Becoming a hopper
I have in recent years become familiar with groundhoppers. Through my work at Merstham FC I came into contact with a fair few of them and always found them a friendly if thoroughly eccentric branch of football fans. Sometime in the last six months, something clicked inside me and I now...understood them.
Over the summer break I decided that in the 2011/2012 football season I would become a groundhopper. For those that may not know, a groundhopper is someone who goes to football matches (or any sport come to that) as often as possible, regardless of following a team, they go to games just to 'tick' off grounds. Eventually once you've been to 20 odd grounds in a league, the league can also be 'ticked off'. If you think this sounds like some weird obsessive compulsive disorder then yeah, you are probably right.
So, I have already spent lots of hours creating some spreadsheets with all of the grounds I've already done by accident! And a massive cross-referenced list of all the football grounds in England that I have never been to. It's about a thousand give or take.
Knowing what I'm like I may well become totally consumed by this passion for 6 months or a year and then just stop, bored with it all. But for now, I am looking forward to it as a way of enjoying the sport I love in a new way; as a way to see parts of the country I wouldn't normally visit; as a way to meet new people and as a way to find enjoyment in something so simple.
Leigh July 2011
Over the summer break I decided that in the 2011/2012 football season I would become a groundhopper. For those that may not know, a groundhopper is someone who goes to football matches (or any sport come to that) as often as possible, regardless of following a team, they go to games just to 'tick' off grounds. Eventually once you've been to 20 odd grounds in a league, the league can also be 'ticked off'. If you think this sounds like some weird obsessive compulsive disorder then yeah, you are probably right.
So, I have already spent lots of hours creating some spreadsheets with all of the grounds I've already done by accident! And a massive cross-referenced list of all the football grounds in England that I have never been to. It's about a thousand give or take.
Knowing what I'm like I may well become totally consumed by this passion for 6 months or a year and then just stop, bored with it all. But for now, I am looking forward to it as a way of enjoying the sport I love in a new way; as a way to see parts of the country I wouldn't normally visit; as a way to meet new people and as a way to find enjoyment in something so simple.
Leigh July 2011
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