White Mountain Open 2007

Ugh. This one, unfortunately, is easy to write up:

• Lost 'em all. Pool play losses: half-of-Boston, Big Ego, Bro White, and Chuck Wagon. Play-in loss: New Noise. That bounced us down to the open div. bracket, but our opponents didn't show (Dartmouth Alums) so we called it a day. A few of us stuck around and ended up picking up with Big Ego for their consolation game (they were down to 9 players and had just lost a close one in the quarters). Lost that one too, to GLUM.
• Personally, worst tournament ever (no hyperbole). I've had bad games, I've even had bad days, but never before have I had an entire bad tournament. Every game on Saturday was disastrous. I was relatively pleased with my Sunday play against New Noise, and I was point-blocked twice in that game! That should give you some idea of how poorly things went for me.

On the team front, attrition hurt. Thought we were going to have 14 players, but two of our best athletes had to cancel at the last minute. Apparently it doesn't pay to be among our best athletes, as we lost two more of them over the course of Saturday (one early, one late). Then one of our top handlers by halftime of the play-in game on Sunday, leaving us with nine.

As for my abysmal performance, lots of factors. I've been struggling with a groin pull, and haven't been playing in an attempt to get it healthy. I've probably played five times since the fall, and I'm simply not one of those players who can get away with that. Time to ignore the groin and get on the field more often. Also, my mental game was atrocious. I don't think I made a single play (even routine catches or throws) where some part of my brain (sometimes a large part) wasn't thinking "okay, don't screw this up." You know what that leads to.

Actually, what it leads to is this: for the Chuck Wagon game one of our more sadistic players hit on the idea of having to play in your spandex underlayer with your shirt tucked in for a point if you screwed up. I ended up doing the honors pretty damn early. Kinda helped, in a "rose goes in the front, big guy" kind of way.

Finally, this is probably old news, but this weekend I heard that Jeff Graham tore his ACL. Such news is always bad, but in his case it made me particularly, inexplicably sad. "Inexplicably" because I've never met the guy, I've only seen him play. But he's obviously in tremendous shape, is so much fun to watch, and clearly takes great joy in the game. Also, by all accounts, he's one of the nicest guys around. ACL tears are just so random. One minute you're on top of the world, then you land a bit funny, and your season's over. It doesn't matter how hard you work, or what kind of shape you're in. Intelligent Design my ass. Sigh. Anyway, here's to Jeff's speedy recovery.