My stream of consciousness coming out of my Vent poll yesterday got me thinking about this: how many Venters grew up as UGA fans, but lived outside of Georgia?
I never lived in Georgia before moving to Athens to attend UGA. We moved a few times when I was a kid, ultimately living in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Alabama at different points. But with my dad and his dad being UGA alumni, no matter where I lived, we attended plenty of games, so Athens ended up being a constant in my life.
As I indicated in the post attached to the aforementioned poll, living outside of Georgia and being a big UGA fan kind of sharpened the edge on my fandom. As my school's only UGA fan (among swarms of UNC, Duke, Alabama, Clemson, and South Carolina fans, depending on where I lived at the time), I was always known as "the Georgia guy" as far back as elementary school. That's a vastly different experience than my kids are having, going to a school where half the teachers went to UGA and probably 80% of the students are UGA fans.
When I arrived in Athens, I knew no one on campus. Nobody from my high school had gone to UGA in several years, so I didn't have the kind of built-in social network a lot of Georgia natives have when they attend the university. I kind of enjoyed the clean slate; I wasn't locked into a preexisting peer group, and got to make a whole new roster of friends in college.
Truth be told, while I've often wondered what it might have been like to have grown up in Georgia and attended UGA with a bunch of my high school friends, I really wouldn't trade my experience for anyone else's. I truly liked being an outlier as the lone UGA fan I knew everywhere I grew up, and I've gotten to know the state pretty well during and since college.
Who else here grew up outside of Georgia and attended UGA? Were your experiences similar to mine?
-- 00 Dawg
I never lived in Georgia before moving to Athens to attend UGA. We moved a few times when I was a kid, ultimately living in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Alabama at different points. But with my dad and his dad being UGA alumni, no matter where I lived, we attended plenty of games, so Athens ended up being a constant in my life.
As I indicated in the post attached to the aforementioned poll, living outside of Georgia and being a big UGA fan kind of sharpened the edge on my fandom. As my school's only UGA fan (among swarms of UNC, Duke, Alabama, Clemson, and South Carolina fans, depending on where I lived at the time), I was always known as "the Georgia guy" as far back as elementary school. That's a vastly different experience than my kids are having, going to a school where half the teachers went to UGA and probably 80% of the students are UGA fans.
When I arrived in Athens, I knew no one on campus. Nobody from my high school had gone to UGA in several years, so I didn't have the kind of built-in social network a lot of Georgia natives have when they attend the university. I kind of enjoyed the clean slate; I wasn't locked into a preexisting peer group, and got to make a whole new roster of friends in college.
Truth be told, while I've often wondered what it might have been like to have grown up in Georgia and attended UGA with a bunch of my high school friends, I really wouldn't trade my experience for anyone else's. I truly liked being an outlier as the lone UGA fan I knew everywhere I grew up, and I've gotten to know the state pretty well during and since college.
Who else here grew up outside of Georgia and attended UGA? Were your experiences similar to mine?
-- 00 Dawg
