Hall sport teams

In our hall, the sport teams are very important and in HKU all student halls compete against each other in different sports: Basketball, softball, athletics, badminton, aquatics, table tennis, tennis, volleyball... There are also cultural team (drama, debate, choir, etc.) competition and the Joint Hall Mass Dance competition performance.

Anyway, before coming here I had already planned to join some teams. In the beginning, I didn't hear anything about the basketball team, so I decided to try out softball!

We had three practices during the first week I participated: Wed morning practice starting at 6:30 am (3h), Thu night batting practice at 20:30 (2h) and Sun practice after going to watch a softball game by some of our teams mates (HK Open League). The Sun practice was 3h and I got home around midnight and basically spent the whole day with the team.

From Sunday's game.

Playing field was somewhere in northern Kowloon.

Even though I trained for about 8h that week and a couple of hours on the next week, I didn't had a chance to hit the ball. We have been practising passing, rules, batting (without the ball), running, but not actually playing. In the practice the team was divided to freshmen and older players as there are so many people. Freshmen would pratice the technique and the older players would practice for the inter hall competition.

And actually softball is way more different from pesäpallo than I thought. Like even the small things: if somebody catches a fly ball and the runner has taken some lead from the base, he has to go back to touch the base before he can go to the next one. In pesäpallo you don't have to do that, but you will be out if you're not in some base. (marked as a wound, 3 wounds = 1 out, 3 outs -> change of turns)

But on last days of January I finally got some info about the basketball team and decided to join it after trying out one practice! It's been fun to train after... what... 6 years? And it's fun how some of the things we do are the same we did when I was younger. Nostalgic! :D Background: I played basketball for almost 10 years (age 7-17). At the same time I joined the basketball team I also dropped softball, because I'm planning to join the dance team too and won't have time for three teams.

Also, here 175cm among the girls is considered tall, so I'm the tallest one in the team. Our coach and some of the teammates keep telling me "you should/can do this because you're so tall"... That feels so weird as I was never the tallest on in our team in Finland.

The practice are usually scheduled as 2h ones, but tend to be longer, like today almost 4h, but not that exhausting. And you can leave earlier if you have a class or tutorial or something else (a good reason though). You're also expected to participate all the practice unless you have a time clash with some class, you are sick or have some other good reason. Just seeing your friends would not count as one.

The practice are outdoors as it's hard to get the indoor reserved. It seems that here they don't have gyms in every school like in Finland (or then you just can't book them).