Sectionals and intramural volleyball

For those of you out there who read my blog from the fine (?) city of Pittsburgh, I am not going through a play-by-play or any sort of analysis of our loss at Sectionals to Delaware. Sorry, but I'm just not that stupid... despite having missed my induction into the National Slavic Honor Society this week because I thought it began an hour later than it in fact did.

Sectionals was a bit depressing, but I will admit that I personally had a lot of hubris going into the finals against Delaware. I thought hey, we beat these guys with 10 guys at Salisbury -- there really isn't going to be any contest. We played poorly. I played poorly. I got run over by their handlers, and let off more breaks in one game than I probably did in the previous day and previous tournament combined. Even that wasn't the worst part. I felt like everything I did was ineffective - really it was a feeling of startling impotence. Well, live and learn. I'm not going into Regionals with any presuppositions. I have seen what hubris can do this past weekend, and I don't really like it. Even though I've been thinking about that loss for nearly every waking moment since Sunday, our team will be ready to take care of business knowing that we have something to prove after losing to a bunch of hooligans like Delaware.

All the shock from losing that game evaporated in the Maryland game. We came out firing and I got a point block on the first throw of the first point. I don't want to sound arrogant or anything, but I felt like getting that turn so close to the endzone and scoring right off the bat pushed all the anger out of my mind, and out of the minds of my teammates, and let us focus on going up 8-3 or something at half. We were a completely different team for that game, and secured the #2 spot in the section. Also, some of my teammates foolishly tried to tell me that a kid on Maryland had bigger calves than I do. Yeah right. I challenge anyone in the Metro East to a calf-off.

The next day brought some sports-related success with our intramural volleyball team. I am totally the worst guy on the team, but the team consists of just random people that I know. Ethan, one of my teammates on the ultimate team, and I founded the team our freshman year and recruited several other ultimate guys on the team, also. Not only that but I recruited a guy from my floor who had played for a really, really good team in PA in high school. Then we picked up the roommate of one of my other teammates, who is a volleyball crushing monster. This year we became more diverse with the addition of a female friend of Josh's (Josh being another teammate from the ultimate team who plays with us). Yeah, we have a chick even though we're in the men's league. What?

Anyhow, we're a dynasty - we've got two sets of t-shirts to prove it and a whole lot of pwn3d frat teams that will attest to our dominance. So much for cutting down on hubris. Eh, whatever, it's intramural volleyball. There is this law school team that plays against us, they're pretty good, unlike every other team that has been in any intramural league up until this year. They're so serious about it - they are the antithesis of our team.

Incidentally, our team name is "The Electric Mayhem," which is actually a reference to the band on the Muppets. We are the most random assortment of people (3 ultimate people, 2 friends of ultimate people, 1 roommate of an ultimate person, and one guy I met freshman year and never really hang out with other than playing volleyball). The law school team talks strategy and takes themselves all seriously and shit - we just fuck around and end up pwning chumps all the live long day. It was great - their big dude, the guy after whom the team is named actually, absolutely stuffed Sarah, our token, but awesome, female, in the first match. Come the third match, she goes up against him again (guy - 6'5", Sarah, 5'10"ish) spikes it off his hands and out of bounds at a critical point in the tiebreaker game. Anyhow, that should definitely get us a side of the bracket to ourselves when we go into the finals and start playing frat teams, with all their groupies and idiot pledge classes cheering them on. Last year we beat Pi Kappa Alpha in straight sets for the intramural championship... with five players (it's a six-on-six league).

We used to get mad crew from the ultimate team, but now games are during 24 and everyone refuses to come out and support Josh, Ethan, and I. Our spectator count is at two now (of course they were appreciated), but which is pretty sad really considering the publicity we got in years past. I'll let everyone know when the finals are, and I will continue offering to Tivo 24 so that people can still watch that mindless buffoonery once our games are over.