The basketball men’s 1st team started pre-season in early September with 12 guys back early to train hard and get ready for the season. We had 9 sessions a week spread over 6 days, and I can honestly tell you I have never been in as much pain as in that first week…

But all the boys were back, some of which had been on placement abroad for a year so it was awesome to see everyone back! So on the first Saturday (leading up to our very anticipated rest day on Sunday…) we thought we may as well have some fun while we’re all here with no work or deadlines or anything to get in our way. A silly team member (I will mention no names) then said: ‘I don’t want to throw away all of this training by getting smashed tonight!’. How could we all go out, have fun, and not waste a week’s worth of training? The answer was simple and came out of the mouth of our wise chairman: #sobersaturdays

We met up for pre-lash at his house in Oldfield park in order to test his brand new £15 fussball table. There was a lot of relentless, alcohol free wine and beer, and worst of all: water. All of us were absolutely buzzing. We set up a 10 man knockout tournament with punishments for the losers in each round involving push ups at first, then naked push ups in the garden (no pictures were taken). The competition then evolved into a 4 on 4 battle, which is when things went slightly out of hand... the losing team was made to do the turmeric challenge: a large spoon of turmeric (I nearly chundered).

So after all of these intense sporting competitions and highly banterous punishments, we set out for Second Bridge with our tumerous breaths and stained shirts. All of us danced like absolute animals and the ladies were loving it. One of the ‘lads’ got a jug of water from the bar, brought it to the middle of the dancefloor where we all were rocking all of the shapes (pentagon being my personal favourite), and downed it while we all chanted and screamed. What a hero!

You can imagine how the night went on: 3 of us pulled, some of us met up at McDonalds, and all of us were fresh for training on Monday at 7am.

Tom Janicot
SU Sport Officer
Basketball Men’s 1st team