The Gladiators are back! Come Join the Tribe

Next session: Friday 16th October, 18:30. Oxstalls Campus, Business School building.

First session back, and the thing that stood out was how many faces in the room were new ones.

Some had played before. Most hadn't. A few turned up because a mate dragged them along and stayed because it turned out to be a laugh. That's the honest answer to the question everyone asks before their first session: do I need experience? No. Almost nobody arrives with it. What you actually need is to walk through the door once.

The reasons you're telling yourself no

"I've never played." Neither had most of the squad. This isn't football or rugby, where everyone's been playing since they were six and you're ten years behind before you start. Nearly everyone in British university American football starts at university. The person next to you on Friday will be exactly as lost as you are, and that is a much better place to learn from than being the only beginner in a room of veterans.

"I'm not fit enough." Nobody is, in September. Fitness is something the season gives you, not something you're supposed to bring to it. Turning up unfit and improving is the normal route in; waiting until you're in shape to start is how people never start.

"I'm the wrong shape for it." This is the sport that has the least claim on that excuse of any sport going. There are eleven jobs on the field at once and they want completely different humans. Big and immovable. Quick and fearless. Tall with reliable hands. Short with a low centre of gravity and no interest in being moved. Relentless and not much else. If you've spent your life being told you're too heavy for one sport or too small for another, there is a position here that specifically wants what you've got. You just won't know which one until you've tried a few, and that's fine — nobody expects you to turn up knowing.

"I'd look like an idiot." You will, briefly. So did everyone. The playbook looks like a foreign language for about a fortnight and then one day it doesn't, and you realise you're the one explaining it to somebody newer. That turnaround is faster than you'd think.

"It's too late to join." It is September. It is the opposite of too late. The people who make the roster this season are the ones in the room right now, and the coaching staff are genuinely still working out who plays where.

What you'd be joining

Last season this club went to Swansea — division champions, unbeaten all year — and beat them 27–0 to make the play-offs. That squad was built largely out of people who, eighteen months earlier, had never put a helmet on. The gap between "never played" and "on the field in a play-off game" is a lot smaller than it looks from the outside.

And the bit nobody puts on the poster: this is one of the fastest ways to end up with a group of mates at university. It's a squad sport where everyone learns the same strange new thing at the same time, which is a shortcut to knowing people properly. Plenty of players will tell you they came for the sport and stayed for everything around it.

Friday

18:30, downstairs lecture hall in the Business School at Oxstalls. It starts indoors in the classroom, then onto the 4G pitches. Bring your boots, water, and sensible clothing . There is no commitment, no sign-up.

Bring a mate. Rookies who arrive in pairs almost never drop out.

If you need a lift to the business school, what to know more or just say Hi before you come, please join our WhatsApp group!

26/27 Rookies Chat

See you Friday.

Photography courtesy of shotbystevie @shotbysteviephotography