Chapter 85: The Competitive Edge
I miss playing a wide selection of sports. Since high school, the only two sports that I have played with any regularity is volleyball and tennis. While at times I have felt the want to play other sports again, it wasn’t until recently that I realized how much fun it was doing so. A couple years ago, I joined an ultimate team, and although that was my first real experience playing this particular sport, I had a really enjoyable time with it. As mentioned in previous entries, in the past few months, I’ve been playing soccer again in the corporate setting, and that’s been a blast as well. Today, a coworker had me come out to join his softball team practice. The last time I played softball had to have been three or four years ago, and before that, all the way back in high school. I have made great plays in most sports that I’ve played in, but the one feat I’ve never done is to make a great catch - a full out diving catch in the outfield - in baseball or softball. Today, I finally managed to accomplish this during batting practice. I tracked down a long fly ball in right field and the ball met the glove just as it reached the grass with my body fully layed out sideways. I’m actually pretty proud of that. =) While my inexperienced definitely showed, with many of my throws being errant, I think I fit in pretty well, as I think my natural skill was fairly evident. I may be subbing for their team for some games, but that remains to be seen when. I think I would like to buy a decent catching glove, batting glove, and baseball cleats if I intend on playing more than a couple times.
Following up on my previous entry, we indeed did defeat Mobidia in our soccer match, by the slim margin of 2-1. They were definitely a formidable bunch. Apparently I may have had a hand in breaking some guys ribs during the match. We didn’t even know until the following week when one of their guys, who used to work for us, told us of the fact. Apparently it happened when he went up for a header and got sandwiched by two guys, and from the video that we recorded, the only such event that matched that description involved me as one of the sandwichers. It doesn’t even look like much of an impact, so I didn’t even include that bit of footage in the Youtube highlights video.
A couple weeks after that match, we played a game against Citadel. In keeping with the tradition of every team being tougher than the last, our winning streak finally ended, although our undefeated streak did not. After about 40 minutes, we held a comfortable 4-1 lead. Unfortunately, our team completely disintegrated after that, and they came roaring back with four unanswered tallies to take the lead at 5-4. We managed to notch the tying goal to salvage our dignity, but it was still a disappointing result.
Last weekend, the annual Asian Invitational volleyball tournament took place again. As I said previously, I would actually be quite happy if we managed to finish even as high as we did last year, which was 3rd place in the lower tier. This year, the experience was absolutely terrible. On the first day of play Saturday, we got off to a decent start and won our first set, but then proceeded to lose the remaining 11 sets. Granted, out of the six games in the round robin, we did play what proved to be three of the top four teams in the tournament. On a personal level, I played absolutely terrible as libero. I shanked way too many serve receptions, and even managed to pass some free balls errantly. Completely unacceptable. However, as the record would indicate, the rest of the team wasn’t doing much better. That night, I actually got called for a work emergency, and I ended up having to go downtown and move three servers from one building to another and install and configure the systems. I did this remarkably quickly, and it only took me about 2.5 hours until 2am to get it done. On Sunday, I felt I played much better as libero, but we still did terrible. We lost our first match, and got relegated to the backdoor. We managed to beat the first team in the backdoor draw, but then lost a heartbreaker in the next round. It was one set to 25, hard capped. We led the entire set, and got to a score a 24-23. But, the other team won the next two points to take the victory. Ouch. So out of 9 teams in the bottom tier, I think we finished 8th.
Honestly speaking, our team is not quite in the same league as most of the other teams. We’re pretty much a bunch of high school friends playing together, while other teams bring together players from all over the lower mainland and beyond. The best teams even have a bunch of collegiate or university players. We’re never going to be able to rise to that level. In a way, I feel priviledged to actually even have a chance to play against these high caliber players, but the bottom line is we’ll never be a formidable opponent for them. But I think that’s okay.
