New Jersey, home of the New Jerseyites!

We ran our first MHL of the year on Saturday in Newark's Central High School.

First of all, there was some sort of mass amnesia as just about every other coach missed the signup deadline. Initially I was making the changes for them and then after one too many plaintive cries I just threw the damned thing open again. Fortunately the school we were at was enormous, so space wasn’t a problem. I did send a suitable reprimand to the tutti of the fruttis that this sort of thing couldn’t be a habit. We have procedures for a reason, and the Thursday shut-off is to secure enough rooms. This will be especially relevant this coming weekend, where we’re either on the Vassar campus or down the road, and we won’t know which till the MHL numbers are in. Sigh.

Other than that, things went pretty smoothly. We only did three rounds, but to tell you the truth, more would have been almost impossible. We had newbies coming out our ears, and there’s just so much you can expect from that. For instance, there was the one girl who came up to me as I was standing at the table, who told me that something very unusual had happened, that she had been affirmative in the first round but that in the second round, she was scheduled to go negative. My initial instinct was, of course, to agree that this is indeed very unusual and promise that it would never happen again, but it’s hard to be that mean to a serious little freshman at their first event. That’s why first-timers as often as not get three rounds, in aid of keeping their brains (and our brains) from falling out.

There was one interesting session of falling brains, however, as the 7 JV PF teams all seemed to be prepared to debate different topics. Why this was so eluded me, but O’C finagled a way to make everyone happy, and before you knew it they were sharing evidence and baby pictures and it was the epitome of good debate citizenship. Very nice to see: charity trumped competition. I unilaterally granted them all 2 pts (half a full qual) for the NYSDCA tournament after the fact. They deserved it, because win or lose, they acted like champions. I respect that.

In the middle of the event, we snuck out to the only restaurant nearby, proudly serving what it called comfort food, and holy moly, were we comforted. Meat loaves and mac & cheese and banana puddings and curried chicken & rice and red velvet cheese cake and—Ah, the pounds we added were worth it. Fresh ginger lemonade… Sigh.

Of course, finding the school, and then finding our way out of the school was a comedy of errors. We explored much of Newark, both in the early morning light and in the dark of the Jersey night, but somehow we did ultimately get both in and out. Two of the three competing Sailors went undefeated and earned medals, a fine outcome to a good day.