The Fighting Unicorns

Most of my posts are about me. But not this one. Today I am writing about the Fighting Unicorns of the International School Hannover Region. They are not jousting or fencing team. They do not play dungeons and dragons together while wearing Medieval era costumes.
(brief tangent: when we lived in St Paul there was a group of people that would do that every Saturday morning in Como Park. There's a name for it: Live Action Role Play or LARP. It's a whole subculture. They dressed in their Rennaisance festival outfits and had swords and shields and such. Brian and I often saw them while we sped by on our bikes, dressed in spandex. Who do you think looked funnier?)

The Unicorns are a group of teachers from the school, plus a couple of their friends, who play football (translation: soccer) in the gym on Monday afternoons. The name sounds like it was chosen for a bunch of six year old girls, which they are not, so you should know the story behind it. The reason they chose the name is that the ISHR mascot is the Mustang. On the wall of the school gym is a big painting of a white mustang that looks like it was made by one of the kids. It looks sort of like a unicorn. So the name is a jab at the school and at how its school sports teams generally lack any sort of ferocity.

The players have varying levels of fitness and flexibility, ranging in age from 26 to 36. Brian was at first not interested in joining them. He started out thinking that soccer was an ok game in which he had no interest. Then a few years ago, he decided it was kind of fun to watch on TV. Once we moved here he took a little more interest in watching it but had no desire to play. Peer pressure is a funny thing though, and with that plus no other outlet for organized sports, he started to join the group and play on Mondays. It wasn't pretty at first (so I'm told) but he picked up the game pretty fast and now is a solid member of the Unicorn defense.

On Saturday, the lads (that's a football term) played outside teams for the first time. They were in a football tournament with various club teams from around Hannover, all of which had more players, uniforms and coaches, were about 25 years old and had done this sort of thing before. The Unicorns were scrappy, however, and meaner than the other guys. I was not there, but Brian tells me that there was trash talking in English and the mild-mannered math teacher knocked over a guy twice his size. They were the underdogs. They ended up finishing 4th out of 8 teams.
Here are the Fighting Unicorns:

 The defensive squad sported handlebar mustaches to intimidate the competition and also to look like convicts from the late 1970s.
Their legs might still be aching, but their pride is intact.