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not a metaphor for anything
Mar. 10th, 2008 08:44 amI am completely fucking dead beat, and that is not a metaphor for anything. I'm just exhausted. I just could not sleep Saturday night-- didn't go to bed until 2, and just couldn't sleep after that. And then we lost an hour in the middle of the night. I forced myself out of bed at 10:30, which was really 11:30, because I had houseguests and didn't want the poor bastards waking up and wandering around the house wondering if I had any coffee or breakfast materials or anything. I couldn't exactly take a nap during the day, because of said houseguests-- it's my sister and her boyfriend, and they're in town until Tuesday morning I guess, because they have tickets to the Sabres game tonight.
Z took a nap, and also got a lot of programming done while the rest of us were talking (he retreated to the bedroom), but I didn't even get any dishes done. Hell, I didn't even get to wash/detangle my hair. Not saying anything against the houseguests-- I don't get to spend nearly enough time with my sister, definitely-- but I'm fucking wiped and I need a weekend to recover from the weekend.
I don't think I have it in me to discuss the bout in any detail. I don't know what the final score was. I know the Saucies won, and I will say, they played very well, and controlled a great deal of the action, so none of my complaints about the evening concern them at all. But the thing is, they played extremely well, and so did we: the game is completely different than it was last season.
And the refs?
Not so different from last year. They had no grasp of what was going on. One of my teammates' husbands has video footage of one of the outside refs completely just not watching the game he's supposed to be calling. There were penalties awarded improperly-- hits that were "just too hard" were called major penalties, when the WFTDA rules we're supposedly using state right at the beginning, "A hard hit is not an illegal hit." And yet, a girl leapt and grabbed our jammer by the neck and pulled her down, and didn't even get a minor, despite the fact that the outside ref positioned near me called an official time-out to go discuss the move with the inside refs.
It wasn't completely biased against us, I'm not saying that-- I happen to know that one of our girls got kicked hard in her bad knee in a pileup, and out of sheer reflex at the pain, just punched the other girl right in the face. She didn't realize what she'd done until she was pulling her hand back, because it was reflex, but still, she punched the other girl in the face. It's not even like she was subtle about it.
There was no call.
But at one point, our jammer lapped the pack twice. That's got to be at least eight points. She did not go out of bounds. She was awarded... two points for the entire jam. Our bench manager asked the refs why this was. "Uh," came the answer, "she back-blocked twice." A back block is an illegal block, for which you get a minor penalty. ... But you don't get points subtracted if you commit a foul. That's not a rule. You certainly don't get almost all of your points subtracted if you commit a foul.
Our bench manager was told that he couldn't come into the center anymore. He wasn't allowed to talk to the refs.
... Each team is supposed to have two designated representatives who can speak to the refs. The other team did; their coach went into the center to speak to the refs every time ours didn't. But the refs told us that neither of our representatives were allowed to talk to them anymore.
So our coach simply stood at the sidelines and shouted at them. One of the refs gave him a snippy reply, so the coach walked across the track, put both hands on the ref's chest, and shoved him sprawling across the track before turning around and walking back to the locker room, where he stayed the rest of the night. (The audience, meanwhile, took up a chant against that ref, chanting "[Ref] sucks! [Ref] sucks!" And I promise you, I didn't start it. Nor did I make the sign that the guy in my row started waving, that made an obscene pun on the ref's name.)
Maybe that's not the way to solve problems, but if your team is not allowed to speak to the refs, when the other team is, and it states in the rulebook that you are to be allowed... what are you supposed to do?
Am I wrong in thinking that the sport is supposed to be about, you know, skating? What does it matter, if you train your heart out and play your guts out and break your fingers and your ribs and get concussions and twisted knees and sprained ankles and rip your toenails off and tear cartilage, tendons, and ligaments... if the officiating can't keep up with you, and so it really doesn't matter what you do?
It was completely heartbreaking. These were great opponents, and we'd trained so hard to skate them, and we were so excited to skate them-- various of my teammates had compared Friday night to feeling like they were at the top of a roller coaster, they were so excited to skate-- and then we wound up just arguing with the fucking refs all night, and none of the great plays we'd rehearsed, none of the great strategies meant anything. Our jammers fought like god damned heroes, and there just... weren't any points, and our blockers sat in the penalty box. (One girl got a major penalty when she wasn't even out on the track at the time.) It wasn't even about the rule book. It was just... Heartbreaking.
