What a day!
I’ll start with the cheerleading news,
since tryouts were a big part of my day; and continue on to the football report
after that.
The first bit of news is that Rowen and I
don’t have any competition for the Grade Ten spots on the squad. We hadn’t heard that any of our classmates
were going to give that a shot; so that wasn’t a complete surprise. It is nice to know that we won’t be in a
fight for the jobs this year, though.
Jenny and Tammy can’t say the same because they do have two Grade Eleven
competitors. I’ll be blunt about that;
and just suggest that their classmates are delusional if they think they can
out-cheer Jenny or Tammy. It isn’t going
to happen. As always, it’ll be the Grade
Nine competition that’ll be the most intense; and I haven’t decided which girls
are my personal favorites to join the squad from that group of hopefuls quite
yet. I’ll let you know when I do get
there; and then we’ll see if that works out and our captain, Anna-Marie Palmer,
agrees.
As for the actual tryouts, our workouts
were a bit less intense than last summer; and we instead spent a bit more time
on the creativity side of cheerleading.
Anna-Marie and Erica Bassett, our two senior cheerleaders this year,
want to do more with both our half-time routine and sideline cheers; so being
able to help out with that is going to definitely be part of the equation when
they pick their squad. Rowen and I
already had a dozen new ideas for routines that we worked on last week; so we’re
way ahead of the curve on that – and we impressed Anna-Marie and Erica.
The warm-ups, exercises, and cheerleading
drills kept us busy even if we didn’t physically work quite as hard as last
year; and all of the girls loved every minute of it – even when it was tough
for the younger girls that aren’t used to the physical effort that goes into
being a cheerleader. No, it isn’t all
fashion and beauty secrets, boys; so don’t go there. From what I saw today, there were some
hopefuls for the football team that would have had a problem with our workout. That sounds strange considering the fact that
almost every guy in and around Witch Falls work on farms or doing other
physically demanding jobs; but there is a difference between those kinds of
work and training for either football or cheerleading. For the cheerleading side of that; I’ll just
sum it up in one word – flexibility.
I’m sorry if that comment left you with a
scary mental picture of big football linemen trying to do the impossible – for them;
but instead of thinking about that too much; let’s move on to the football
report next.
It was and wasn’t a tough day for Michael,
Tim, and the rest of the football hopefuls.
The physical effort that Michael and Tim put into their first day of
tryouts was more intense than last year; but that wasn’t the case for
everyone. The good news for them is that
they stood out as the top two players on the field; and the bad is that they
are not happy with how the training went for most of the other guys with just a
handful of exceptions. Lucas was one of
those exceptions; along with a few of the guys that have been training with
them for the past few weeks.
Tim had a lot to say about everything that
happened with them today after our practices when Michael and I hung out with
Tim and Rowen until dinnertime. It’d
take quite a while to cover all of that; so let’s just include a few highlights
instead of writing an essay. Jason
Johnson has pretty much anointed himself team captain this year, and since the
other seniors support him; Tim’s sure it’s a done deal – even though he doesn’t
think it’s a good idea. Jason is a big
part of the problems Tim’s seeing with the team this year – an over-confidence
combined with lack of effort from the seniors that have now been on two
championship teams and somehow think they’re unbeatable. Since most of them only made the team for the
first time in their Grade Ten year; winning is all they know. What Tim thinks that they don’t know is how
much effort the past two senior football players and captains put into making
those teams worthy of being champions.
For the football skills part of the
tryouts, Michael, Tim, and Lucas are all even better than last season. Being taller is part of that for Michael and
Tim, and along with all of the extra training and weightlifting workouts; they’re
stronger and faster. That’s great for the
team, but they have a problem this year at quarterback. While Coach Robinson pretty much leaves every
position open for competition during tryouts; our team lost a very capable
quarterback to graduation; and our top prospect this year isn’t nearly as
good. Ray Parker has wanted his shot at
the job pretty much since Grade Nine, and will likely be our quarterback this
year if Tim’s right about the complete lack of competition; but he really isn’t
nearly as good as Jeff Morris was for the past two seasons.
