Photographic evidence

CJ, the Furies forwards coach, has a really nice high-powered camera that she takes wonderful game photos with. Because she is awesome, she sent me these two photos, one of me running and one of me SCORING MY TRY in the game against Lancaster (click to embiggen):








To be honest, this was not the best try ever – we had a five meter scrum, and I should’ve waited until my scrummies pushed a little closer before taking the eight-man pick. You can see the green scrumhalf tackled me, and I really had to stretch to get the ball into the try zone. But – I did get it there, and a try is a try!


The other great thing about CJ taking photos is that she takes LOTS. And posts (at least some of) them online. So a nerdy little rugger like me can take the time to go through, say, almost 500 photos (from a single 40 minute half) and look at my body position in rucks, where I’m standing in the defensive and offensive lines, etc., and figure out what I’m doing well and where I need improvement. It’s SO helpful!


And I am realizing while posting this that I never did a write-up of last Saturday's games. So here's a quick run-down, for posterity: Furies had three sides, and each one played a different team. The A-side game vs. Philly went to the Furies with a score of 28-21, the B-side game vs. Chesapeake was a close, close match with a final score of 3-5, and the C-side game versus Lancaster was a Fury win with a bunch of tries (including the one above!) to not so many. After each game, everyone voted for their "Player of the Match", and during the social, our captain announced the winners: for A-side, Beth (my vet buddy!); for C-side, Di; and for B-side, ME!! I've never been prouder to receive a congratulatory cup of beer.

Overall, it was a really fun day of well-played rugby. The Furies competed with a lot of synergy, especially awesome since it was the first weekend of the season, but also identified some areas to work on over the season. I can't wait!

FINALLY – rugby is back in season!

Last Wednesday, my coworker asked me if I had any exciting plans for the evening. When I excitedly told him I had my first rugby practice of the season, he looked skeptical. Hadn’t I been playing rugby for a few weeks now?

Well, okay, the Saturday before I’d gone to Baltimore with American, my alma matter, to sub in during their game against Towson. I relived my first few seasons by playing wing, and had a great time rucking it up with my old teammates.

And sure, a few weekends before that I’d driven all the way to New Orleans for a tournament, and spend two weeks before that going to practice for the tournament.

But none of that’s the same as the season really officially starting. Practices reliably occurring twice a week! Games happening every Saturday! My inbox flooded with emails about meet times and practice details and selections and kit reminders! Playing “Dirt or Bruise” and, if I win, going to work looking like I lost a fight with a staircase!

Oh yes, there’s NOTHING like rugby season.

Crazy fun rugby

I love this quote from a California State article, UC Berkeley shuts out short-staffed Chico rugby team. I think it sums up rugby pretty well!

"This sport had to be invented by someone who was drunk," Kieren said. "But even though it's crazy, it's still crazy fun to play and watch."

As a bonus, there's a pretty good video of some gameplay with interviews with the coaches at the bottom of the page.

NOLA/Mardi Gras write-up: the FUN part

I am writing up my weekend trip to New Orleans in chunks, because it was too much experience for just one blog entry! Read about the road trip, a cemetery, and the rugby tournament too.

Crawfish and Mardi Gras


A few Stingers with our second place trophy

Post-tournament, fifteen members of the Stingers headed out to a crawfish boil. Q later reported in the Stinger's Weekly Buzz that the fifteen of us consumed:
25 lbs of crawfish
8 lbs of potatoes
15 ears of corn
1 dozen crabs
1 lb of shrimp
3 baskets of crackers
2 baskets of fries

and of course...

9 pitchers of beer

After that, it was time for showers and MARDI GRAS. We failed a little bit on Saturday night (although we did receive a truly beautiful second place trophy boot – painted silver and decorated with beads – at the tournament social!), but we made up for it on Sunday.

We spent the afternoon and evening exploring Mardi Gras New Orleans, doing line outs in the crowd to get MORE BEADS (even though our necks and shoulders were already sore from the weight of the ones we had!) and singing “Saturday’s a Rugby Day” as we strolled down Canal Street. We also enjoyed our share of NOLA cuisine, including beignets drowning in powdered sugar, hand grenades complete with little green plastic grenades, and hurricanes in souvenir glasses eighteen inches high. (Yes, I am counting beverages as cuisine.) Finally, we ended up dancing the rest of our night away at a bar called the Rugby Fruit Jungle.

All in all, a weekend that lived up to expectations.


More photos on Facebook: one and two and three

NOLA/Mardi Gras write-up: the rugby part!

I am writing up my weekend trip to New Orleans in chunks, because it was too much experience for just one blog entry! Read about the road trip and a cemetery, too.

Rugby!


Stingers vs. Buffalo Girls, photo thanks to Dee

The Mardi Gras tournament is a pretty friendly affair, and our hosts, the Halfmoons, squooze all three of our games into one Saturday so we could spend Sunday better appreciating the finer points of New Orleans at Mardi Gras. Despite these allowances, Saturday was no lazy rugby day. As both the first rugby day of the year, and my last games with the Stingers (I'll be moving to play for the DC Furies this spring), it had a lot to live up to - and it did.

