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Vail Shootout Day 4 – 9:30 am – (12th Entry)
Good morning again. I must admit that this blogging thing is a little difficult. It was all sweet and lighthearted at the beginning and then it took a sick and cynical turn yesterday. I apologize for that. Mostly it’s just been fun for me to pound away at the keyboard again and get my writing juices flowing after a lengthy absence from any creative outlet.
I majored in English with a concentration in Creative Writing in college at Colorado State University. For those of you scoring at home, that’s a Liberal Arts degree from an agricultural university. Maybe could have used a little more help in the academic advisory department on that one. But the degree has served me well so far in life and I have a great profession that allows me to stay involved with lacrosse in the coaching, playing, organizing and sales realms.
Yesterday evening was another fine one in the Vail Valley as most of the staff took a little time off from the monotony of day to day preparations. All of our CSU crew came down to Ford Park and shot on me for about an hour. I think it’s been very beneficial for our current players to watch the Masters and Supermasters teams play. The speed is not up to par with collegiate lacrosse, but some of these guys really know how to play the game. They know when they need to jump onsides for someone to run over or when to just protect the ball and get out of trouble or how run an odd-man break. Lacrosse is not just an athletic contest to see who can get to the goal. It helps to be athletic, but really being a student of the game is what makes good players great. Having a good Lacrosse IQ is as much of a skill as any of the other things people work on.
While I was taking shots, there was a Supermasters team hanging out down at Ford Field having a few beers, relaxing in the evening cool and just spending some time with friends. I didn’t get down to the park until 6:00 pm and they were still there as we were leaving at 7:20, so they must have hung out on the field for three or four hours after the game was over. That’s what Vail is really all about at its core.
We enjoyed dinner at the Tap Room, skipping the hormone-fest over at the Boys and Girls High School Barbeque. Walking in the Vail Village, you are bound to run into people you know at every turn. I am by nature relatively shy and socially elusive, so sometimes that makes for some nice awkward moments for me. Kale thinks it’s funny to watch me wriggle in certain situations and my mom says I remind her of Larry David. I don’t see the humor, frankly. But I’m getting better and it’s nothing a beer or two can’t fix so I made the rounds and gave it my best shot last night.
Today should be a fun day with the Supermasters Championship at 1:00 pm on Ford and the Boys High School semifinals on Avon at 11:00 and 1:00. I haven’t seen one bit of the high school ball yet, so I think I may be coerced into hanging out over there all day. The Colorado Favorites play Team Ohio at 11:00 and Team Colorado takes on the Baltimore Crabs at 1:00. Both of these games have intrigue, so I’m hopeful that they live up to the billing.
I will try to get a special guest with an eye for the game to give a nice re-cap of the Supermasters Division where the Adidas Magic Wands takes on the FROGS. It feels almost weird not watching much of the Supermasters because it’s one of our best and biggest divisions, but it just simply hasn’t been in the cards for me this week. I think my guest columnist tonight will be able to recap it better than I can anyway. Until later today, bloggership.
Vail Shootout Day 4 – 11:30 pm – (13th Entry)
You may have noticed that the Vail Shootout blog has taken a hit in production today. It’s been a rough day in terms of criticism. You certainly can’t please all the people all the time, but jeez, some of these people need to just relax. Blogs are by nature OPINIONS. Everyone is entitled to an opinion. What’s funny is that if you read through my previous entries, very few people would be able to find the statements that may have offended some of the more delicate sensibilities out in our small community.
Blogs are relatively new in our society – though I believe tournament director Flip Naumburg was on the cutting edge of what has become a very mainstream form of communication. He started an online journal in 2001 that was meant to simply detail for himself the trials and tribulations of one of our greatest teams at CSU. I think he ultimately started the thing because he knew how it would turn out that year and wanted to remember it for all time. But once the season ended – in the best possible way, I might add – the journal continued. And it still endures nearly eight years later.
Flip’s journal and what we now know as a blog differ in one fundamental way, in my opinion. Today’s blog is self-aware. It knows that it has an audience and it acknowledges the reader in a very direct, often overt way. Flip’s journal was for its own sake. It got – and still gets – to the root of the author itself instead of being a conduit for someone’s opinion or a lightning rod for controversy.
That’s not to say that his journal hasn’t been without its share of turmoil. The university once came down hard on him for something he said that may have been construed as derogatory towards our institution of higher learning. Don’t you have to be a university employee to take that kind of grief?
I digress. My original point is that doing a blog has almost become passé. What was once a very underground and edgy medium has now achieved its saturation point. It is very similar to any type of counter-culture movement. Take sports blogs. Many blogs started up as a response to “mainstream media’s” stranglehold on information and distribution to give fans a voice in the sports landscape. They started as clever little anti-ESPNs, pointing out everything that was wrong with the way sports are covered in our society.
But the problem was that they continued to grow and continued to gain popularity. Because of that, they slowly started becoming exactly what they hated about the mainstream media, didactic, dogmatic and authoritative. It is a true case study in something that Holden Caulfield of Catcher in the Rye might call “phony,” but I’ll leave that for another discussion.
On the point of blogs, everyone has a voice, everyone has an opinion and everyone has a vehicle that can carry that voice and opinion to potentially millions of people. Not to mention, those millions of potential readers have the vehicles and voices of their own to make sure everyone knows whether or not your opinion is correct.
Case in point is this blog right here. I started this thing as a way to get info out to interested parties in a fun and uncensored way. I have no editor but I have no axe to grind with anyone either. This was supposed to be nothing but a creative outlet for me and an informative tool for our online visitors. Apparently, a few relatively innocuous comments have gotten to people in a way that nothing really ever should.
Now it’s nearly midnight and I’m rambling about like a sophomore in Theories class. Maybe there was a reason I shut off the creativity switch to begin with - it's hard work doing heavy thinking again. I’m going back to standing in the goal and getting hit with lacrosse balls. Enough waxing existential for tonight.
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