First day of Poultry Days
While the team is back in sunny California (oddly enough, sunny Northern California), I'm in sunny oh-HI-oh, playing at the 26th annual Jeff Warrick Memorial Poultry Days tournament in Versailles. That's Ver-SAILs to us non-oh-HI-oh people. Pronounce it ver-sigh and you'll get a head-dubbing worthy of a king.
John saved me a spot last night by double parking when he arrived earlier, so I had a sweet parking spot when I arrived at 12:30 am (nearly the whole time thinking it was only 11:30pm, because I was a nut and forgot that valpariaso is on CENRAL time, not EASTERN time - brilliant me). I went to "bed" where "bed" is the back of the aforementioned van.
My bed sucked.
It was hard, and lumpy, and curved in funny directions. I was unable to sleep well at ALL, and ended up ossing and turning the whole night, wishing that I coudl fall asleep and being completely unable to do so. 1:30. 1:54. 2:26. 2:54. 4:11. 5:27. each of these times a wakeup point. Annoying wakeup points, actually.
When 9:00 am rolled around, John knocked on my car window, telling me to get up, they were going to breakfast. Fine. Fine. Fine, I'll get up. So, up I went, moving slowly. Turns out, there are hide-away storage areas in the van, so I was able to hide all of my valuables in the bottom of the van, while carrying only the stuff I really thought I needed.
The first game at 11 am was against the top team in our pool. John mentioned tehy were a college all-star team, which didn't do much other than psych us out. We lost half at 7-2. We did, however, come back in the second half (or they didn't think much of us and relaxed), and the final score was 13-7.
The second game was against the fifth seed in our pool, and not much of a contest. The hardest part was, of course, not playing sloppy and causing the game to drag on forever. They managed two points on us, for a 13-2 score.
The next game was against the fourth seed in our pool and, although they seemed to have better throws than the previous team, the final score of that game was 13-4 or something close. I thought they were better than the fifth seed team, John didn't agree much. No matter, we won.
The last game of the day is the game that mattered. The second place team in our pool had lost to the first place team in our pool. A win over this team gave us a chance at the A bracket tomorrow: the bigger the victory, the better the chance. The team, Hee Haw, was a little odd for my tastes. They came with baby-dolls covered in crude, quite offensive words and phrases. I'm not sure if they drank all day, but our margin of victory of two points didn't really give us a great chance at the A bracket.
Having never been to this tournament before, I had no idea what to expect next, so I just went with the flow. When the team wandered over to the shade at the side of the field, instead of my usual panic rush-rush-rush to get our field area cleaned up and eat, I followed the team and sat in the shade. Matt and Rene Greff had not only sponsored the team by paying for the tournament fee and buying the team shirts, they had also brought two ice chests of food for us to munch on while several ambassadors went on a chicken run for us. I sat in the shade and enjoyed the feeling of being a team player, instead of a team mom.
Admittedly, it was nice.
So, first tournament day done. I've finally figured out how to stretch my hamstring so that I can play all day. I'm excited about the discovery, which will continue my journey of healing.