This last Friday on October 6, I, an exchange student, went to my first football game since I arrived here in America, Pasco at Hanford. I went with some of my other exchange student friends. And I came with one goal, to write an article about the game afterwards. I think I underestimated how little we actually understand about the game of Football, since nobody really plays it at home in Europe. In this article, I will try my best to recap the game and give my perspective on how things went.
The game for our Bulldogs started off slow, in the first quarter, we unfortunately didn’t score a single point, while Hanford scored 12. I didn’t really see how they did it, it looked like they fell out of bounds on their touchdowns, but I guess that’s part of the game.
In the second quarter, we picked it up a little, we got 6 points from a 22-yard pass from Salvador Olvera to Jose Luis Vargas who got the touchdown, which was pretty cool. We didn’t however manage to stop Hanford who kept their hot streak going, scoring 14 in the 2nd.
The third quarter ended similarly to the first, we didn’t score a single point and Hanford kept extending their lead. This was when we started to get a little bored and also confused, how can you score, other than touchdowns? Touchdowns were pretty much the only thing I knew about football before this. Well, turns out the big sticks sticking up out of the ground actually have a purpose. Kick the ball between the goalposts and you get some points, and that’s something that we felt like we could do. “It’s harder than it looks though” – said Valarie Doan, the only American with us that day. I’d have to try it to find out.
The fourth quarter was by far our best one. Hanford didn’t score a single point and we scored 13. They made it look easy. Still, though, we lost, but that’s fine. Our next game coming up on the 13th of October is against Joel E. Ferris High School who hold a similar record to ours. They are also on a 4-game losing streak right now and have only scored a total of 24 points in those 4 games, they also haven’t won a single away game the entire season. With that being said we definitely have a decent chance against them and hopefully we’ll be able to go home that night with another win under our belt. If we win that game, we’ll have a record of 3-4 and a pretty good season so far. Let’s go Bulldogs!
