Generally bad nocturnal decisions

So I felt a little left out by not going to First Night of Flight in Pittsburgh, the originator of this overnight indoor tournament idea, so I was pretty excited about the idea of this tournament up in north Jersey. Of course I also had scheduled to run a long morning practice with the University of Delaware men's team on Saturday morning. I dragged these college kids out of bed for practice at 8am and beat the hell out of them until 3pm. Had a lot of fun in the process and felt like I taught them a ton. I also ran around a bit with them. I'll probably end up helping them more throughout the season as they are a team with a ton of potential to make some real noise at College Nationals in the next year or two as they have a ton of solid young players.

Anyway, followed up practice with driving home, taking an hour nap, waking up and realizing that I definitely had not stretched enough prior to running around with Delaware. But I was getting picked up in 2 hours. So I scarfed down some food, packed up my bag, and got picked up for the 1:30ish minute drive to NJ.

Saw a ton of my Philthy teammates and other folks from Hawaii which was great as it kind of continued the overall high I've been on since getting back. As I kind of took stock of who all was at this tournament it became apparent that there was a lot of really talented people. Sadly...none of them were on my team. The two teammates worth mentioning were Ted Skaarup from Love and Erin Herzog from Puppet. Otherwise my team was made up of a bunch of people who clearly overranked themselves. The end result was an extremely average team.

I'm not even going to go into much detail because my body still hasn't figured out what day or time it is. I will say this....my team was bad. Dusty's might have been worse. We commiserated a few times over beers about it at like 2:30 in the morning. Somehow, despite winning a total of two games all in our "losers" pool we ended up with a shot to play for 5th. To get there we had to play a team we'd already played with Jamie, and some other people on it and then we got to play Joe Smash's team from PoNY who's entire strategy was to just throw it up high to Joe. In an indoor setting this is an almost unstoppable strategy. When I would play defense on him I might get it as close to 60-40 in Joe's favor but never any better. The rest of my team had no shot.

We ended up somehow coming in 6th place. I would actually consider us lower than that considering we beat Jamie's team in a game that if we had lost we would have been done playing. Instead we got to play another game at 6am.

Overall the tournament was a lot of fun. I would have enjoyed myself more if my team was better. I can see how FNOF in Pittsburgh is better in that you can bring your own team but instead all I got was incredibly sick on Monday and completely messed up in terms of my sleep/health schedule. I'd recommend getting even more Pikes and other high level players to come next year so that the overall level of play could continue to go up.

Now I'm out of commission for a few days as far as working out because of how sick I am. Oh well....

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