beyond the green

On Friday night, the Student Activities Committee hosted a campus-wide game of Persecution. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the game, allow me to fill you in: Persecution seeks to mimic to some extent the lives of the early Anabaptists as they fled religious persecution in the 16^th century.

The point of the game is to work one’s way from safe house to safe house (located in different areas around campus) without getting tagged by a person carrying a broom. If one is tagged, one must go to the jail, where the jailer subjects the prisoners to ridiculous rules. A prisoner may be set free from jail, but only at the jailer’s discretion. Once a person has been to all six safe houses, they receive the password to “heaven.” The game is played at night, wearing all black, and the “Anabaptists” travel in groups of 4 to 10, depending on whom in the group has already been tagged. Essentially, it’s a giant game of Tag, with multiple people who are “it,” and lots of secret passwords.

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One of the best things about Bethel is life on campus. I’m not sure what percentage of students live on campus, but it’s very high. This makes for a very tight-knit community.

My floor in Haury Hall is actually two girls’ halls, but we do most everything together. This past Sunday our two RAs, Lindsey and Jordyn, organized a tie dye party for the 30-some girls on the floor. For most of us it was a fun way to spend time with friends we had already met, but I also talked for the first time with some girls who I had said hi to when passing in the hallway but had never really talked to before.

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This past Thursday, one of the most exciting fall events at Bethel took place. Every year, the volleyball team plays at least one game against our rival opponents, the Tabor College Blue Jays. It seems that every season, these two teams are evenly matched, making for an unforgettable game. This year, the meet was held at Bethel, in Thresher gym, and boy was it unforgettable!

I like to think that almost the entire student body was in attendance. Some of the boys on the basketball team even painted their chests to spell THRESHERS. Everyone was cheering and standing for the duration for the entire five-game match, and for good reason. The games were very intense!

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One of the little joys of coming to Bethel is a thing called Student Announce. This is something that you don’t really think about when you’re examining Bethel, but it’s a nice little tool that is really only available at colleges like Bethel.

Because Bethel is such a tight-knit community, it is possible to e-mail all Bethel students at once. This, my friends, is student announce. Student Announce by itself is a handy tool (if you choose to use it–you can also opt out) for selling books or hearing Student Life announcements, but it gets really hilarious when you start using it for jokes.

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I play basketball here at Bethel and our practices start tomorrow!  That is September 28th!  This is very early for any basketball team to start and I can’t believe it is here already!  Conditioning is over with and it is time to get down to the fun stuff!  I have to admit that it is weird to be starting basketball while volleyball and football and other fall sports are just in the middle of their seasons.  It will give us a lot of time to prepare!

Our team looks very good this year.  We have a lot of seniors and a lot of freshman and then just one sophomore and one junior.  We will have a lot of experience with our seniors and  a lot of raw talent with our freshmen.  It will be interesting to see how this dynamic plays out.  I hope we are able to push each other in practice and make each other better.  Our freshmen are really great girls this year!  It should make for an exciting season!  We may start practice early, but our first game is not until Nov. 4th.  So… enjoy all of the fall sports right now, but be ready for men’s and women’s basketball this winter because both teams have been working very hard!