With a heat index of 109° this must have been the worst week-end of the year to hold a masters tournament, but that’s where I was from 10:30 to 5:30 on Saturday. Fortunately, we were blessed with an afternoon shower to cool things off for a while. I didn’t feel too wiped out at the end of the day (just hungry), but I am sore today and my skinned knee looks a little worse.
It was a hat tournament organized by Dave Kaminski with teams assigned semi-randomly, and I ended up a on well-balanced team. We went 3-0 through pool play, and, after some minor re-balancing of teams, we kept rolling through the semifinals only to run out of poise in the finals. All of our suppressed mistakes manifested themselves in the second half of the finals where we didn’t score a single goal.
One thing about masters players (33+) is that they come prepared. We had plenty of shade tents, watermelon, first-aid supplies, etc. Though the fields were in excellent condition, we had to supply our own shade, as seen in the sideline photo.
It was Rich’s first masters event, so perhaps that accounts for the slip-n-slide. He’s making a diving catch onto the slide in the photo. He even went to the trouble of lugging a cooler full of water out to the fields just for the slip-n-slide. The cooler turned out to be very popular for dunking one’s head in to cool down.