New Season Underway, part II

Adam (above) is our other new player for Sophie's III. In a recent post I described seeing him a couple years ago run "10 or so" games while sporting a huge white bandage on his bridge hand. After reading the post last week he corrected me, saying that it was 15 games. Coincidentally, 15 is my all-time record, injured or otherwise (and I have a photo to prove it). At any rate, I stand corrected. A former teammate of mine on Sophie's III this time last year, Noah, made a claim that he ran 40-some games in a row at Raven. Hmmm. I digress.

Adam is in many ways the ideal APA player. Most importantly, he has started practicing a couple times a week. He has shown up pretty much before everyone else each week to get in some practice. He's even studied the APA rules book. But most importantly, he takes the game seriously. Not that he gets overly upset if he loses, but he's critical about his game and seems eager to improve it. He never assumes beforehand that he is going to win a match. He is humble enough to talk to others about what he needs to correct. Which, in short, is a quality that is utterly absent by some of our most senior members. Our team had a meltdown this week with our first and hopefully last shutout loss of the season. The last match involved our most senior member huffing and puffing during and after a 1-5 drubbing he received. He was rude to his opponent and it extended to the visiting team as well. And it brought our whole team down after an already difficult night. It was embarrassing. We're only going to have seven players this season, but it's looking like we might be better off with just six.