Engineering Blog

We may have stopped blogging so much about Phys-Ed at Rally, but that doesn’t mean we’ve stopped doing it. Today’s game was unique enough to warrant a quick mention.

Fall in Boulder means snow (which is odd because winter usually doesn’t) and we’ve had a couple of storms in the past week. After the first last Wednesday, we faithfully trudged out to the field for our Thursday game and found it covered with snow. After a quick trip to Garston’s to grab a basketball, we were playing on the miraculously bare court right next to the field.

We had another storm yesterday and today we weren’t so lucky with the court – it was soaked. We weren’t about to turn around and go back to the office, so we did our best Navy Seal impression – “Not dead, can’t quit.” This week falls into the soccer part of the rotation, so we decided to give snow-soccer (or snoccer as some were calling it) a shot.

What a blast.

The soccer part was OK (I’m usually the worst player on the field during the soccer rotation) but the snow part was awesome. The game turned out to be about 80% soccer and 20% snowball fight.

I’m not really sure who started throwing snowballs, but it quickly became an integral part of the strategy. Early on while defending a corner kick, I was playing goalie and facing the corner when a snowball hit me in the back of the head. GOAL!

A bit later, I was still in goal with Johannes and Steve charging toward me with only a single defender to help. I squared up to stop the ball and ended up ducking at the last second to avoid a snowball thrown at my head by Eric “The Red”. Luckily the shooter bounced the ball off of one of the moguls that had naturally developed in the middle of the field and ended up kicking it wide.

When I was out of the goal, I was generally ending up on my ass about every 23 seconds because I was slipping like crazy. That 23 second average was probably about par for the course today.

In the second half, I started off back in goal. When the ball was at the other end of the field, I spent the time building walls to shield the lower corners of the goal. They saved one potential goal by Garston before Steve kicked them over. Also while in goal, I ended up on my ass again trying to cut back and block a shot. The shot didn’t go in, but since the goalie was on the ground and clearly not getting up, Steve CRAWLED up to the ball and headed it in from the ground.

Perhaps the finest use of snow I observed was from Brett “Bieber” Davidson. Brett seemed to be avoiding the snow because he was wearing shorts, a short sleeve shirt, and no gloves. He hadn’t thrown a snowball all day when on a breakaway he produced one seemingly out of thin air, pelted the closest defender in the face, and scored.

It was all for naught though, as the dark team got absolutely rolled despite a 1.5 man advantage the whole game (halflings only count for 0.5 men).

Dark Team: me, Bieber, Smitty, Scrum Todd, Matt Farrar
Light Team: Eric “The Red”, Garston, Groundskeeper Neely, Johannes