How To Mesh Styles With Your Roommate When You’re Fans of Rival Sports Teams

By Victoria Robertson on August 20, 2015

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When you and your roommate are huge sports fans, things can get complicated — especially if you’re both fans of different teams.

Bears or Packers, Yankees or Mets, Celtics or Lakers, Capitals or Penguins: I feel your pain.

There’s nothing more difficult than fighting over which pennants can be hung in your apartment, or which team member’s bobble head can be sitting in your dorm room.

Team rivalries are a big deal, especially when both you and your roommate are adamant about which team is better.

So to help ease the tension in your campus housing, here are some ways to mesh styles with your roommate, even when you’re both fans of different sports teams.

The first thing you need to understand, and I know this is probably the hardest thing you’ll ever hear, but you’re going to have to compromise, at least a little bit.

You can divide and conquer, which entails splitting up your dorm room (or apartment) into equal halves, where you and your rival can hang sports decorations. This is typically easiest when you’re splitting a dorm room, but much more difficult in an apartment (and bound to cause a few fights).

You can have designated rooms (in your apartment) for each team. Obviously, each of your bedrooms would be fair game, but maybe you could each take a bathroom as well and split the other rooms in your apartment. Again, this can get hairy (with one roommate upset that the other one has more room than they do, etc.).

Finally, you can have a schedule. This is by far the most ridiculous suggestion, but if you and your roommate are incapable of compromise, this is how it’s done. Only on game days (where the team in question is playing) a roommate may bring out their sports paraphernalia. Other than this day, all equipment must be stored out of sight.

Of course, if you’re a bit more grown up than this, you can decide to have fun with the rivalry and make it into a game.

For instance, when your teams play one another, place bets with your roommate that whichever team wins can hang up their team’s flag in the loser’s room. Or the losing team needs to buy the opposing team’s bedspread and use it for the rest of the semester.

If you want this to go on a little longer, you could use the entire season’s schedule, and every time your roommate’s team wins, you need to purchase a decoration for that team and hang it in your apartment (and vice versa). This way, the decorating occurs throughout the year, so you continuously have an apartment game going on to annoy your non-sports fan roommates with.

Yet another way to have a little fun with the rivalry, and to let your creative side shine, is to create a mash-up of your rival teams and decorate the apartment with this new logo. You can create banners, etc. of both teams to make the apartment decorating equal. Plus, you’ll then have something to do during the first week or so of classes. You’re welcome.

Last but not least, you could just both be adults about the whole thing and decorate the apartment accordingly. Since most college students aren’t this civil, especially when it comes to something as trivial as sports rivalries, I highly doubt this will happen. But hey, I threw it out there: if you want to use the advice, take it, if not, go ahead and leave it and continue to fight with your roommate about which team will be better this season when in reality, both of them are absolutely terrible.

Sports rivalries are pretty stupid when you think about it, and yet, we can’t get enough of them. So I blame you for picking a roommate that likes your team’s rival, so deal with it however you choose (the more immature you are about it, the better), decorate your apartment accordingly, and quit talking up the Bear’s defense when you know it’s non-existent.

Rivalries were built to make grown men cry and to disappoint fans everywhere: so stop buying into, watch the adult men throw their temper tantrum when they strike out and just enjoy the fact that you can sit on your couch and judge them.

And stop worrying about whether or not your living room rug is supporting your team or your rival, because it doesn’t matter. You’ll both probably lose anyway.

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