Give Sport Initiations The Red Card

Rowing, rugby, Arzoo’s, cheesefloor- these were the ingredients of my first term of college sport. Until recently I didn’t know how lucky I’d been to avoid the darkest side of college sport: the initiations. 

Seeing it as a sociable way to contribute to college life, a friend at LMH signed up for his college’s 2^nd XI football team. Two weeks later, he found himself dressed in tight women’s underwear, competing desperately against another team of freshers as a large crowd looked on. The team that did the fewest keepy uppies had to ‘keep it up’ with viagra. The first fresher to fail this task would be the first to show his ‘excitement’.

It’s all fun and games until the vomit kicks in

This humiliating trial set the bar high, but the older members of the football team kept the initiations rolling with a series of drinking and eating challenges. Gin, catfood and rotten fish were just a few of the ingredients that were chewed up and vomited out (often repeatedly) by the freshers. By the end of the night, every fresher had been sick, having to fight with the other freshers for ‘bin space’.

It’s not just LMH that indulges in this form of team ‘bonding’. New rugby players at St Catz were forced to naked mud wrestle; the winner being the first person to get two ‘thrust’s upon the other fresher. Meanwhile, Teddy Hall’s initiations were rumoured to involve strippers, whipped cream and a pig’s head.

Oxford may be bad, but it’s certainly not the worst for initiations. At Loughborough, the rugby club forced two freshers to get in a naked 69 position while the rest of the team simultaneously threw up over them.  Other games like ‘pass and sniff the poo’ and a finger-up-bum-human-centipede were tasks created by the veteran members of the squad.

Good fun for the freshers? You’d think not, yet the victims talk about their initiation stories with a ‘back in ‘nam’ mixture of both pride and horror. I suppose that for the men, ‘macho’ plays a part.- what better way to show your manliness (albeit a naked-mud-wrestling, team-showers type of man) than in a stoical acceptance and completion of the tasks? And maybe being able to get revenge on the next year helps the freshers tolerate their tasks. But who knows what sordid psychology lies behind initiations- all I know is that before long, the LMH freshers will have planned a series of brutal tasks for next year’s lot. The cycle will continue.

Most antics take place off the pitch

Over the past few years initiation culture has got worse at Oxford, as sports teams vie with each other to create the most stomach-churning challenges for their new recruits. I’m sure the people that force the freshers to do these tasks are not the sadists that the stories make them out to be, but give anyone unlimited power, especially over a worthless fresher, and they’ll tend to go a bit crackers. As I hope these stories have shown, what’s seen at the time as ‘banter’ is often just abuse.

So for now, I can’t help but feel that the many benefits of sport at Oxford are being overshadowed by the initiation process.