Thank You!
So many of you helped to make the Madison trip a great experience, that it is impossible to thank all of you. Nonetheless, all of you deserve some credit for getting our gang to Madison and back healthy and happy!
Thanks to everyone who contributed snacks and drinks. When I first grasped just how many snacks we had - something I thought I had better notice when I saw Kyle Sanderson unloading cases of drinks from his pickup - I didn't think that even this crew could eat everything. But they did. Homemade brownies, cookies, oranges, tortilla slices, gatorade, water, yogurt, party mix, granola, trail mix, power bars, doritos, fritos, tostitos, and every other sort of -ito or snack available anywhere. I believe we arrived back at East with only about a dozen small packets of chips, and that was only because the box containing them was hidden behind suitcases in the luggage section of the bus.
Thank you, too, to the parents who provided lunches and dinners. We did not come close to consuming all the sandwich fixings though we hit them hard for dinner one night and two lunches. We also put cash contributions to work. We had pizza from Glass Nickel, a Madison favorite, on Saturday night; Babcock ice cream (if I have this right, Babcock's has been made by University of Wisconsin in Babcock Hall for 90 years) at the University of Wisconsin Union on the shore of Lake Mendota; and burritos from Chipotle on Madison's State Street mall, just down the street from the capitol.
Thank you for your help with the logistics. The forms and checks are a pain, and we really appreciate you getting them back to us on such short notice and without lynching us for the short time frame. (There is a reason the time frame is short, but was still maddeningly short.) Not spending the evening before the trip tracking down forms and players was wonderful. Thanks also for getting your players to the bus and picking them up on time.
Tricia Huth (Jeff's mom) and Leslie Sarlo (Max's mom) were wonderful. Assume you are a charming and civilized person who generally gets more than 4 hours of sleep a night. Then imagine spending 30 hours of your weekend cooped up in a bus with 25 high school students. Don't forget that after clambering onto the bus at 4:30 AM and spending the day in a seat with a constant background of offensive videos, when you reach your hotel on the first day, you will spend the night crammed into a room with 4 young women. Now imagine the return trip. The seat and videos are all the same, but the players are now exhausted and - it cannot be disguised - stinky. Sound as if it might strain the nerves of prison guards? Well, it didn't appear to faze Tricia or Leslie who were as cheerful at the end of the trip as on the first morning. And that's amazing.
Finally, though it would take many, many paragraphs to even get a good start on describing all that Derek does and has done for this team, he was truly amazing on this trip. He gave of himself constantly - and I mean "all the time." He was constantly "on" - even during the bus ride - discussing with each player their "role" for the weekend, deciding on videos, organizing games at rest areas, giving the driver directions and unscrambling his mistakes, and chatting constantly and positively with all concerned. His coaching was great and consistently positive - though he was sorely tested. On Saturday evening, he kept a rein on the crew with constant attention and leadership. I have never seen anything like it.
It's not time to detail all the things that Derek has done for this team, but particularly for those of you new to East Ultimate, it is worth touching on the subject. The game, the coaching, the organization, the drills, the playbook, the silly games, the cheers, some significant parts of the players' personal growth, and even many of the friendships among teammates are all Derek's work.
Susan Reher & The Invite
The East Invite is a big undertaking. It requires planning, volunteers, organization, publicity, food, and a host of other things that drive normal folks crazy. Last year it took three parents to organize it and pull it off.
This year Susan Reher (Goofy's mom) did it single-handedly. And, Susan spent less money and did a better job! (Susan also organized the sale of Butterbraids earlier in the year - our biggest fundraiser - and another onerous job.)
Thanks, too, to everyone who volunteered. The feedback from other teams was uniformly positive. Apparently the ease with which you all appeared to get things done has inspired the Colorado Academy parents to run the State Championship. They've even asked for Susan's list!
Two Weeks
[An e-mail from Derek to the team.]
I want to bring your attention to a single fact, and then leave it at that. We've been working all season long for a State title, and it is well within our grasp. At about this point in the season, it's necessary to shift focus a little, though. If that's all we're interested in winning (which I use in the sense of "attaining" or "achieving"), we will miss out on the main reason to play ultimate. As my brother, recent UPA college champion and 2-time runner up said once (his talent for perspective and articulateness is enough to make a brother proud) as Johnny Bravo was gearing up for a title run, "Consider what we're doing out here, and why we do it. Because I'll tell you: that trophy cup doesn't hold what you think it does."
I've won the big end-of-season tourney, and I've lost it, too. And strangely enough, the feelings at the end of it all are pretty similar. The great and inescapable fact is that the team for which you sweat, and cried, and sustained stress fractures, and reopened the wound on your hip time and again has ceased, in the moment of that final goal, to exist. The only thing that EVERY ONE of you shares with EVERYONE else on the team IS this team, its history, and its accomplishments.
Following the tourney in two weeks, this team, as all others, will cease to exist. Nicole and Mary and Hayley and Max and Jeff and Josh and Leah and Kit and Spencer and KJ will go on to other things, and will never wear our uniform on the field of play again. The juniors will become seniors, the freshmen will become, well, something else; we'll field a team next year with more rookies, more tension, more games to play, more history behind us; and our eyes will again be starry with the possibilities of each new player, the development of each old player, the new hope for success and a winning record in Madison. But it will not be this team. It will be East Ultimate, but it will not be this team. Ask Jimbo, next time you see him at practice, how many chances a team gets to do what it's promised to do.
And this is what I want to say, finally: From the time we opened chapter 3 of our season last Saturday in Madison, we've been putting it all together, and have FINALLY begun to see what we all knew we could be from the first practice of the season. Our growth, though, gets cut off two weeks from this moment, and we have more growing to do.
We don't have to play the best ultimate of which we are capable in order to win the tournament. But it turns out that winning isn't what feels good -- it's the perfect game. That's what we're after. The ONLY cure for those end-of-season blues is the knowledge that it couldn't have been any better. And winning, by the way, is already assumed; this isn't a substitute. The other team will always fall away. And it will be as though it is only you and your teammates on the field. And if you're lucky, you'll be struck by the full knowledge sometime in the second half of exactly what you're accomplishing on the field. It's not a subistute for winning, because winning is the necessary result of that transcendent play; it is, however, the only goal worth playing for.
6 practices to transcendence. Bring it.
Fire up, East
Derek