Recently in Sports Category
Gina and I volunteered Saturday night at the U.S. Women's soccer team's game against Canada at RFK. I didn't think I'd make it back to RFK many times since the last Nationals game there last year, so this was a nice surprise. We were running a booth for her hotel, which was sponsoring the event, so I got to practice my soccer skills while letting kids try to kick a goal to allow their parents to enter to win a three-night stay. I should note that I've never actually played soccer, but I continue to believe that it would be my sport if we'd ever had it growing up. As it stood, some people were skeptical of marketing ploys and avoided our booth altogether. We bookended the night by handing out free Doubletree cookies to everyone at the end of the game, which were much better received than the contest. It was an experiment in sociology. I could see people walking past me with their usual gut reactions to street peddlers: a quick shake of the head and a "no thanks." Then, when my message of "free Doubletree cookies!" sank in, they would give a quick doubletake and a "wait, what did you say?" Finally, the reality of a free cookie would overtake them, and they would take a few steps back to grab one (or two or three) from me.
Some, of course, simply said "oh heck yes" and took the proffered cookies without hesitation.
Watching the game was fun, by the way. Our free tickets were close to the field. It was my first live soccer match other than intramurals, and I was impressed by how quickly the 90 minutes goes by when you're there. Of course, the fact that the US women outscored the Canucks by 6-0 probably meant that there were many more goals than is typical, but I still enjoyed it. I could probably go see a DC United game sometime soon.
Maybe this still wasn't my last time at the old warhorse of RFK.
I'll be honest: I pay very little attention to college basketball until March. I know I'm not alone in this. It took a few years, but toward the end of my time at Tech, I was known to catch a game or two per season. When we really started being in competitive in the ACC, that was exciting, but I still didn't have the time to watch every game. That doesn't mean that I'm not indignant at VT's NCAA snub! That doesn't mean that I won't fill out a bracket with 15 seeds making it to the Final Four in protest! Mark my words, this is Austin Peay's year, baby! They have jumping people on their webpage, and that means they're exciting!
But in all seriousness, the second year of the Coors Park Bracketology Center is now up in our basement. This year it comes complete with 200% more tournaments! I don't think you can call the CBI a tournament, but Matt still scribbled its bracket out on a piece of notebook paper so it wouldn't get left out. See Matt's Flickr pictures of the setup. I can claim no credit for the ideas or the craftsmanship of the brackets, since Josh handcrafted the NCAA board and Matt made the others, but I can still have collateral coolness by living here.
This year, I was also doing research into bracket scoring strategies for purely hypothetical application in various sociopolitical pool-type settings. I was stunned at the precision that some people use in their brackets! I think that next year, I could really get into coming up with a dorky scoring system that uses Fibonacci sequences and least squares regression. Someone call me up and remind me to do that in 11 months, ok? Seriously.