BoH 2012: First Impressions

Hey all, hope your legs and backs are demangled and still functioning properly this morning.

To start, I just want to briefly re-live what may be the Bag Of Hammers' play of the year: newb Jean Pelletier's diving, thundering, barrel-rolling circus catch at mid-field, to save a wind-blown mis-throw from the clutches of the bearded, bewildered opposing captain (who, BTW, was cited as the individual responsible for the early retirement of our ex-Captain). The guy never saw it coming, although he surely must have heard it. The catch left Jean in a heap, between the disk and the ground, with his shorts stripped down his thighs and his upper torso thoroughly grass-stained - and it left me guffawing in dis-belief (I'm still chuckling to myself). To use a term that gets thrown around far too often, but is certainly apt in this case, it was epic.

See also: Mike's own impressive suite of circus catches, Jim laying out for errant (sorry!) and deep end-zone passes at least 5 times, end-zone snags from Nick and Becky and Deidre (I think?), and a series of advancing passes that happened so quickly that I wasn't able to yell out to "slow down" (but hey, the shit worked). And, ladies and gentlemen of the 2012 Bag Of Hammers Recreational Ultimate Frisbee and Social Drinking club, it is plays like these that will likely define our success this year: big effort and athleticism, to be tempered with some refinement and direction from our wiley vets. The wins will come as we gain our confidence (and the winds die down, and we settle into our appropriate tier), and if the wins don't come, at least y'all got to run around in the open air for an hour or so.

 As for the "refinement and direction to be provided by our wiley vets", while I attempted my best Dan McAffee impression to start the game off - it will be shown to be no substitute for the real thing. It actually brought back some stomach-knotting memories from school, where my objective as a TA was to stay 1-2 classes ahead of those snotty engineering students and hope that they don't ask any questions. So thank yous for not asking any tough questions and exposing me for the Ultimate fraud that I are. Next week, I will come prepared with a Ray Lewis motivational speech.

Huzzah!
-Aaron

PS: big thanks again to Becky for picking up the slack and getting this team together!

PPS: big un-thanks to the crotchety, tattooed hipster server at Freeman's who nearly lost her shit on us after the debit machine took ill. Lynn, as Mayor of Freeman's, could you please take care of this. Ahthankyou.