WOMEN IN DESIGN: TAAST and Kickball

Happy Tuesday, everyone! Let’s take a moment to appreciate the lack of snow over the last few days. Don’t look at the weather for the rest of this week – we’re being positive right now.

With so many midterms in progress or around the corner, we’re taking it down a notch this week. After all, it’s the once again time for TAAST. The Annual All-College Spring Thing, TAAST is a week of fun, de-stressing, and a host of workshops to learn awesome things. With kickball, the talent show, and the Beaux Arts Ball – and that’s just what happens on the weekends – you can’t help but have fun.

With all of the great activities that will occur, as well as the amazing ones that already took place, we should discuss one of the many important activities: kickball.

I don’t know what you learned in middle school, but kickball is an incredibly serious business. Second only to Tennessee football, this sport requires dedication, focus, skill, and a desire for fun. If you made it out to the park this weekend, feel free to reminisce right now. If you didn’t come, that’s sad…but you can pretend you were there, which is awesome. And be sure to look at all the great photos on the TAAST page on Facebook. You won’t regret it.

But I digress. Back to the sport! Kickball is so awesome that we need a list:

Teamwork! Hopefully by now you know the people in your year pretty well, but kickball is a bonding experience for everyone involved. You and your classmates will grow even closer as you battle for glory and victory.

More bonding! Seriously, though, the bonding doesn’t stop with your year. You already have friends in other years, but with kickball you get to meet more people and make more friends. Even though you’re fighting them for victory one minute, you’ll be hanging out and eating awesome food later.

A good healthy sense of competition! This is the good kind of competition, because at the end of it, everyone gathers around and eats food. But until the food arrives, you get to battle for bragging rights and have fun facing off against the other team.

GPA doesn’t matter! With all of the stress that college brings, nobody at kickball cares if you have a 4.0 or a 2.5. All that matters is your ability to have fun…and your actual skills. I guess those help, too.

Awesome team shirts! Nobody can argue a design student’s ability to think up and make awesome things. The fact that we make what we wear means our teams are that much more awesome, and we can take pride in our work.

A sense of humor! People will pitch terribly, kick terribly, take some spectacular falls, get tackled, and just generally make fools of themselves. But everybody’s doing it, which means everybody’s laughing some time. And there’s no point getting really embarrassed because, as you might have figured out, everybody’s bound to get embarrassed at some point.

But most of all, it’s fun! For all the reasons listed above, and for all the ones I’m certain to have missed, kickball is just an incredibly amazing experience. The mere fact that so many students – and faculty members, too – come out to enjoy a cold Saturday morning is amazing, and really showcases the uniqueness of our college.

So if you didn’t make it to kickball this year, at least be sure to attend all the other awesome TAAST events going on this week. Hope to see you on the kickball field next year, all decked out in handmade team shirts and ready to have a ton of fun!

Go here for all things TAAST. You won’t regret it.

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