Corporate Team Building

Last Wednesday night I went to a soccer pitch in the middle of urban Beijing to play with 9 of my coworkers from my internship at IDC China.

Things got off to a bizarre start when my well-dressed boss and other superiors all stripped down to their tightie-whities in the middle of the field, just a chain-link fence away from the busiest and most famous avenue in all of China. Apparently when they had said "we'll change at the soccer field," they had been speaking quite literally. Nearly all of them had actual soccer cleats, and I felt a little under-equipped in my dirty Saucony running shoes and baggy black sweatpants. We began playing in a small area wedged between several pick-up games, shooting at two shoulder-high goals. I was standing in front of one goal stretching when I noticed that about 7 or 8 of the Chinese players had converged on the ball, like kindergartners at their first practice in the park. Apparently, we had started. For about 15 minutes, I tried my best to stay out of the action and to guess who was on my team (no one had bothered to tell me or answer my panicked questions). In the most politically correct way possible, I will say that in the heat of the action most of my coworkers looked about the same to me. Numerous times I passed the ball to someone I had thought to be a teammate, only to have them race back the other way and score. If my Chinese coworkers hadn't heard the English phrase "my bad" before the other night, they have now.

I started sweating about 30 minutes into the game, and took off my black hoodie, revealing a gray long-sleeve tee shirt. My boss, Luke, ran over and asked, "What are you doing? Will you put that back on?" Apparently, the entire time we had been playing light shirts vs. dark shirts and I hadn't been told. That made things easier, to say the least.

Largely fueled by my ineptitude and communication errors, our team immediately went down something like 7-0. It was embarrassing and despite promising myself that I would stay calm and not try, I started to try. Over the next hour or so, I scored about 15 of our team's 20 goals. We had moved to a larger field, and now that I was able to run in open grass there wasn't a whole lot that many of my opponents could do. I was hailed as a defensive genius, as apparently I was the first to introduce the Chinese people to the concept of man-marking. So you're saying that if you stand in front of an opponent, that makes it harder for them to receive passes and score? Brilliant!

The Chinese also seem to lack a perception of field boundaries, and it was not uncommon to be moving the ball up the pitch only to be brushed back by a pair of wildly sprinting players from the next field over, chasing a long pass.

I know that all of my coworkers know how to speak English, and they were all very kind and spoke to me in English before and after the game. During play, however, there was absolutely no English, bar one word: "Sh*t."

All in all, it was a great experience. I'm hoping it gives me the guts to be more conversational in the office, and that my coworkers will stop referring to me as Messi, the world's best player. I'm not really very good.