Basketball

An old friend from college, Mike, emailed me the other day to play in a SJU Hawks alumni 3v3 basketball tournament. Back then, we played on the same team that won the intramural league when I was a junior at St. Joe's. On my way out of the house, I grabbed a T-shirt out of Brigid's room (she tends to steal a lot of mine). On the way over, I realized it was the same shirt we got for winning that tournament back in college. I felt like a tool for wearing it, but I laughed when I got there and saw that Mike was wearing the same one. I didn't know the third guy, Chris, but was told he was actually pretty good. I hoped so, because the day before he sent out an email saying he was going to be at a bachelor party and didn't know how "alert" he would be the next day. At least he showed up...

The event wasn't very organized. 10 teams of 3 showed up, and played at various courts in what seemed to be meaningless games. If you won, you moved up in the heirarchy of courts. If you lost, you moved down. They also had games of knockout and a shooting competition. After about an hour of this, SJU coach Phil Martelli showed up and gave a brief talk about the status of the team and the scope for the future. Honestly, I think he woke up that morning and grabbed the wrong speech, because he sounded like he was addressing the Future Hawks of America. SJU didn't really have a good season, and they have a long way to go if they plan on making a splash next year.

After Martelli's speech, the event organizer (a sassay undergraduate girl with serious attitude) explained how the final tournament would shake down. We hadn't reported any of our wins, although we did win about 2/3 of the games and beaten every decent team there at least once. We figured we had a pretty good shot at winning. We played our first game and won fairly easily and had to sit out a game before playing our next. Our next opponent was someone we hadn't seen before and they looked pretty rough. It was ugly, and we ended up losing by a few in poor fashion, almost getting into it with one of the guys on the way off the court. That was it. No big talk to end the day, just a small mention that there was food, drinks, and a TV somewhere off down the hall to watch the NCAA tournament.

All things said and done, it was poorly organized, but I still had fun playing with Mike and hope he makes the trip back up from Delaware more frequently. Maybe I can recruit him to play on a Manayunk Sport and Social League.