I have never been a huge sports fan.

Sure I played soccer in first grade, and I played lacrosse for two years in high school, but sports have never been a huge part of my life. I never really threw the football around, and I never sat down to watch the game with my buddies.

When I came to Appalachian State University, I could have cared less about the football team, and I still could. It seems in the three years I’ve been here, football has become more and more prominent and the types of people attending the school are different.

Jocks, frat boys and drunks populate the streets during game days, but its OK to be drunk in public because the football game is coming up.

On Saturdays when I leave my house to go into town and there is a home game, part of me wants to die. Part of me wants to die because I hate waiting through the traffic, I hate the people getting drunk at 11 a.m. and I hate not finding parking spaces so I can go about my business.

Boone is too small of a town to support the kind of traffic the football games draw, especially when a lot of attendants are drinking at the games then driving back home.

While people may think the football games bring in commerce for the town businesses, merchants have chimed in against the parking on game days.

At a joint meeting between the Boone Town Council and the Boone Planning commission held Nov. 13, a retailer spoke about parking on game days.

“Parking on game days is killing my retail business,” he said. He went on to say how people park on the main street and walk to the stadium, effectively blocking cars from shopping at his business.

When I came to Appalachian, I came because I wanted to go to class here, not because the football team had won a national championship. When I see people losing their heads over a game, I wonder if they came to school for the same reasons I did. Now, after winning three national championships, the football team is somewhat of a focus at Appalachian.

They spent $50 million to expand and renovate the stadium, which, in my opinion, did not need to be renovated nor expanded. Why not use some of that money for academic purposes? I know my department could probably have used a fraction of that money for better purposes.

I don’t want the football team to go away, I just wish people would act a little less intense about a sports game. I understand the struggles the players go through with school and playing on a sports team, and know it must be hard for them.

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