Intramural Flag Football makes us Smarter

People interpret the word "smart" in various ways. The most common interpretation of being smart is the ability to retain information and understanding it. The truth is that "smartness" or intelligence is unique to numerous aspects of life. For example, many people underestimate the importance of emotional intelligence which is the ability to recognize emotions and understand them. Believe it or not, playing flag football at Drexel implements these various ways of being smart.

Flag football involves a great amount of coordination both physically and mentally. Coordinating a team is one aspect that is overlooked in sports. At Drexel the students are allowed to choose their team members which requires a great deal of intelligence. We have to evaluate each persons strengths and weaknesses to see what position they are most adept at performing. Also, everyone that is playing has a busy schedule and you must learn how to balance your classwork, eating habits, studying, social activities, and other tasks throughout each day. This requires an enormous amount of planning and reasoning which is an aspect of the cerebral cortex. This trains our minds for the "real life" when we are going to have to maintain a schedule with numerous tasks.

As explained by Steven Johnson in his novel Everything Bad Is Good for You, multiple threads, such as in TV shows, require an increased amount of brain usage to keep track of whats going on. The same is true for playing on a flag football team because numerous amounts of things are going on during a game. As a player I have to keep track of what down it is, know what the opposing players strengths are, know who I am covering or trying to avoid, understand the rules of the game, know what my immediate goals are, and a plethora of other things. All of these things are running simultaneously through my mind and this trains the brain to multitask and follow a hierarchy of goals. Steven Johnson said that video games involve number goals that the player needs to learn how to prioritize which requires a great deal of focus. The same is true when playing a sport, there are both immediate goals and long term goals. The long term goals are obvious, to win each game and win the championship, but the short term goals involve individual plays such as stopping the team on fourth down. Learning how to manage these tasks is a crucial part of being smart.

Flag football teams have sixteen players on each team and each player is unique. Steven Johnson described the complexity of TV shows and movies through character maps and the increasing number of connections between characters in a show. In football, every player is good at something different and learning these differences is vital to being an intelligent player. For example, if a player is good at catching the ball, it is not a great idea to make the player a lineman. Recognizing each players strengths allows for a team to succeed because you want to exploit each players strengths. This is training the way the brain thinks like a video game does. Books simply dictate a narrative while video games and sports require you to interact, prioritize, and execute. Emotional intelligence is also important because during a game, various emotions arise and if you do not recognize them it will lead to miscommunication and sometimes even a fight! In conclusion, flag football is a complex activity that involves all aspects of brain usage ranging from using the limbic system (emotions) to the cerebral cortex (planning).