playing in high school was rugby. Rugby was the most popular and notorious sport at my school probably because every year an international rugby tournament with teams coming from all over the world, the Rugby Sevens, was held in Hong Kong. I would definitely say that being known as a rugby player was my identity throughout high school and was what connected me most with my friends. Sutton-Smith mentions how our identities “focus on the use of play forms as forms of bonding” (p. 106), which is something that definitely applies to me. Outside of sports I didn’t particularly stand out at my school, but playing rugby with my team was something that brought us together and gave us a commonality to share. Furthermore it was something that we could always do together and something that people who were outside of rugby could not really understand. I would say that this contributed to my identity very much because despite the fact that I also played 2 other sports, soccer and basketball, I was always known as a rugby player first to most people. Chapter 6 in the book states that “But whatever the rationalization, what is constant from earlier times to the present is the same rhetoric on the key nature of communal identity in the life of the folk, whoever they may be.” (Sutton-Smith, p.92) Beyond being known as individual rugby players we were also known as a team. Beyond being known as a team, we were also known as good friends. So whenever someone would be looking for a person on the team we always knew that we could expect them to be nearby another teammate because of our type of community that kept us together.