Friday, July 6, 2012

Friday at Camp: The Volleyball Plague


I want the Masonic Band back. I know I’ve been joking about how they’re Masons and they have secret lives and rituals and probably have weird initiation ceremonies that involve nudity and chickens, but in reality they were very considerate and polite, and they were great cafeteria buddies. Today, we got new cafeteria buddies. At breakfast, there was a murmur, a slight stir of a sort-of check-in outside the dinning hall. By lunch, that murmur was a full-blown bombination of teenage and pre-teen girls flooding the buffet lines, zipping in and out of small groups of other teenage and pre-teens, yipping about boys and ponies and glitter, totally unaware of their spatial distance and where lines originate. It was havoc. It was the locust plague. It was volleyball camp.

Dinner wasn’t as bad, but only because we arrived before the infestation. Ok, ok, so I know I’m giving these girls a bad rap, when in fact they’re not actually the ones who deserve it. Their counselors don’t deserve it either. They’re running a camp with close to a couple hundred girls. My guess would be that it’s probably a little harder to manage a couple hundred teenage and pre-teen girls than it is to manage about a hundred women. However, it’s a little difficult to manage both a couple hundred young girls and a hundred women together, having a small, hour and a half, window in which to eat, and having other things going on in their respective camps which only shrink that window. I blame the dinning services for the chaos. They should extend the lunchtime and stagger the two groups.

Anyway, enough about the little nettlesome volleyball players and on to rugby. We had one practice session today and went over a lot of video. From what we’ve seen, it looks like our match with the red team should be a good one. They have some weaknesses that we’ll look to exploit (just like any other match), and we have a game plan that we think will win. We’ll see tomorrow. Should be a good one.

After our field session, lifting form session (forgot to mention that one), and all that video, we did some improv with John, our Skills Coach. John is pretty awesome. He’s exceptionally intelligent, a great conversationalist, recommends awesome books, and he does cool things like work with Navy Seals (or the Marines or one of those bad-ass military groups) and Improvisation (the live kind). Tonight he put us through some improv/team-building exercises. We created rhythm together, passed around a couple of imaginary balls, created a very large and very noisy imaginary machine, and either hated or loved sporks. It was a lot of fun. I think that we’re all in a really good place, mentally, to play tomorrow. And as far as the physical goes—we’re all recovered, feeling good, and raring to hit people. Tomorrow will be a good day.

Oh, and one other thing, I found out that I run funny, today, which I knew (I run straight up), though I’d never described it as funny. I think my shin angle is off. But all that means is that I have the potential to be faster. Look out now.

No comments:

Post a Comment