Football and law school

Law school can be a direly demanding and exhausting undertaking. The usual grind of reading encyclopedia-thick commentaries and verbose jurisprudence can take its toll on one’s sanity. Further aggravating the stress is the ordeal of tense recitations, and the written exam can be just as arduous.

In going through law school, the motivation I need to push myself to go on often springs from finding kinship with the struggles of other people who invest in passion and grit in pursuit of success. After watching the recently concluded Fifa World Cup, I realized that football players are perfect for exactly that purpose.

By the time I entered law school, the Fifa World Cup 2018 was just about to begin. I watched the last edition of the quadrennial tournament and found it an enthralling experience. At this year’s games, I witnessed more penalty shoot-outs, late game heroics and dramatic finishes than in the previous Cup.

Every time the side I supported lost, the heartbreak stung worse than before. It felt that way when Japan lost to Belgium after squandering a substantial two-goal lead, and when my favorite team Brazil was eliminated in the next round.

The travails of law school can be likened to the difficulty of winning in Fifa. To survive a semester plentiful of do-or-die moments, the class should be just as bonded as a football team, and must regard each other as brothers-in-arms. In this sport, injury, defeat and despair will be as common, and strategies and tactics to avert or overcome them will come in handy just as much. Through it all, my classmates and I will be in this battle for four laborious years.

In class, the casualties will come in the form of bad recitations, failed exams, emotional and physical fatigue, humiliation inflicted by terror professors, and many others. The strategies will consist of study tips, good study habits and buddies, time management and adequate review materials.

Like footballers, students in a block should be able to help one another lift themselves from setbacks to avoid falling into defeatism. They must cheer up their downtrodden mate and help build up each other’s emotional resiliency, so that bouncing back from bad days in class will be much easier.

Perhaps no other aspect of football can be more starkly relatable to law school life than penalty shoot-outs. The penalty shoot-out is that all-too dreaded climactic stage in the game where victory and defeat are separated by mere inches. The moment is intense, pressure-packed, nerve-wracking and stomach-turning.

Similar circumstances occur when a law student is called by the professor to engage in a recitation, or when the teacher conducts examinations. At that precise moment, the nerve switch gets flipped, and the pressure is on. Time stops for you and the professor, as if you are the penalty taker and the professor is the goalie standing in the way of your passing grade goal. For each question, every word, every phrase and every paragraph must be correctly put over, because one wrong word can spell the difference between passing and failing.

As daunting as that sounds, it serves as a reminder of how excruciatingly meticulous and exacting the study of law can be, and, why, under such circumstances, there is almost no room for error.

Yet while it is true that hurdling challenges in law school can demand so much out of a student, the feeling of elation after hurdling them is also worth cherishing. It’s like scoring that game-winning goal to save your squad from elimination. Imagine how uplifting that is, and how fun getting mugged by your teammates in delirious jubilation, the crowd meanwhile going bonkers.

To rephrase an adage: Difficult roads lead to beautiful destinations. For pupils of the law, no moment is more beautiful than that spurt of brilliant legal insight that reinvigorates one’s embattled spirit as he or she hacks away at the books. Football athletes, meanwhile, spend countless hours grinding away in practice to come up with an awe-inspiring performance that will hopefully turn them into legends.

Law students and football athletes both intend to prove to the world one thing: that they can turn the impossible into “I’m possible.”

Jan Paulo Sarmiento, 24, is taking up law at De La Salle University-Manila (BGC campus).