The Invaluable Guide to 5 High School Winter Sports

When talking about sports, it is important to know what kind of sports person you are, easily determined by this simple test: who is (most likely) going to be the #1 NFL draft pick next year? If you said “The Packers,” then you are probably not a sports person.

Luckily (sports people: no pun intended; non sports people: don’t bother looking for a pun, because you won’t find it) for you, I’m here to explain all you need to know about the winter sports at your high school.

Basketball

We all know what basketball is, so I’m not going to bother with the rules.  No, in high school, the trick is figuring out who the basketball players are.  Generally, this isn’t too hard; take a good look around when you walk in the halls.  The person whose chest is at eye-level is a basketball player. I’ve heard from many a basketball coach that you don’t need to be tall to play basketball, but I didn’t hear them before I quit playing, because it took the words seven light-years to travel from their super-high mouth down to the level of my ears.

Also good to know, for you semi-clueless non-sports people (those of you who didn’t know Andrew Luck was the answer to the first question, or that the pun was about his last name), is that basketball, while being the most popular winter sport, is a little different from football.  If you go to a game, you should avoid shouting things like, “Tackle ‘im!” or “Touchdown!”; rather, you should shout “Batta batta batta swing!” or “Goooooaaaaallllll!”

Wrestling

Remember that look around the halls? Well, the wrestlers are the ones you didn’t see, because they were turned sideways.  Many of you might think of wrestlers as enormous and muscular, but in high school, there’s this thing called ‘weight divisions.’ Just like it sounds, ‘weight divisions’ pit people against each other depending on how long it takes them to divide a random 2-digit number into a random 5-digit number.  Oddly enough, many of the wrestlers misinterpret this to mean that they should diet to get into a lower, and thus easier, weight division, as dieting allows them to spend less time eating and more time practicing math.

I’ve never gone to a high school wrestling match, so I don’t know what you should expect.  I think that if you go, the proper way to cheer is by yelling:  “Wrestle!” or maybe even: “Wrestling!”

Skiing/Snowboarding

The skiers/snowboarders can be identified by the fact that the really ‘intense’ competitors never spend more than three seconds without a cast on some part of their body.  The idea of skiing/snowboarding is usually to go as fast as one can down a mountain laden with rocks, boulders, trees, rocks, bodies of water, rocks, and stones, and a collision with one of these is usually what causes the injury.  These are not spectator sports, so you don’t need to bother cheering (although if you really feel a need, you can shout “Break a leg!”).

Swimming

To identify a swimmer, look for the person with a genetic mutation.  In my experience, the state-level swimmers are often mutated due to the time they’ve spent in chlorine-filled pools.  Examples of mutations include the inability to grow hair on their legs, a lessened sense of smell, webbed hands and feet, or a third eye.

Swim meets are exciting sporting events.  You get hyped up with school spirit, or pep, and travel with a group of fellow students who are equally pep-ed up to the event. Boy, are you planning to kill the other swim team.  But then, the swim meet actually starts, and…nothing happens.  All you see is splashing and waves, and have no idea who wins.  Your excitement quickly fades, not helped by the fact that the scoring system is more difficult than some derivative calculus.

Water Polo

The water polo players are those with both genetic mutations and muscle (when compared to swimmers). Water Polo, as you may know, is the pool-oriented version of Polo, where people ride genetically enlarged seahorses while trying to play golf.  Because so much of Water Polo happens underwater, where the ref can’t see, it is a ruthless sport, with opponents being known to scratch, punch, kick, stab, shoot, skin, bite, burn, bomb, or sue members of the other team under the surface of the water.

If you go to a Water Polo match, it is appropriate to chant: “AoiuahAHGOAOUAwoahweYEAHYEAHOheoweaui!” repeatedly.

I recommend that you print this guide out and reference it whenever you need.  You should also print copies for your friends, Facebook friends, Google+ circle-mates, Twitter followers, and congressmen. After all, you never know when you’ll find you need to know the answer to: “Who will be the number one draft pick in the NFL next year?”