Edelman

Mobile! Agile! Hostile!...Okay, I won't go through the whole cheer, but DAMN I miss playing college flatball. Since graduation, all I've been trying to do is figure out some UPA loophole that will allow me to use my last year of college eligibility. Some results: I could pull an AJ and go to Oglethorpe for a semester, pretending to actually want that Masters in Education they're offering for $4k in tuition, except that AJ went there for four years actually seeking a degree and I would just be paying them $4k to play ultimate (in addition to quitting my job). So unless I can get the Emory kids to pony up a bit (hey, wait a second...), this seems implausable. I could re-enroll at Emory, but I don't have $40k. This option almost makes the former option plausible, by comparison.

So what do I do? Do I suck it up and accept the fact that my glory days (if you could call them that) are over? Am I really just an old man now, doomed never to be quite good enough for a competitive Open team? Why do my toes sometimes smell like bacon?

Well, the answer to all these questions is yes. However, there's nothing wrong with a little vicariousness. I've started assistant coaching with Emory ultimate beneath the omniscient Ricky McClelland, and let me be the first to tell you, if you're on a men's college team and you're reading this (ha! like people read this), Emory is going to be a force to be reckoned with in the spring. This is by far and away the greatest crop of rookies Emory has seen (obviously since me) in many years. In a throwing drill yesterday I threw with a rookie who is one of those never-played-ultimate-before-but-is-athletic types, and he was throwing flicks 40 yards (albeit not very accurately, but still). He's not the only one that has greatly improved, either. I think much of this has to do with Ricky's good coaching and individual attention to as many kids as he can coupled with my constant, but obvious harping on vets on what they should be doing, implicitly setting and forcing them to set an example for the little'uns.

UGA, GaTech, UF, y'all better bring your A-game and all your 5th year (or 6th and 7th year if you're UF) seniors and other somehow-eligible players if you want to beat us this year. By the time spring rolls around, if you come out slackin', you'll find out the hard way that WE WANT SOME MO WE WANT SOME MO WE WANT SOME MO!

(*sigh*...By "we" I mean the players. Gah! So frustrating...)

Word of the Day: brackish adj: having a somewhat salty taste, especially from containing a mixture of seawater and fresh water; distasteful, unpalatable.

I bet you're expecting a semen reference here for this example. Well, I'm not going to appease your brackish sense of humor.