I do apologize if you’re sick about reading about how busy I am. But such is my life as of late, and as we all know, I like to talk about stuff that actually relates to me in my blog.

So today is my marathon day. If I survive the day without going crazy and not breaking any bones, then I’ve accomplished an extraordinary feat. Here is my schedule:

• 7am-4pm: Work
• 11:30am: Lunchtime mortgage meeting
• 5:30pm to, at the latest, 8:15pm – Corporate Challenge Flag Football
• 9:00pm: Work (evening release)
• 10:00pm: Indoor Soccer

I’ll probably get home at 11:30, where I’ll probably go immediately to bed and wake up the next morning to get to work at 7am again. Oh. My. God.

So let me explain some of these items. Obviously, I have work. But during my lunch break I’ll be heading to rework our mortgage, probably to a decently lower interest rate, which would rock. If that happens, we’ll likely keep our payments where they’re at now, and if we run into issues in the future, cut how much we’re paying to it. It’ll be a nice buffer should we ever need to use it. Otherwise, we’ll pay off the house much faster.

So we also have Corporate Challenge Flag Football this evening. I’ll get into the reason why, but our earliest game starts at 6:30 and our latest goes until whenever. If we keep winning, we keep playing. But I know for a fact that I can’t play past 8:15 and some other people can’t because we all have evening releases at work. Which, of course, is next on my list.

Our evening release should actually be pretty easy. Normally, when we have Thursday evening releases, if I have an Indoor Soccer game later than 7:30, I won’t play. But this evening’s release shouldn’t take longer than a half-hour. So I’m going to head up to my Dad’s place and do the release from there, which is 5 minutes from the Indoor Soccer facility. As long as the release doesn’t take too much longer than we’re anticipating, I will make my Indoor Soccer game at 10.

Wow. Indoor Soccer at 10. Looking forward to that one too. But that means I’ll have at least played in two games (one football, one soccer) and potentially up to four, depending on how the flag football games shake out. I’ll be dead, dead tired. And let’s not forget all of the other busy-ness I’ll be tackling throughout the day.

Oh, I figured I should give you a quick wrap-up to my odd breathing issue. Yesterday it started getting better as the day went on, and when I woke up this morning, it was gone! I’ve had a suggestion that it could have been allergies from a shitload of dust that was kicked up over the last couple days by high winds, as well as hyperventilation, in addition to those thoughts that I listed on the post yesterday. If it happens again, I’ll have to see if I can identify any similar and dissimilar conditions between the two occurrences to see if I can come to a better conclusion.

So as for the reason we’re playing Flag Football tonight — we won last night! But that will be a blog post later today, likely, as I want to expand upon that subject.

Also, Wyatt Gallagher had a pretty interesting post on the state of the USA right now…

So today’s Wednesday. This means that the pool play portion of Corporate Challenge Soccer has ended! So, how did Selling Source fare?

Actually, I’m quite proud of the team. We had issues getting enough women on the team, so we weren’t even sure if we’d be able to play. We ended up actually having 5 women on the roster, but one of the ladies, Celeste, had just given birth, so there was no way she’d be able to play.

Complicating matters, another lady, Emerald, would be unable to play the first two of the three pool-play matches because she would be attending a wedding that evening. So we’d have three women for the first two games and four for the third… Well, not so fast. Initially it seemed like another woman, Melissa, would be unable to play the third game of pool play and any potential matches in the playoffs. We got that cleared up so she’d be able to play, however.

Although this is getting ahead of myself a bit, that wasn’t the end of it. Another of our ladies, Adrienne, wasn’t able to make the third game because something came up at the last moment, so we played all three pool play games with three women. Since we were playing 6v6 and were required to keep three women on the field at all times, our ladies had to play the entire game without a sub… Wow.

So what about the men? No issues, really. We had 6 guys and all 6 made each game. So obviously, the men did the heavy lifting on running up and down the field, but the women really, really contributed.

Now on to the results! We dropped our first game to AAA to the tune of 6-2. It wasn’t as bad a loss as the score suggests really. We were still in the mode of learning how we all played and getting people in the right positions on the field.

The second game we won 6-4 over Nevada Cancer Institute. We felt really good about this win and we gelled pretty well, I thought. Unfortunately, we were eliminated from the playoffs after our second game, as AAA defeated Konami and had a 2-0 record. They held the tiebreakers over both us and Konami because they beat us both, and Konami defeated Nevada Cancer Institute, so we had no way to get ahead of AAA in the standings.