I can pick one word to describe Ray’s
quarterbacking issue – accuracy. Jeff
wasn’t flashy, and couldn’t throw the huge passes; but he didn’t mess up many
throws either; and that gave his receivers a chance to do something with the
play after the catch. Michael and Tim
didn’t have to worry about getting killed out on the field today, but one of
Tim’s biggest worries right now is over how to keep from getting clobbered thanks
to bad passes from Ray – or defend even worse passes from being
intercepted. He assured Rowen and me
that there’d have been more interceptions at the practice today if he and
Michael had been defending against Ray instead of working as his receivers.
Finally, for this update, Tim needed to
vent a bit with us about their new, as-yet-unofficial team captain. While he doesn’t have the specific data to
back up his opinion; I could confirm that Jason did not kick as well today as
he was kicking last season – though I couldn’t tell Tim that. He’s a bit off on the actual numbers, and I
didn’t see everything Jason did today while working on that; but his range is
down more than ten yards for field goals; and his accuracy is down even more –
maybe as much as twenty yards; but fifteen for sure. While that’s a big problem, Tim’s more upset
about Jason’s methods of motivating his fellow players. I’ll be blunt again and just say that Jason
likes to use back-handed compliments; insults; and sarcasm as his primary ‘motivational’
tools. That style of leadership might
even work on some of the guys; but Tim is sure that it won’t make them a better
team – regardless of which guys end up making the team this year. I agree with him; but we’ll have to wait and
see how it goes.
On the brighter side, some of our
classmates are doing much better so far with their tryouts; and Tim and Michael
think that they’ll have at least three of the Grade Ten guys joining them on
the team this year. I won’t name names
now in case they’re wrong about that; but keep you posted for how that works
out by Thursday when the final team picks will be announced. Whatever happens, my two favorite football
players are going to be glad to have some classmate company on the team this
season!
Rowen and I were finished our cheerleading
tryouts for the day more than a half-hour before the guys were done; so we
waited for them and watched the tail-end of their workout before heading back
to Michael’s house to go for a swim and cool off once they were set free for
the day. That was fun, and so was the
chat time; but we didn’t really have that long to spend together before Rowen
and Tim left to have dinner with his parents and Michael and I went inside to
help out with getting dinner ready at his house. That wasn’t a lot of work, since we were
having an easy-dinner night so that Michael could be ready to move on to his
baseball practice on time; but the dinnertime fun was all about spending that
couple of hours with his parents and Rebecca.
That would have been more fun if Lucas could have been there too, but he
had needed to hurry back out to his farm and get to work right after football;
and he’ll likely be working until dark every day this week.
I feel sorry for him over that; since he’s
going to be very sore after the football workouts and then hours of farm work
on both sides of the sports training; and he doesn’t have the advantage of a
Magi Master girlfriend. That’s skipping
ahead of the story; but I’ll admit that I was happy to help Michael out with
some Magi-powered healing before I came home tonight when he was starting to
get very sore and cramped up from a long day of football and baseball.
For the record, Michael – no, I do not plan
on ever healing anyone else while also sharing long hugs and kisses; so quit
joking about it with me. ;^)
I stayed and helped with the dinner
clean-up when Michael headed for the school ball diamond to meet up with
Tim. Rebecca decided to come along with
me after that; we picked up Ethan and Ehlana along the way; and went to the
school for some playground time while the boys were playing baseball. Rowen met up with us there, and we had other
kids and teens to play with; so that was another hour or so of fun before we
all went back to Michael and Rebecca’s house to go for another cool-down swim.
Mom and Dad came over to hang out with
Jacob and Miranda after seeing us out at the river; they took the twins home
with them; and Michael and I had some alone time in his room after Rowen and
Tim left that was partly about playing music, having a little make-out session,
and healing Michael of all of his aches and pains. That all added up to a lot of busy, but we
still managed to fit all of that into just a couple of hours; and I came home
at ten-thirty.
That had me here in time to do the bedtime
routine with Ethan and Ehlana; I had them tucked into bed by eleven; and then I
got ready for bed too and moved right into my bedtime computing and family
business work. I need to be ready for
another busy day tomorrow, so I time-phased the entire work session so that I
could get everything done without staying up until three or four; which is why
I’m exhausted by will be sleeping before midnight. Trading off the extra sleep time with the
power drain is basically an even trade, but I still feel better with the extra
rest even if that is just an inaccurate perception.
I won’t be perceiving any benefit at all if
I don’t wrap this up and get to the napping part of my night, though; so, until
next time...
...May the Magi Force be with you!
