Apropos of Nothing

Last time I posted I wrote about a crazy length of time that had past between posts. Wait! That was only an unpublished draft. I don't even want to go there in this one. The goal is to get back into the swing of things - at least semi-regularly. We shall see!

I recently participated in tryouts for an elite Ultimate Frisbee team from Philly. The team is Pike and they are known as a "team to beat" in the Ultimate World in the Club level Open division (Open = men's) at least on the East Coast. This was an excellent experience for me. I have just come off a really fun, yet fairly disappointing College career in terms of success. I have never made it past the first round of the Championship Series (Sectionals, Regionals, Nationals) in College. Pike is a team that used to consistently go to Nationals until recently and the captains seem hungry as hell to make it Nationals once again. I started the tryout period by going to random pick up games in both New Brunswick and Philly. There I meet some of the veterans on the team and learned how their system worked a bit. The main tryout weekend was an intense experience. The last weekend of May anyone that wanted to try out for the team was invited to a brutal tryouts in Philly at t...

In terms of blogging I have fallen off the face of the Earth! It have been over 4 months since my last post?! Ridiculous! I HAVE been really busy, but that time gap is inexcusable and I apologize. Let's do this! Oh yeah, I graduated!! Way back in May (Tuesday, the 19th of '09) I graduated from Rutgers University! I am a joint graduate from the School of Arts and Sciences (SAS) and the School of Communication, Information and Library Studies (SCILS). I was granted a Bachelors of Arts degree in Communication with a ~3.4 GPA (really a 3.39) and departmental honors. I was also inducted into Lamda Pi Eta the Communication honor society end of my Junior year. The ceromony was nice and also short running just under two hours (incredible!). It was held in the College Ave gym, a place I have visited many times during my tenure at RU. It was a great feeling to walk across that stage to know that I have finally earned a College degree. Wow! Finally done with College? On the t...

Every year my team travels together on Spring Break. This year we went to Jekyll Island, GA. (Very nice little island, btw). What a week! First, we met up in back of the college Ave gym in New Brunswick, NJ at 5:30pm sat. Yes, PM! Not my idea, trust me. I packed the van (we had a 15 passenger van, the big red San-van, and two cars) full of 19peoples gear. I a lot to fit into the back of one van, but it worked out alright. We departed on our long journey to Georgia. Google maps estimated roughly 14hours travel time for a arrival time of around 8am. I estimated 6:30am. Hmm... The ride down was very long, fun and a pain in my freaking ass. Normally, there is a lot of great bonding that happens on these trips, but because we drove overnight many of my passengers passed out much of the way. I, on the other hand, along with my buddy Thorpe (first name [Ryan] is unimportant) stayed up together and took turns driving through crappy, raining conditions. Thanks Mother Nature! We ma...

Last Thursday, I got a call from a fellow supervisor from RU-info. She called to tell me that I was no longer needed to help lead mentor training that took place on Sunday. Bill has a free weekend?? Solid. So, within about 45mins I already made arrangements to visit Juniata for the first time since Fall '07. It had been awhile. Friday night I excitedly arrived to South Hall to an excited Jordan, Mike (Steigro), and Claire. Three of my best friends there. I was only there for a few minutes before a drink was put into my hand. I hung out with mostly just them and a view others, mostly just acquaintances I knew from Freshman/Sophomore year. The night was a good time. The next day Jordan, Mike/Streigro and I all decided to go hiking around the local mountains, since it was a high around 50. The weather was gorgeous! I ended up waking around in a T-shirt at one point. We hiked past the railroad and followed the river for about a mile or so. There was still ice in the river ...

Last Saturday I traveled up to North Jersey with some of my teammates (all of which are officers on the team) for a coaching clinic. The clinic is designed to give members of the Ultimate Frisbee community the necessary knowledge and tools in order to do basic coaching, specifically at the Youth [High School] level. The clinic was lead by a well known player/coach in the Ultimate World. Upon completion, all attendees are considered level I certified. The clinic was broken up into two parts; ethics & performance. The morning was designated toward understanding the ethics and basic structure to building a program, specifically at the high school level. This section was very interesting to me. I never knew, nor thought about, anything that was discussed about building a program, recruiting, fund raising, parents, traveling, etc. Being one of a very few players on my team that did not play in high school I never experienced most of what everyone else had experienced in high scho...