Blog 13 - COmpetition With A Capital CO
Well our chance for finals is shot; shot like a rubber chicken out of some kind of clown bazooka, but that doesn’t mean that we aren’t still competitive around the club. There’s a couple of different ways in which we battle for bragging rights: teams challenges, best blog and, um, best way to finish a list of three things when you can only think of two.
Our teams challenge started a few weeks ago in the spirit of making training a little more competitive in order to help get a bit of fire in the belly. I, personally, am in Team 2; or, as we’ve coined ourselves: ‘Team Win Everything Always’. Unfortunately for us, we are not living up to our nickname and have so far been sitting at about 5th of 6 on the ladder, winning very little other than the prestigious ‘least-number-of-team-members-fit-to-participate award.’ The challenges have so far instilled a good feeling amongst the group and given us a good level of competitiveness at training.
Some of the activities that are involved are: goal-kicking, relays, handball games, soccer, footy baseball and the ever-popular ‘drill with a name I can’t mention if you’re reading this before 10:00pm’. So far teams have participated in the spirit of a complete lack of sportsmanship. Highlights of this include Cain Ackland’s team repeatedly starting before the word ‘ready’ in a relay, some players intentionally - yes, intentionally! - slapping members of the ‘shirts off’ team in the handball games and, in trying to put Mitch Clisby off his goal-kicking, some opposition team-members even performed the unforgivable act of mixing up the ‘I’ and the ‘L’ in his surname and called him Mitch Cilsby (needless to say, he missed the goal by a long way).
The other form of competition is that on the North Adelaide website. Every fortnight/whenever we get around to it, Rhys Archard, Damon White and myself post articles on there. And the competition is fierce. Countless times I have suspected Whitey of looking in my ‘Blog Ideas Book (edition #17)’ to try and post my ideas before me. This book contains all my ideas for content in my blogs and I thought he was going to steal my ideas and words. So much so that I’ve now planted a decoy book in my locker with comments like: ‘do a survey on the club’s paper usage over a 10-year period’, ‘interview Benno again’ and ‘writing a story about how Whitey sucks would be popular, definitely.’ It struck me that he had indeed pilfered my book when ‘Captain’s Column: 1001 Way Damon White Sucks and How This Relates To NAFC’s Paper Usage (prologue by James Bennett)’ was released.
I’m not a big fan of talking myself up, but the thing that saves me on the website is that I have access to the content management system and can sabotage their articles if they start getting wise. So look out Rhys, Damon!
On an unrelated topic, I would like to start a once off Quote of the Week segment because of a great little sentence I heard as a pre game comment. To arm you with the background information to make this funny, you should note that we have both Henry White and Damon White at the club. Damon is captain, obviously, Henry debuted with us a few weeks ago. You won’t get this yet, but at the point marked with a * that’s where the player stumbled slightly, realising how the sentence was about to end up sounding. The comment sounded a little somethin’ like this: “You need to talk and instruct today – every one of you – it doesn’t matter whether you’ve played a lot of games like Whitey or are playing your first game* like Whitey.” Genius.
That’s all from me for now, but I hope to see your smiling faces down at Alberton this week for our last game. This would help us take some momentum into next year after the promising last two weeks.
See you then,
Gilly #25
Nick's blogs from 2011