South Florida Community College will soon become South Florida State College. This means that I may have just participated in the last Community College Week ever held on our campus.
What was Community College Week? It was an opportunity for the student organizations to battle each other in various competitions over a period of four days. My team, the Student Nurses’ Association, called ourselves the Bloody Warriors, a name that sounds more menacing than we actually were.
If we had to pick a name that fit the way we performed, perhaps “Island of Misfit Toys” would have been more appropriate.
In case you haven’t met any current student nurses, we range in age by about 40 years and some of us, like me, are not in peak physical condition. This made for an amusing match-up with the other clubs which were mostly young, athletic individuals. Our only real physical equals were the faculty team.
The first day put us on a field in the hot sun running with a stick horse in a relay-style race. I sat out of this competition, choosing instead to laugh at winded classmates.
The next game was “Granny Pants” which had me in a pair of pantyhose stretched to the max so I could catch balls thrown by my friend, Amanda. It is hard to catch anything in a pair of pantyhose you are actually wearing, but the difficulty increases when you have a bad case of the giggles.
The final game was the Wobbly Wheelbarrow. I was not the wheelbarrow and I was very thankful for that. Both the wheelbarrows lost the use of their arms for about 24 hours and the Bloody Warriors lost all three events.
Day two, unfortunately, had us in our bathing suits for a raft race. I was erroneous in my thinking on two things: 1. that my extra fat tissue would give me buoyancy and 2. I could swim fairly well. We lost miserably.
The dreaded belly flop was next, but since everyone on my team was philosophically opposed to embarrassing ourselves added to the fact that there were no paramedics on site, we opted out of this one.
We had eight members participate in the tug-of-war and it seemed like we were going to be victorious at first, but rope burn is a very real, painful skin condition and the other team gained some supernatural strength from somewhere to eventually overcome our will to win.
Finally, a water balloon toss capped our losses and sealed the second day in fun-filled misery.
On the third day, dodge ball was the game. All of a sudden I was catapulted back to 7th grade gym class with those mean girls pelting me in the face with balls, only it was the faculty team figuratively spanking us around the court. I want to say our first match lasted about 45 seconds, but the shame made it seem about five times longer. The second round was even shorter. Apparently, dodging and throwing is not our forte.Our moment of triumph arrived with the trivia challenge. Amanda and I battled with our wits and snatched a victory for the Bloody Warriors which goes to show that what we are lacking in brawn, we make up for with brains!
We didn’t compete on the last day, but even with all the humiliation, our team was awesome. If I learned one thing from this week, it is this: next time I play tug-of-war, bring hand protection.
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