Lax in Beijing

I am hurtin. After months, many months of not participating in anything remotely athletic or physically enduring, I decided it was a good time to join a club here in Beijing. To my surprise after doing a little research, I was able to get in touch with someone through the online Beijing expat forum to enquire about a lacrosse league that they were plugging. Last Sunday was our first practice and the first time I had touched my lacrosse stick in over a year (I brought it with me to China because I had thought it would be depressing to abandon something that had been apart of my identity for much of my life, I also brought my skates to China). It was held at Forestry University and I had to borrow most of the equipment.

The season consists of weekly practices on Sunday mornings leading up to a tournament called the Beijing Cup in June when we play teams traveling from Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, and the U19 Superstars from California who will probably kick everybody’s butt – Beijing will have two teams, one for the Chinese and one for expats like myself. This jamboree will be competitive but more importantly geared towards sharing the knowledge and love of the sport with others from around the world. We will encourage the Americans to do more teaching than slaughtering, considering that the game is fairly new in Asia and any tutorials from these prep school kids can be very helpful in the development of their game. In fact, because the practices every Sunday are mixed (Chinese and expats, boys on one side of the field, girls on the other) there is good deal of coaching that needs to be done to prepare this brave batch of small Chinese college students willing to learn a completely foreign and violent sport. I probably look like a monster to some of them, and they have to be wondering sometimes why they ever agreed to signing up as I run through them. But the other expats and I all try our best to teach the basic skills and strategies of the game while being as encouraging as possible – but at the same time as competitive as possible.

The organizer of the league has come to China to actually start his own lacrosse equipment company based in Beijing and hopes to have his products manufactured and marketed at soon as possible. Once I test out the merchandise, I will tell you what I think, but I think what he is doing for the sport – organizing international tournaments and workshops, creating affordable equipment for markets in and out of the US and developing an affinity for a game in China – is outstanding. And for me, I can finally get back into shape while at the same time revisiting a pastime that had added so much joy and passion in my years at school.

I also missed the battle wounds, I forgot how bad ass they make me look.