That was an epic weekend to say the least. It was stressful watching the weather unfold last week, and a difficult field owner left us scrambling to revise our backup plan on Friday. I got in late Friday night and Nat, Jane, and Loryn (Pres Day TDs ’11, ’10, and ’09) picked me up from the airport to head straight to San Bernardino, which was about two hours away. We crawled into bed for about 4 hours of sleep, then got up early to set up fields.
Saturday saw a ridiculous mix of conditions from sunny and almost warm to hail and frigid temperatures. The day was not pleasant, but it could have been a heck of a lot worse. I did fine until the end of the 7th round when the rain and cold started to get to me. I was able to get in half a workout running around picking up the cones after games though. After about 14 hours at the fields, we drove back to San Diego as games moved back to campus for Sunday and Monday.
The weather on Sunday was awesome and I got to watch a lot of good ultimate. This year is the first year that none of the Pie Queens are my former teammates. The team has a player who went to my high school (and who is 7 years younger than me), as well as a player I coached when she was in middle school. The Queens are going to be very good this year and watching them play made me feel both very proud and very old.
Monday was spent running a team skills clinic and trying to get scores reported in a timely manner while not being at any of the fields where games were going on. I spent much of the day coaching Occidental and UCLA-B, as well as helping to facilitate the entire clinic. We lost a lot of our coaches due to various circumstances last week, and I had been pretty worried that we wouldn’t be able to pull the clinic off. I sent a desperation email to a bunch of my friends and Georgia, Kaela, Danica, Gina, Claire, and Patti came through big time for me. Each of them took time out of their coaching or vacation weekends, and made that clinic happen. I am so thankful for such awesome friends.
The enthusiasm from some of the players at the clinic was really encouraging. About 7 hours into the clinic during a water break, one of the Oxy players asked me to keep throwing to her while she basically did suicides trying to practice her one-handed catches in a drill I had just taught them. Other players approached me and asked me really interesting, thought-provoking questions. And all of the players seemed pretty awestruck during the skills sessions with our stud guest coaches. Interacting with these teams reminded me that the vast majority of the teams in the country are resource (both financial and knowledge-based) challenged. These are the teams I want to reach… sometimes I am not sure how, but I hope that the players at the clinic learned something somewhere during that long day. I came away from the clinic completely exhausted, but also reminded of exactly why I’m doing this.
I am traveling again this weekend, thankfully, not for frisbee. Next weekend is Midwest Throwdown, kicking off a stretch of 4 tournaments in 5 weekends. Lots to do before then.
