Free Time... What's That?

As an avid sports fanatic and someone who has played softball seventeen years of her life, “free time” does not exist in the life of a dedicated athlete. I have spent hundreds of hours devoting my life to a sport that I love. However, once I got to college… softball became a job. Free time did not exist in my college life. I did not live that “college life” of party all day every day, or getting to pick my classes whenever I wanted to, or skip class because I was too hung over. My weekdays consisted of getting up early for class, going to workouts, off to get shoulder treatment, back to class, and then off to three hours of practice, and back to class, and my night (which I would like to say was my "free time") ended in bed doing homework, and waking up early to do the schedule all over again. According to Adorno, "free time should in no way whatsoever suggest work..." I had no free time during winter break; that consisted of working out everyday to stay in shape for season. Oh, and once season started, I had no weekends and we traveled for weeks at a time to different states.

On the other hand, this thing we call a “hobby” doesn’t exist for my self, I call it my profession, and as Theodor Adorno says, “not that I’m a workaholic who wouldn’t know how to do anything else but get down to business and do what has to be done. But rather I take the activities with which I occupy myself beyond the bounds of my official profession, without exception, so seriously that I would be shocked by the idea that they have anything to with hobbies.” I once thought softball was a hobby... ya, that was from the ages six to eighteen. But once I got to college, this sport became a profession. It's more a job than anything. No one really understands the time and dedication and strain we put on bodies to make us a better player and a better team. In college, athletics is a whole different world. Sports are to be take so serious, it almost takes the fun out of it. And to me, a "hobby" was fun. I believe that most athletes are so wrapped up in athletics that they don't even realize how unfree their life really is. "Unfreedom is expanding within free time, and most people are as unconscious of the process as they are of their own unfreedom."

You never realize how much you learn from playing a team sport, but for those of you that have played any type of sport; you would know that it’s the dedication and hard work that made you who you are today. There is no I in team, and what you learn from that, is how to become a team player, which then you take those qualities into the real world and the work place. “Some insight nevertheless is furnished by the hypothesis that the physical exertion required by sports, the functionalization of the body within the team, that occurs precisely in the most popular sports, trains people, in ways unknown to them, in the behavioral techniques that, sublimated to a greater or lesser degree, are expected from them in the labor process,” Adorno states. As you grow as a player and a person, you gain these qualities that you never really paid attention too, but you are expected from your coaches and players to have these qualities, in which make you a better player.

Athletes give up their free time because we know that there is a job to be done and that is to win. So in the end, even though we work our asses off all year around, non-stop, it's all well worth it in the end. This thing we call a "hobby" or more like a "profession," only makes us better players and people for the moment and in the future.