tryouts

in the club ultimate world, almost everyone is on the lookout for a "better" team. yes, there are a lucky few who play on a team with their best friends at the level they want and achieve the success they are hoping for. unfortunately, most of us struggle to match that ideal with reality - your best friends are scattered across the country, only 16 teams in each division go to nationals, teammates often disagree about the appropriate level of commitment, and a few mistakes on the field can cost you the success you worked for all year.

last year i wasn't satisfied with my team (chinstrap) so this year.... i'm forming a new team! name as yet to be determined. we held the first tryout this weekend and 60 people showed up. wow. great start - now we have to figure out who the good players are, keep them interested, get them committed, learn to play as a team, maintain goodwill among teammates... you know, all the easy stuff. wish me luck.

ugly sweaters galore!

what a great weekend! my roommates (alex, matt and meriden) hosted an ugly christmas sweater party, which was a resounding success. our apartment was packed with frisbee players, colleagues, family members, fellow students and neighbors. lots of guests brought their own sweaters, and those that didn't got their pick of the "extra sweaters" pile. by the end of the night, most of the extra sweaters were gone, and late arrivals had limited choices...

i wore an infant sweater (the sleeves came to my elbows), we held a sweater contest (mc'ed by me), alex got in a fight with misbehaving attendees, i hung mistletoe from our kitchen light fixture, some guy threw up in the sink, chinstrap guys and their sketchy friends took over the porch and the party ended with a 5 am singing circle. all in all, a truly great party.

of course, any good party should be followed by a 7:20 am wake up call from your brother, reminding you that you are already 20 min late for the 7 am departure to Get Ho Ho Ho. (i gave sam my key on friday night so he could physically wake me up if necessary.)

by the time i arrived at the fields, i was feeling ok, if a little out of it. our team was small, which helped us keep warm, and we had a bunch of fun games. after winning our pool, we met a slow-white-conglomeration team in the semis. they started off by breaking us and it looked like it would be a tough game. fortunately, we cleaned up our playing (zirui slightly reduced the number of hammers he threw) and pulled out a solid win. the finals were another story - we were tired and their team was better than ours. we still had a decent showing (11-7 maybe?) but couldn't seriously challenge them.

i had to work sunday, which was a little hard, but i made it through and i slept all day today to compensate. next tourney is vegas!

frisbee in the cold

this saturday, i drove up to bowdoin, maine (site of many swim meets!) for a little frisbee and a LOT of cold.

thanks to sam (i really can't say enough how great this guy is), stew (that's our team) has managed to create a solid tradition of sending fun (and good) boston players to very cold tournaments, where we beat up on college kids and sort of try against other hastily-put-together teams of club players.

this year's frozen butterball (named after the frozen turkey that is the winning team's prize) featured snow flurries and a deep understanding of the phrase "wind-chill factor". sam, steve, zirui, amanda, ellen and i arrived at the fields only 20 minutes after the games were scheduled to start. steve had spent much of the ride up devising strategies for 6 on 7, but bowdoin thankfully agreed to donate X (his real name was arnab, but he seemed to prefer X).

we fought off the cold with many layers of clothing, amanda's sleeping bag, lots of huddling, and delicious stew (remember that guy sam? he made the stew). darah and dana arrived right when we needed them, in our third game, against a pretty solid team. and the moment when i came off the field and darah handed me a cup of hot cider with rum - priceless.

we won our pool, then the semifinal game and were discussing forfeiting the finals, when the other semifinal winner forfeited first! then the other semifinal loser (who we had alreay beaten earlier) insisted that we play them again, so we squeaked out another win 5-4 (game to 5) as the sun went down. our first butterball victory!

frankly, the only really disappointing moment was when i realized the turkey we had won was going to be donated to charity, and not eaten by us at a fun, post-butterball get-together. darn.

when we got home, i got into bed immeadiately and fell asleep with my body still thawing out. i slept for the next 10 hours, missing the saturday night events i was supposed to attend.

all in all, pretty great. i love ultimate.

ps. tom daschle's hair has gone completely white! he looks a lot older than i remember. also 538 is projecting al franken to win by 27 votes.