Saturday:
Remember that Ke$ha song that goes “wake up in the morning feeling like P-diddy… ect”? I think Dave Clavens did a routine to it, so I am not too ashamed to know it. Well, I woke up in the morning feeling like someone who had just injected a massive amount of adrenaline straight into their heart. I beat the alarm clock by 5 minutes and grabbed a quick shower. By that time, I was pleasantly surprised to see that everyone but Marc and Ryan were awake and were in varying stages of readiness. Eventually even my fellow apartment dwellers joined us and we headed out to Irving’s for breakfast. Man, their morning special really hit the spot. Freshly made everything bagel, egg, cheese, tomato and crispy bacon. Boom. We ate pretty quickly and then left for the shred spot. As usual, it was me and Jim in the lead, followed by Ryan and Jeremy and then Nick, Nadiah, Aaron, Zack and Marc. It was really cool to have Jim there because he was like me when it came to going places – be ready 5 minutes before you have to be, be willing to get moving at a moment’s notice, and move at a quick pace until you reach the destination. Having two people in the lead made it a lot easier to mobilize a bunch of sleepy footbaggers, but this morning everyone was very excited to kick so extra motivation wasn’t necessary.
The venue we scouted out the previous night turned out to be better than I had hoped. It was the secondary gym used by the PSU volleyball team (if you don’t know, women’s volleyball is a powerhouse program here to even their practice facilities are top notch). It was divided into 4 basketball courts, and we took up position in the court farthest from the entrance as it had the least amount of players. Khoa was already there playing freestyle soccer, and other people started filling in as we were getting set up. Along one of the walls we found a free power outlet and rolled a waist-high wooden storage cabinet up next to it to act as a scoring table. I set up the speakers, phone, camera and laptop on it and put the prizes on display. I could not have planned a better setup. As our numbers swelled, we pretty much got the entire court to ourselves and even spread out onto a second court.
People seemed to like the setup and were warming up and mingling with ease. However, I was pretty nervous about the whole thing. This was the first time we had kicked in this gym, and while we had never been kicked out of a gym at the university, the large crowd and loud (ish) music drew a lot of attention. I didn’t actually tell anyone, but we hadn’t reserved space for this event, betting on the power of numbers and our sport’s relative obscurity. Granted, as an official Penn State club we had the exact same rights to that court as the basketball players, but the large number of people in the gym who were not registered university students could have potentially gotten us kicked out. We had no contingency plan, as this was already our backup spot. After the event concluded, people actually came up to me and said that it was awesome that we reserved such a large place for shred, so I suppose it was better that I didn’t worry people with all of the possibilities if someone didn’t like where we were and decided to bring in authoritative power. It was actually pretty funny seeing some footbag players asking the basketball players to move to an adjacent court – we were a pretty convincing group in our matching shirts and 40+ people.
I was set up and ready to go an hour before the competitions were slated to start as planned. Nearly everyone had showed up, and those who hadn’t had called me for help. Here I relied heavily on Ryan’s help, as I would answer calls, record the number, and shift the duties off to him to keep me available to focus on other tasks. This was one of the most important tasks that morning, and I knew I could trust him. Looking back, I might have placed too much load on him, as this kept him from properly warming up and getting a chance to kick with people. 15 minutes before comps were to start I announced the first circle and gathered the judges at the scoring table. Drew, Cassy, Nick and Jim had agreed to judge and we quickly went over the seeding of the 4 qualifier intermediate circle that Jim and I had put together the previous day at lunch. If I remember correctly, there was no intermediate circle at Worlds because there weren’t enough people there to compete - we had 12 total competitors, which was pretty wild for an intermediate comp. Jim and Ianek went over the basic judging techniques and each judge got a sheet of paper and a writing utensil (which never returned to me at the end of the day…) to take notes and grade each run.
I won’t go in depth about how each competitor played, as there are far better accounts in other people’s blogs. As the mc, I called passbacks and put out general announcements, and controlled the music and mic volume while watching the comps. While it was a lot to do, I managed to also keep an eye on how the judges went about their business, and even did my own rankings in my head. At the end of every circle, I would hear their conversations about the results and would compare their seeding with mine. The first circle consisted of Marc, Ben and George. I made the decision to have the top 2 players advance after only 4 rounds around the circle, so as to give the intermediates more experience in competition, and George was unlucky to have been seeded in the circle.
