Short Story 'Keep On Ruckin'

Keep on Ruckin’
Crack! I felt the air being forced out of my lungs as I hit the ground. Dazed and gasping, I struggled to protect the ball from the hands of my opponents for those critical moments until help arrived. It came. I saw a blur of green and orange as my team-mates reached the skirmish and threw off my assailants. As a familiar hand swept the ball up and away, the action moved on. For half a moment, I lay there, aching from the tackle and burning from the exertion, but my job was not over. I dragged myself to my feet and followed my brothers back into the fray. I knew that in rugby, as in life, you’re going to get knocked down, but success is about always getting back up.
It might seem strange to some people that I had willingly thrown myself into
We have to tell them that it’s not OK to keep missing practices and hanging the rest of us out to dry.”
“Yeah, I see what you’re saying, but right now guys can just show up to games without coming to practice and they’re gonna play, cos we need every-body we can get…”
We realized that we needed a plan to get more people involved and invested in the team, and by the time we’d drained our last Lone Star’s we had one. Over the next few days we got to work, hard. We both started hassling our team mates for their lack of commitment and actively recruiting from our friends and colleagues, we even went out and put up posters all across the island. We kept on running practices, hassled everyone a bit more and organized socials to build up the team off the pitch too.
At the following practice, we had seven instead of two. It wasn’t great, but it was a start, and we knew that big changes didn’t happen overnight. We stuck to our guns through those summer months, and by the time the new season came around, at the end of August, we had more than 20 guys showing