What rugby taught me about academia - Part 1
In honour of the Women’s 6 Nations Championship and the SVNS Series, this is the first of three posts where I look at skills and habits I acquired as a rugby player and which have made me a better academic and helped me tackle my PhD creatively and sustainably.
I have been a competitive rugby player for nearly half of my life, having played for big clubs such as São Paulo Athletic Club, Harlequins, and Stade Français and earning caps for Cambridgeshire. What began as a way to recover my mental health at the start of university became a career I am actually very proud of, and I can confidently say that I am a better academic because I player and coached rugby for so long. Here are 4 lessons from rugby that I have implemented in my academic career.
1 - Periodisation
This will come as no surprise if you have looked at the RHYTHM section of this website, but the main lesson I have learned from rugby is the importance of periodisation. When I moved into a more semi-professional setting and was expected to train every day, we hat strength and conditioning coaches who broke down a season for us: pre-season, strength, power, injury prevention, sevens season, recovery. This also applies to individual training sessions: for some drills, you focus on technique, whereas for others it is about being in that red zone. My point is that no athlete is in full performance mode 100% of the time, so why do we expect academics to? Yes, there will be times when you have to work more than usual to submit an article ahead of the deadline, and I have been known to do 12-hour days in archives whenever that is possible, but that is like pre-season or sprinting for a try (or, in my case, pushing in a scrum), and nobody does that for the full 80 minutes or for a whole season. Whatever scale of time you are working with (daily, monthly, quarterly, or yearly planning), think of applying periodisation to it and differentiate between when it is time for speed, when it is time for strength, and when it is time for recovery.
2 - Planning ahead for non-work time
When I first started playing, I was part of my university’s team, and our coach was always considerate of our responsibilities as students. I was a very disorganised person and had never considered having a structured routine or planning ahead, but I slowly learned to pack my kit and some food in the morning when I had training in between lectures, for example. But the real lesson came from something my coach said every game week: “finish all of your essays during the week so that this weekend you can think only about rugby”. This has followed me throughout my whole life: finishing my work on time so that non-work time is non-work time. Even if I can’t finish a whole project before the weekend, or a whole task before the end of the work day, at least I can write it down on my to-do list for the next working block so that I can then concentrate on playing (even though nowadays that means playing with my child and not actual rugby!). In order to have unstructured time, you need to make the most of your structured time! (Plus, being an athlete taught me to pack a few snacks to take to the archives or to a long day of teaching just like I would pack my kit bag for a full day of training or playing.)
3 - An adversary is not an enemy
If you have read my previous blog about the PhD being all about creativity, you will know that the defining trait of a doctorate is originality. This means that you are never truly in competition with anyone because nobody else is doing the exact same work as you. Don’t get me wrong, the job market is tough and there are more PhD graduates than there are jobs for us so there will be competition, but this is a systemic problem of Higher Education, not a problem with the community of early-career academics. On the contrary - we need that community if we are going to survive the broken system long enough to try to change it, let alone thrive in it! Even when we are going for the same job or applying for the same grant, your competitor should not be seen as your enemy. Without the opposition, there is no game! Not to mention that the opposition may be an adversary, but at the end of the day they share the same love of the game as you - and there is no better feeling than playing against a really well-drilled, technical, or hard-hitting team! Transpose that to academia and you realise that the person going for the same job as you is likely in the same (often precarious) boat as you, and yes, they are competing against you, but they are also probably one of the few people who share the same dreams as you and know exactly what you are going through (plus their work might be really interesting!).
4 - Receiving feedback
My viva in France was a public event, and there were 7 people in the jury plus a few friends and family in the audience, including some former teammates of mine. I was terrified of one of my examiners: not only was she a “real” literary scholar, whereas I do interdisciplinary work and only came to literary studies in my PhD, but she also works on canonical 19th-century poetry and my work is on poetry as a shared cultural practice which goes beyond the literary field, and I knew she would question why I though bringing together some of the most famous French poets and people whose “bad” poetry shouldn’t even have been published was a good idea. The first words she said to me during my viva were “your supervisors told me you play rugby and are not afraid of contact, so I’m going straight into attack mode”. Funnily enough, that calmed me down, because I went into rugby player mode, and rugby Julia knows that no feedback is personal or can be extrapolated to beyond the specific situation being commented on. When the opposition has just scored again and you find yourself under the posts for the n-th time (for the record, my biggest defeat was 73-0), the captain or the coach are not going to preface every piece of feedback with “you are very good players but could you maybe make those tackles you are missing?”. No, there is a problem to be solved and you have less than 80 minutes to solve it, so feedback will have to be direct, effective, and more often than not quite blunt, and it is up to you to have the psychological strength to separate what you are doing wrong in that situation from who you are as a player. Of course, we have to take into account that most high-level rugby settings offer athletes the psychological support to develop that strength, because it is a muscle you have to work-out like any other, and academia, despite being a high-performance environment, does not offer that support. But my point here is that because I am used to coaches, captains, and gobby scrum-halves not sugar-coating their feedback and because I have learned that what is said (i.e. shouted) on the pitch stays on the pitch, I tend to be okay with the infamous reviewer 2. This does not mean that I tolerate cruelty or gate-keeping, and some reviewers should never be allowed to critique the work of other human beings (just like some coaches should be banned from the game - and I actually quit one of the most prestigious clubs I ever played for because the coach was a bully), but just as giving feedback is a skill, so is receiving it, and that skill came from rugby.
This does not mean everyone should go out there and play rugby (though I seriously think you should give it a try!). The objective of this post is twofold: on the one hand, it looks at transferable skills that are really important in academia and that form a part of the RHYTHM framework but that are seldom talked about. On the other hand, hopefully it will encourage you to continue pursuing hobbies outside of academia as part of your own recovery and periodisation, because every activity (but especially competitive sport) can teach you things that will make you a better academic (or not, which is also fine - not every thing you do needs to be about professional development, but that is a whole different blog). Stay tuned for parts 2 and 3 of this series!