And I'm just so tired.
And fuck you, Daylight Savings.
Z took a nap, and also got a lot of programming done while the rest of us were talking (he retreated to the bedroom), but I didn't even get any dishes done. Hell, I didn't even get to wash/detangle my hair. Not saying anything against the houseguests-- I don't get to spend nearly enough time with my sister, definitely-- but I'm fucking wiped and I need a weekend to recover from the weekend.
I don't think I have it in me to discuss the bout in any detail. I don't know what the final score was. I know the Saucies won, and I will say, they played very well, and controlled a great deal of the action, so none of my complaints about the evening concern them at all. But the thing is, they played extremely well, and so did we: the game is completely different than it was last season.
And the refs?
Not so different from last year. They had no grasp of what was going on. One of my teammates' husbands has video footage of one of the outside refs completely just not watching the game he's supposed to be calling. There were penalties awarded improperly-- hits that were "just too hard" were called major penalties, when the WFTDA rules we're supposedly using state right at the beginning, "A hard hit is not an illegal hit." And yet, a girl leapt and grabbed our jammer by the neck and pulled her down, and didn't even get a minor, despite the fact that the outside ref positioned near me called an official time-out to go discuss the move with the inside refs.
It wasn't completely biased against us, I'm not saying that-- I happen to know that one of our girls got kicked hard in her bad knee in a pileup, and out of sheer reflex at the pain, just punched the other girl right in the face. She didn't realize what she'd done until she was pulling her hand back, because it was reflex, but still, she punched the other girl in the face. It's not even like she was subtle about it.
There was no call.
But at one point, our jammer lapped the pack twice. That's got to be at least eight points. She did not go out of bounds. She was awarded... two points for the entire jam. Our bench manager asked the refs why this was. "Uh," came the answer, "she back-blocked twice." A back block is an illegal block, for which you get a minor penalty. ... But you don't get points subtracted if you commit a foul. That's not a rule. You certainly don't get almost all of your points subtracted if you commit a foul.
Our bench manager was told that he couldn't come into the center anymore. He wasn't allowed to talk to the refs.
... Each team is supposed to have two designated representatives who can speak to the refs. The other team did; their coach went into the center to speak to the refs every time ours didn't. But the refs told us that neither of our representatives were allowed to talk to them anymore.
So our coach simply stood at the sidelines and shouted at them. One of the refs gave him a snippy reply, so the coach walked across the track, put both hands on the ref's chest, and shoved him sprawling across the track before turning around and walking back to the locker room, where he stayed the rest of the night. (The audience, meanwhile, took up a chant against that ref, chanting "[Ref] sucks! [Ref] sucks!" And I promise you, I didn't start it. Nor did I make the sign that the guy in my row started waving, that made an obscene pun on the ref's name.)
Maybe that's not the way to solve problems, but if your team is not allowed to speak to the refs, when the other team is, and it states in the rulebook that you are to be allowed... what are you supposed to do?
Am I wrong in thinking that the sport is supposed to be about, you know, skating? What does it matter, if you train your heart out and play your guts out and break your fingers and your ribs and get concussions and twisted knees and sprained ankles and rip your toenails off and tear cartilage, tendons, and ligaments... if the officiating can't keep up with you, and so it really doesn't matter what you do?
It was completely heartbreaking. These were great opponents, and we'd trained so hard to skate them, and we were so excited to skate them-- various of my teammates had compared Friday night to feeling like they were at the top of a roller coaster, they were so excited to skate-- and then we wound up just arguing with the fucking refs all night, and none of the great plays we'd rehearsed, none of the great strategies meant anything. Our jammers fought like god damned heroes, and there just... weren't any points, and our blockers sat in the penalty box. (One girl got a major penalty when she wasn't even out on the track at the time.) It wasn't even about the rule book. It was just... Heartbreaking.
And I'm just so tired.
And fuck you, Daylight Savings.