Our final game was against Konami and we took it, 4-3. So we ended with a 2-1 pool play record and a -1 goal differential. Not bad!

I’d like to give shoutouts to all of our players:

The ladies on the team were troopers for sure, and despite playing a lot of time, they still made plays in all three games the whole match. I’m really proud of this team considered the circumstances, and it being our first year for Corporate Challenge Soccer. I hope to be able to play with as many of them as possible in the future.

Well ok, so Rantzweiler is just a last name. But it’s the onyl thing I could think of to use as an odd post name that sounded like: rant!

So what shall I rant about today? How about Las Vegas’ Corporate Challenge? Specifically, their co-ed soccer rules.

I’ve been waiting a long time to be able to participate in Corporate Challenge here in Las Vegas. My two previous jobs that I worked at totalling over 5 years didn’t participate, and my first two summers here at my current job they didn’t either. But they are this year, so I got totally psyched.

In case you’re not familiar with Corporate Challenge, I’ll give you a short recap of what it is. Companies across Las Vegas decide they want to compete against others in friendly athletic competition over a summer. There are many different sports and events to participate in, some individual and most team. There.

I plan on participating in Soccer, Flag Football and Bowling. Soccer and Football are mostly back-to-back from early- to mid-April and Bowling takes place sometime early May.

As many of you know, I play Indoor Soccer each week, so I’m already acclimated to soccer. They started team captain signups this week and I knew that nobody would head up the soccer team, so guess what — it’s me. I read the rules before signing up and got pretty pissed off.

See, usually any co-ed soccer setup will have rules designed to level the playing field between men and women. Some of them are pretty harmless, but others are blatant and even others are just outright bad for the game. I mean, it’s understandable that women can get injured more playing soccer than men, men are usually more aggressive than women and men, as a whole, are “athletically superior” to women. That is, if you believe that. So thus, balancing rules are in place.

My Indoor Soccer team is co-ed and there is basically one rule in place to level the playing field — a goal scored by a woman is worth two, a man gets one. That’s it, and when I first heard the rule, I was upset about it. That’s a drastic rule, but I eventually got used to it, and sometimes even like it because it creates unique tactical situations on the field that aren’t there in single-gender games. Like who to send up on offense and who to defend with.

So that rule isn’t that bad once you start playing with it in effect. But the rules that Corporate Challenge are using just absolutely suck. Really, it’s only one balancing rule that I think is really awful.

When a woman has the ball on the field, unless she is in the opposing team’s penalty box, a man may not challenge her for the ball. If he shadows her as she runs across the field or tries to intimidate her, he’ll get yellow carded. If he actually does take the ball away, he gets yellow carded. Now, I’m sure you all know what a yellow card is — it’s a serious warning. If you get two in one match, they turn into a red card. A red card ejects you from the game and you have to sit out the next competitive game.

How awful of a rule is that? Really, really bad. It basically means a woman has free reign on the field as far as opposing men go. It is really bad. At first, I was truly pissed off and was considering whether or not I wanted to participate because this rule is so putrid. After some thought, though, I realized I still wanted to play.

This rule makes it so only women can defend women. This way, men can’t just overtake a woman. Let me tell you from experience, women can be way better than men on the soccer field. I play co-ed each and every week and I’ve got to defend the women just as hard as the men because they’re really damn good too. If I couldn’t challenge the woman except for within the penalty box, I’d be screwed. Just think, if there’s a really good woman shooter from outside the box, men can never defend her shots!

I understand the rule is to make it so women actually get to play, but this is pretty bad. There should be some other mechanism in place. This kind of thing promotes the tactic of “get it to the woman!” at almost all times, which may counterbalance in favor of women and start shutting men out of the game.

In any case, the way around this rule to stay competitive and keep men involved is to deploy some good women on your team. The rules are 6-on-6, so ideally you’d field three men and three women, each gender having at least one player that can play keeper relatively well. From there, you’ve got to have good plans on offense and defense:

• Defense: Stay disciplined and communicate well in order to keep matching up women on women. In the event of a mismatch where there are more women you have to defend than you can match up with, well… you’ll have to practice that scenario.
• Offense: Try to create mismatches as much as possible to keep the defense running and confused, but don’t rely only on women. Creating mismatches may open up someone of either gender. Again, communication is key, but on offense, gender tactics aren’t as prevalent as on defense.

So yeah, I’m the team captain and will be responsible for practices, tactics and the like. Should be interesting, I’ve just got to get a team together, along with alternates.