【HULABOWL現地レポート②】アメフト部宮澤選手：本場への挑戦

宮沢がコミュニケーションギャップを縮めるチャンスは、あと数回しかない。土曜日は早朝からバスでセントラルフロリダ大学構内のBounce House Stadiumに向かい、午後12時（米国東部時間/日本時間1月16日の午前2時）のキックオフに備えます。

Reported by KELLY FRANKLIN

ORLANDO, FLORIDA— Take a baseball player in Japan and transport him to America. With little to no effort, that player could step into a baseball game and compete with no further need for instruction or translation. The same is true for many other sports, but not at all for the complex game of American football.

College and pro football teams in the U.S. have thick multi-page playbooks that must be committed to memory from the first days of practice. On each play of any game, different attack formations and actions require totally different movements from each player. The complexity involved is even higher for the “skill players” such as quarterbacks and wide receivers.

Wide receiver Ryo Miyazawa is learning first-hand just how daunting a task it is to play at the highest levels in the United States while navigating new systems in a foreign language.

Arriving in Orlando on Sunday, January 9 as one of just two Japanese players selected to participate in this year’s Hula Bowl All-Star game, Miyazawa was handed a totally new playbook on Monday and has had just three team meetings and two short practice sessions to learn the plays and more importantly, to communicate with teammates about how the plays need to be run.

“The first few days, the language barrier was a big wall,” Miyazawa said. “It was difficult to know what to do on each play. Even though much of the football terminology is the same here and in Japan, the pronunciations and accents of the native-speaking quarterbacks were so different that it raised the challenge to another level.”

Making the job even more difficult is the very nature of an All-Star game, where players on each 56-man roster are coming from all over the United States, with different regional accents and phrasing. One quarterback on Miyazawa’s “Team Kai” roster hails from the deep south state of Louisiana and another is from the western state of California. It’s not at all rare for even native-speaking Americans from those two states to struggle trying to understand each other.

Like any language learner, Miyazawa has resorted to countless repetitions and the use of gestures when all else fails.

“The first two days, I had to ask the quarterbacks to repeat some of the words over and over, then I would repeat the way they sounded, to myself,” Miyazawa said. “I’ve slowly started to understand more. Quarterbacks and coaches have developed some gestures, too. Now, it’s much more satisfactory and after early struggles I had an enjoyable third day.”

The experience during the practices and festivities of Hula Bowl week have given Miyazawa a new challenge to pursue during his senior year at Oberlin.

“This has made me think about studying English more next year, so that if I got a similar chance I’d be able to communicate better,” Miyazawa said. “I would suggest that other players, if they have any desire to participate in similar types of events in the future, also study English more to get more from the experience.”

Miyazawa will have just a few more chances to continue narrowing the communication gap. The two teams have position meetings and a brief walk-through practice Friday morning, then all head to the Magic Kingdom for a day of Disney relaxation, away from football. Saturday morning will be an early bus ride to the “Bounce House” Stadium on the University of Central Florida campus to prepare for the 12:00 p.m. (Eastern US time) kickoff.