<<  Previous Entry

Next Entry  >>

I haven't talked much about softball this year because, well, it had become a little repetitive and not very blog-worthy. I've been playing on four teams four nights a week since April and there really hasn't been a whole lot of excitement. The usual stuff.

 However, the coach of one of my teams--the Friday night coed team that's sponsored by Grevey's Sports Bar--decided to shake things up a bit by putting us into a tournament in Richmond against the big boys (and girls).

But not just a normal tournament. Nope. That wouldn't be any fun, would it? Instead, we signed up for an all-night tournament. Midnight freaking madness.

Yep, that's pretty much as insane as it sounds. You start on Saturday evening with a sort of round-robin (like the World Cup) thingy with four other teams and then you're seeded into the double elimination portion of the tournament based on your record in the round-robin part. Then, you continue to play in the double elimination bracket until you either lose two games or win the tournament. For those of you who are looooooong-time readers, you may remember that a few of us played in an all-night tournament back in 2000, but let me tell you this: compared to the tournament we just played in, that 2000 tournament was like a day at Disneyland.

Here's why: Our first game started just after 10:00 on Saturday night--and we didn't finish playing until just after 3:00. On Sunday afternoon.

Brutal isn't the right word for it. More like ghastly. On absolutely no sleep, we played eight games in 17 hours plus had to drive two hours to and from Richmond. Actually, that part about no sleep isn't entirely true. A few of us did sleep--for about 12 minutes during a break between games.

Surprisingly though, we did pretty well in the tournament (unlike our previous overnight debacle). We went 4-0 in the round-robin part (including three straight wins by the slaughter rule) and then won our first game in the double-elimination round. And some of the teams we beat were certainly better than us. After every win, we would trudge back to our little makeshift camp (dubbed Camp Grevey's, of course) and shake our heads. How in the hell did we just win five straight games? Could we really win the whole thing?

Well, no.

We might have had a chance to win it all, but because of some odd scheduling, we had a break of four hours between our fifth and sixth games. And this break was between 7 a.m. and 11 a.m. on Sunday morning. Needless to say, any energy we had quickly dissipated as the sun came up and the temps climbed into the 90's. Our mojo was gone and we limped through four more games--winning two and losing two--before we all dropped from exhaustion after the last out of Game #8.

When all was said and done, we finished fourth out of about 30 teams, which is pretty damn good. And I think we earned the respect of several teams who probably thought they'd roll right over us.

Also, no one died, which is certainly a plus.