Our first game was against the Baton Rouge Barbarians. It was a close, tough fought match: the Stingers scored in the first half, but after that play ranged back and forth between try lines with no further score. After two 25-minute halves of hard play, the Stingers emerged victorious, 5-0.

Later in the afternoon, the Stingers took the pitch again, this time against our hosts the Halfmoons. Play in this game was looser and messier, with a lot of pick-and-go from the forward packs. However, the Stingers were able to capitalize on the chaos and play another shut out game, with a final score of 19-0. A highlight of the game for all was when Jen Dean, in her last games as an active rugger before retiring, not only scored a try but kicked a successful conversion!

Finally it was time for our last game, with no break. We were playing the mysterious Buffalo Girls - up until Saturday morning, I figured they were some D2 team from Kansas or something. But over a Continental breakfast at our hotel, a chat with one of the players from the Oklahoma college side enlightened me: "The Buffalo Girls? Watch out! That's the Old Girls - they're tricky!"

Tricky indeed! For when we took the pitch, we found that we recognized more than a few Buffalo Girls from Back in Black, who narrowly defeated the Stingers at Ruggerfest in the spring. Determined to turn the tables, the Stingers played a good game; but, true to predictions, the Buffalo Girls were full of tricks, as well as hard tackling and good footwork. It was a well-fought match on both sides, but in the end, the Buffalo Girls shut out the Stingers for tournament gold and we received the silver.

More photos on Facebook: one and two and three

NOLA/Mardi Gras write-up: tourist time

I am writing up my weekend trip to New Orleans in chunks, because it was too much experience for just one blog entry! Read about the road trip, too.

New Orleans: The Educational Part


Our tour guided at the family tomb of Marie Laveau, Voodoo Queen

On Friday afternoon, because I have never been to New Orleans before and really wanted to get to know a little bit about the city, I went on a Cemetery and Voodoo tour with Kelley B, Kellie Cav, and Tiff. Our tour guide was a very energetic blond woman who gave us lots of fantastic background about New Orleans as we walked to St. Louis Cemetery - for example, did you know that New Orleans was Spanish for just as long as it was French? The thing is, it was French first, so when the Spaniards came in and changed the street names and insisted everyone spoke Spanish, everyone basically ignored them, and just changed the street names back to French when they left.

St. Louis cemetery was one of the several Catholic cemeteries in the city. It is full of those above-ground tombs that I'd always figured were popular in Louisiana because the ground is too marshy for underground burial. But, our tour guide explained, they were popular because they're a very efficient use of space: a family (or neighborhood association) would own a plot in the cemetery, and build a tomb on that plot that had a number of casket sized spaces - one, or two (like Marie Laveau's), or in the case of the neighborhood-owned or common tombs, more like fifteen or thirty. When you died, your body would be put into a coffin, which would go into that space in the tomb. Not so efficient so far, right? But here's the nifty part - after a minimum of a year and a day (this amount of time has something to do with Catholicism), when, say, your cousin dies and needs that space, they take out your coffin, take out your decomposed remains, shove them to the back of the tomb where they fall into a little cave in the bottom along with all the bones of your previously dead relatives. And hey presto! A new storage space for your dead cousin!

After wandering around the cemetery for an hour or two and learning lots more fun facts about New Orleans, burial grounds, and voodoo practices (those triple-X marks on the tombs of voodoo queens [and they are always queens, never kings] are a silly tourist thing. You shouldn't mess around with someone else's religion if you don't understand it, and anyways, all real voodoo practitioners are also staunchly Catholic. Our tour guide was also very opinionated), we went to visit a voodoo temple. There, we visited a room absolutely full of stuff - hangings on the wall and trinkets and statues stacked on the furniture and rolled up dollar bills and cigarettes stuffed everywhere. Then a woman (I guess... a voodoo priestess?) talked to us - or rather, at us - at great length about staying true to ourselves and not changing the outside because that will never change our insides. She seemed both insightful and a bit crazy - definitely an experience.

This was the end of our tour, and by then, having driven all night and then walked around a cemetery all afternoon, I was exhausted, so I met up with Dee and Q to head back to the hotel for a nice early bedtime of 5pm.


More photos on Facebook: one and two and three

NOLA/Mardi Gras write-up: the road trip

Oh, man. This trip, as might be expected, was absolutely EPIC AND AMAZING. So much so that, in order to be able to handle it, I had to break up it up into a few different sections - I'll post them one by one as I finish them!

Road trip


Q and Dee in their killah shades, somewhere in Alabama


1,200+ miles, 7 states, 18 hours of driving - and that's just one way. But Dee, Q, and I are all both dedicated to rugby and cheapskates adventurous, so we decided to drive from DC to New Orleans, Louisiana - overnight Thursday and Friday morning to get there, then all of Monday (day and night until it was almost day again!) to get home.

It wasn't as bad as I had expected - mostly because I sleep like a baby in moving cars. But there was also scenery, and rest stops (6 am McDonalds!), and late night discussions about all the important things in life (sex, love, and rugby), and the license plate game. Q and Dee laughed at me, but pretty soon they were just as excited as I was when they saw a state like California or Minnesota. By the time we'd gone to NOLA and back, we'd seen 31 states, plus DC, diplomat plates, and two Canadian provinces.


More photos on Facebook: one and two and three