From the ingroup to the outgroup

Belonging to a high school sports team is a big part of someones identity during high school. For the most part your team mates are your friends and you hang out on and off the court/field. It also seems everyone believes their sport or their team is superior to the rest, they work harder, are more fit, or their sport requires more skill than the rest. I was a member of both soccer and cross country in high school and girls from both teams were not necessarily fans of each other.

I started out my freshman year running cross country. My sister had joined the team two years before me so I already knew most of the team members as they were all good friends and became my friends also. In addition to the core cross country members, some of the girls on the team were only in cross country so that the could be in an athletics class first semester so their schedule wouldn't change the second semester when their primary sport began. In this instance their were quite a few soccer players running cross country. The majority of the cross country team were die hard runners. They felt cross country required more endurance and over all fitness than it did in soccer (disclaimer: as a member of both I think they are both great sports and both require extreme physical fitness, the focus of training is just obviously different soccer requires more speed and control and distance running focuses endurance).

As the majority of the team were runners they created the ingroup, that means they felt a closer connection with runners and formed a group where runners were believed to be overall more friendly and more fit. The random soccer team girls were few and far between so they were the outgroup in this situation, the group the runners felt no sense of connection or belonging with. Additionally, no one took the time to get to know them because they assumed they were all bitchy and not interested in the cross country team, this is know as the outgroup homogenity effect (Linville & Jones, 1980), believing members of an outgroup are all the same.

Unfortunately for me, when soccer season rolled around I became the outgroup. The soccer girls who had been in cross country thought I was just a snobby cross country bitch and we did not much get along. It was an interesting experience going between both teams and witnessing discrimination from both sides.

Linville, P. W., & Jones, E. E. (1980). Polarized appraisals of outgroup members. Journal of Personality and Social Pyschology, 38, 689-703.