The second circle with Khoa, Kat and Nathan really made me rethink my understanding of the judging process. The first round, I just kinda looked at the overall performance of the players and put together my ranking. The second round, I tried doing the same and stumbled as the circle was much closer. I knew every player very well, I knew which tricks were safe for them and which ones were considered big. I saw each of them choke in a round and excel in the next. By the end of the four turns, I had no clear winner. I looked at the judges and was surprised to see that they had a clear 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place. I guess that’s what makes them experienced judges . This was the first circle with an upset, with Khoa crashing out. I had a feeling that this would happen, and it kinda sucked seeing the cold hard numbers on the score sheets confirming my suspicion.
After that round, I changed the way I judged circles. Every judge was looking at the overall level of the circle and basing people’s scores on that benchmark. Run length was very important, and toe bails midrun hurt a lot of players. Each turn was scored on a scale of 0-5, with 6 being an exceptional run. What I noticed killed a lot of our higher seeded players were rounds with zeroes. Those were awarded if the person dropped their first trick attempt, got a passback, and couldn’t put together a safe string. Getting a zero round was enough to keep a player from advancing, so it was really painful to see my friends trying stupid tricks out of desperation or nerves, which I knew they couldn’t hit and being eliminated. Man, judging sucked, but at the same time it gave me a whole different appreciation for the game and the strategy of circle competition. However, by the later rounds, I was able to get carbon copies of the official judge’s numbers in my head and I felt like I was properly calibrated to evaluate someone’s performance in circle.
The third circle was Mac, Chrissy, and Derek which Chrissy pretty much took without trouble and Derek filed in behind her due to a clutch final round. Mac couldn’t find his rhythm and had a lot of short runs that did not score high enough to secure the second seed. The last qualification circle was Ryan, Aidan and April. Ryan played a safe game which I was proud of, and Aidan surprised me with the length of his runs. I was proud of April for competing – she was able to put together some strings that put my first competition results to shame and seemed to have fun doing it which ultimately made it fun to watch as an observer. The second round of intermediate comps started with a circle of Ryan, Marc, Nathan and Derek. Here I saw Ryan deviate from his gameplan and Derek could not repeat up his late round heroics. Marc took the round with a solid run of 21 contacts for his second turn and Nathan solidified his place in second by having strong runs all around. I felt pretty bad for Ryan, who wasn’t able to push past 10 contacts that round and ultimately got cut. If not for the numerical system of ranking runs, this round would have been impossible to judge, and even with the numbers, 2nd and 3rd place were within a few points of each other.
The other semifinal circle was Kat, Chrissy, Aidan and Ben. This one looked very difficult on paper, and turned out to be quite the competition. It took some time for the judges to decide and in the end I actually ended up contributing my numbers to their final tally due to a three way deadlock (Nick had stopped judging the previous round). In the end, Ben and Kat came out on top due to their consistency and ability to keep tiltless deep into a string. The final circle was Marc, Ben, Kat and Nathan. To be honest, I was pretty nervous for Kat, as I invested a lot into her game over the past months and talked to her about strategy a bit before the comps. Once again, the judging was tough in the circle and first place was decided by half a point. I didn’t contribute my numbers/thoughts in the final judges conversation because I didn’t feel like I was impartial in my judging that round, regardless of how hard I tried to be fair. In the end, Ben won and Kat got second, with Marc coming in third and Nathan rounding out the fourth spot. I announced the winners and it was awesome to see people so excited. I knew they were going to remember this competition for the rest of their lives. I didn't really think of it at that moment, but looking back now, that excitement and surprise on everyone’s faces was worth whatever hardship hosting the tournament brought upon me. These results would be their drive to play footbag in the next few months, or an appropriate reward for the efforts they put in preparing, or both.
After handing out the prizes, there was a ten minute break and Open circles began.
I've had stress dreams in the past about tournaments I was hosting, but that one beats any of mine. I have to say, the shirts and trophy look amazing. I still want to make it out to PSU at some point...this year just wasn't going to work with weddings/work trips/etc.
