chatter from the Library Monkey

volleyball tournament

There was a volleyball tournament yesterday, I guess it was part of a St. Patrick Weekend in my school town. It was a little unnerving. I felt really uncomfortable. For a small bit because last Monday (during the weekly volleyball) when I asked about forming a team, one of the women made a point of saying: “we will just form teams on Friday.” The reason for that was clear, she was bringing a team, mostly college students. I think she wanted to make sure the college studs were going to show up before committing to a team.

So I didn’t really have a team, I ended up playing with the ‘b’ group of the regular players. It didn’t look promising at first, partly because a couple of the players are just not ‘team’ players. Like one woman ‘neapolitan’ hits the ball over the net every time the back comes to her. No bump, set, spike with her. And she is about the worse server of the regulars. She has a strong serve that she only hits in about one out of 10 times. Last year I tried to give her advice about serving better, but she basically told me to go have sex with myself.

In addition to the ‘b’ group we had a couple players who I haven’t seen before, one guy looked like he was a marine who thought he could play every position on the team.… He was an okay player, but was the kind of player who has no clue about positioning or strategy.

All that said, our team won. There were several reasons

So we beat all the teams — including the college team twice. The two bad teams we beat 15-3 and 15-1. The college team the score was something like 15-8 in the first tame and 15-6 in the championship game. To put those scores in prospective…in each of the first three games it only took us eight minutes of the allotted 15 to win. In the last game we were winning 13-7 when the fifteen minutes were up and we played another four minutes to win.

It wasn’t so much we were good, we did play as a team, but because we got 90 percent of our serves in. That meant we scored about 45 of our 60 points without the other team returning the serve. I think me and two other guys scored about 50 points between us on our serves — one of the guys I didn’t know scored about 25 of those points, the band teacher (and organizer of the tournament) scored 17 and I scored maybe eight. The marine scored about eight, he didn’t have much of a serve, but as I said, all you had to do is get it in bounds and you could score points.

The really unnerving thing is this is about the only time I really have seen the community. I know there are other people in town, but when you look at the people you would think we were in a red neck Appalachian town of some sort.

I was asking one of the locals who different people were and he was going through people — but it was confusing, since he didn’t know any of the women’s current name, just their maiden name. He did point out one key person — the town tramp. This is the woman who was alledgedly sleeping with a high school kid and supplying beer to under age students. I was kind of surprised, she was more attractive than I expected — part of this is because her sons are obese and I expected her to be very overweight. She was a little chubby, but not too bad.

The Big Cats lost to the yankers. ugh. Justin Verlander got battered around in the first, but settled down (after giving up seven runs in the first two innings)

Gratitude (3)