Member Profile: Annah Hackett
I’ve never been a sports person. It wasn’t that I disliked sports. I just never understood why they got everyone so excited. As far as I was concerned it was fine if other people wanted to spend their time and energy kicking or throwing a ball around, but I was happier with a quiet corner and a good book.
That is why it is so strange that I now spend hours every week talking about and watching soccer.
I moved to Austin from the Midwest in the summer of 2019. The first ten months of my new life in Texas were a blur of adjusting to my new job at the University of Texas at Austin, learning about all the things this new city had to offer, and most importantly, discovering the joy of breakfast tacos. Probably about 70% of my diet during that time was comprised of some form of taco. Long live tacos; I will never say no to you for as long as I live.
I was busy, happy, and active. It was exactly the life I wanted. But then on Friday, March 13, 2020, I woke up to a text saying that the university was temporarily closed due to a staff member testing positive for COVID-19. Feeling a giddy rush of anxiety, I messaged my boss to ask how long she expected that we would be working from home. Did she think it was worth it if I made a quick trip to campus to grab a few essentials from my office?
You can if you want to, came the answer. But no pressure. We’ll be back soon.
Of course, everyone knows what followed.
My situation was (and is) a lot better than that of other people. I am not in risk of losing my job. I am healthy. I am safe. But living alone during a global pandemic in a city that still sometimes feels strange to me has been. . . difficult. Like many people, I started quarantine with lots of plans. A lifelong lover of movies, I decided I would make good use of all my extra time by watching three Criterion Collection movies a week, along with finally conquering my extensive Want to Read list on Goodreads, learning how to knit, and running a virtual 10k.
None of that happened. Of course it didn’t. Like a lot of people, my brain was so busy trying to cope with all the crises happening every day that there was very little left to tackle watching Andrei Tarkovsky’s arthouse masterpiece Stalker. Trust me, I tried three times. But far worse than my inability to watch a challenging movie was the silence. Though I had met lots of nice people since moving to Austin, it was always at the corner of my mind that the people I felt closest to were hundreds of miles away. With no one to talk to (except via text or Zoom) and no energy to speak of, every day felt very long. And boring. And horribly empty.
This is where soccer comes in.
At some point in the fall, I started putting on whatever Premier League match was available while I was working or doing chores, rarely doing more than glancing over from time to time. The games were a convenient source of background noise because I didn’t feel tempted to watch them closely. They barely registered on my radar.
And then came Tottenham Hotspur FC vs West Ham United FC on November 18th, 2020.
I was barely paying attention, per usual, when abruptly my notice was caught when the Tottenham player Heung-min Son scored a goal barely a minute into the game. Even I knew that this was not something that usually happened. In the next nineteen minutes, Tottenham took two more goals, both scored by the captain of the English national team, Harry Kane. The game ended in a draw, but it was the first twenty minutes that stayed in my memory.
It wasn’t the goals themselves that caught me. It was the choreography that went into scoring them. Harry Kane and Heung-min Son could have half a field between them, yet somehow they were repeatedly able to seamlessly place the ball at each other’s feet, sometimes without even looking. It’s an extraordinary partnership that has fascinated soccer/football fans around the world. I had never seen anything like it.
Watching them, I started to understand why for many people, sports mean a lot more than a bunch of people kicking or throwing a ball around. It’s an opportunity to watch a unit comprised of many moving parts come together and (potentially) do something magnificent.
That was the moment I started watching soccer in earnest. Every Saturday and Sunday I would get up early, make a pot of coffee, and settle down for many hours of soccer. I had no idea what I was watching most of the time. My phone got a workout as I used it to google soccer terms and teams every few minutes. But the way the players could work together to achieve something — a goal, a win — had me hooked.
Particularly during this time of isolation, I find great comfort in the unity I see play out on the field. For about ninety minutes real life gets suspended, and the only thing that matters is the team and the game. Furthermore, unlike almost any other sport, soccer can be found in almost every community in the world. It’s a powerful thought that as I watch the game on tv in my little apartment in Austin, there are millions of other people around the world also stuck quarantining at home, watching the same game. We may call it by different names, but we are unified in the act of watching and cheering on our team.
That having been said, while the global aspect of soccer is inspiring, one of the best aspects of my new interest was finding that same feeling of sport-inspired community in a group much closer to home.
One day about nine months into social distancing, a notice happened to come across my Facebook timeline for an event with a group called Austin Anthem.
The name sounded familiar. And then I remembered meeting the bird-soccer people.
A few months after I moved to Austin, I had stumbled upon a soccer watch party at Oskar Blues Brewery. Listening in on my neighbors’ conversation, I discovered that the watch party was being thrown by some group called Austin Anthem. What an Austin Anthem was, I didn’t know. I guessed it was associated with the soon-to-be MLS team, but based on the shirt that I bought from their merch table on a whim, they could have just as easily been a group of soccer-loving ornithologists.
They seem nice, I remember thinking. A little intense about soccer (and birds), but nice.
Initially I didn’t know if a soccer event was the thing for me. By then I had been steadily filling my brain with Premier League soccer all weekend every weekend for a month, but I still felt stunningly ignorant about the sport. I worried that someone would try to start a conversation with me by asking me about the offside rule, something that had never troubled me before that moment, and that after fumbling the answer, I would have to stand awkwardly on the outskirts before finally slinking back to my silent apartment.
But I shouldn’t have worried. I had hardly been there two minutes before I was enthusiastically welcomed by two board members, one of whom had also sold me my Anthem grackle t-shirt way back at that Oskar Blues watch party. And then there were suddenly many other kind people and an unexpected drum circle and abruptly for the first time in many months, I felt okay.
Since joining Austin Anthem, I have discovered an entire community of people who have used their common interest in soccer to connect with one another. While we are prohibited from meeting in person due to the COVID-19 restrictions, I check in on the organization Slack channel throughout the day just to watch the conversations happen and find myself learning so much. Some members are the type of fans who obsess over the details of every game and hotly debate potential draft picks. Others are the type who (pre-pandemic) showed up to watch parties occasionally in the hope of seeing a good game and making a friend. That’s okay — there is no wrong way to follow a sport.
Discovering a new interest doesn’t change the fact that quarantine sucks. As so many people have said, we are living through turbulent times. However, now I feel like I am a part of a group. And that makes Austin feel more like home than all the tacos that I enjoyed before the pandemic.
Though, to be clear, I will still never say no to a taco.
Annah is now a member of the Organizational Team of Austin Anthem.
Austin Anthem is the independent supporters group for Austin FC, the Major League Soccer club of Austin, Texas.
