Jenna Lemberg is a 23-year-old German philology major who manages to combine her studies with two active hobbies. Here she tells us how she does it and why she thinks it’s never too late to start a new hobby.
Jenna watching the Champion’s League in Portugal last fall
Tell us a little about your hobbies and how you ended up choosing them?
I play soccer and American football. I also go to the gym and run. I started playing soccer at secondary school, so around 10 years ago. American football I started last year when a women’s team was found in my hometown Lohja. I’m absolutely nuts about American football, I could play it every day.
The biggest reason why I like both of them is that they’re team sports. With your team, you share everything from happy times to sad ones, victories to losses and from tough practices to successes.
How many times a week do you have practices or matches?
I have ball practices five times a week and I go to the gym and run three times a week as well. During the summer, we also have matches once a week or so. When the playing season is on, I don’t go to the gym as often.
Combining two sports is pretty hard because I want to give 100% to everything I do. You can go running and visit the gym on the same day, but usually I have to skip one ball practice. There just aren’t enough days in the week and you can’t develop if you don’t take any days off. The number of practices is also dependent on whether we have a light, medium heavy or heavy week going on.
So far, I’ve managed to avoid major injuries, even though my team members call me Jenna ‘Injury’ Lemberg. Minor injuries happen quite often, though. For example, just last November I broke a few fingers.
How do you combine two active hobbies with studying at the university? How do you have energy for everything?
Many people have asked me this but I don’t have any problems with it! Even though I have to travel from Lohja to the university almost every day, I feel like I’d do much worse if I wasn’t so active. This is my third year studying and last week was the first time I had to skip practice because of school. Of course, when choosing courses I have to be careful and not take ones that last beyond four o’clock on days that I have practice. But then again, I don’t do much else than study, work and do sports and that’s fine by me.
How do people view women’s football in Finland?
Many people have been surprised that women play American football too. But in general, I think they take it really well and are interested.
What would you say to your fellow students who’d like to start a new sport but feel like they’re too old or are scared to join a team alone?
Age should be no barrier. In both of my teams there are players 15-20 years older than me who started within last year with no prior experience with the sport. Be brave, think about what sport might interest you the most and contact the team. If you want to try American football and practices at Lohja, that won’t be a problem, you can contact me and come give it a go at our practices! You’ll also find us on Facebook under ‘Lohja Lionesses’.
Jenna with her team
Photos (c) Jenna Lemberg