Thoughts.

Allow me to open with the most important aspect, the party.

‘Twas good times! They had it in one of their dining halls, apparently? Nice venue, live band.

Highlights include:

-At one point the band wasn’t playing anything (they stopped for long pauses between songs) and we got an “ole, ole ole ole” chant going, jumping, etc, and the band picked it up and segwayed it into a song. likewise for “build me up buttercup”

-Wheaties and Cabo in teletubby costumes

-Like half the team going around as a team cock encourage, encircling dancing couples and chanting “make out, make out, make out” until they capitulated or otherwise retreated. the first couple or two resisted, but it worked surprisingly (or perhaps not so surprisingly) well.

-Trying to cock encourage Phil (harvard captain) to make out with Pi (harvard sophomore)

-AnnE being AnnE, with special guest Jon Hopper

-Cabo brought a giant inflatable turtle (Trip Leader Trainer leftovers) and it went crowd surfing at multiple points over the night. early on it was pretty popular, to the point that they put people in the inflatable turtle raft for crowd surfing. Terrible idea. People nearly died.

-Apparently the Dartmouth women and the Williams women had a big pow-wow spurred by their cheer. Nora and APay were saying how they were making plans to do a winter Olympics-type event in lieu of the turf invite/having Williams come to Dartmouth for wintry fun.

No good hookup stories or drunken follies that this guy knows of. Though I think GW decided to landshark the party at one point–the offending shark was promptly hooked and captured by the security who were stationed in the party. In the meantime, somebody had stolen the shark’s clothes–his buddies came around asking, and at one point the band leader was all “so guys, you may have noticed our streaker, he kind of needs his clothes, he’s being detained by security right now…”

Games went well. We brought a good number of tryouts, and played them liberally, adhering to a loose subbing rotation–we had 3-4 returners every point, and the rest were non-returners. We wound up losing all of our games, but it’s said that you learn more from failure, so by that logic we learned the most out of any team there. We certainly identified some good things to focus on for the course of the season, and so far our team dynamic and leadership is looking solid.

I’m obviously biased, having spent the last 3 years growing with these guys, but I feel like things were remarkably process-oriented–I don’t think we ever mentioned the score in huddles, and rarely checked in-game unless we were concerned for when half was, etc.