DarqByte

Ok, so for the first time ever I have a significant goal streak going in soccer. This easily beats out the one game I had two goals in the last minute remaining, simply because I’ve never had two games in a row with a goal… Let alone three. We’ll see if I extend this out to for on Wednesday.

In any case, I wanted to break down the three goals for you because they’re pretty cool. The yellow circle is the ball, yellow arrows the ball’s path. Red people are opponents, green people are teammates, blue is me and the purple person is the opponent keeper. Our paths all match our colors like the ball path does.

Game 1, Goal 1: Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Game 1, Goal 1: Wednesday, January 27, 2010

I’m not entirely sure how the ball got into that area of the field, but the opposing player had it and was trying to run across the goal to get the ball around me to clear it upfield. I knew he was trying to do that, so I let off just a little tiny bit to give him the idea that he might have an opening. He took the kick and I got my leg out to block it. Low and behold I did, and I got a fortuitous bounce. The ball kept rolling the direction I was running, across the goal, right with me. I took a couple steps to line myself up and shot across the goal low, voila! Goal!

This was mostly all a hustle goal for me. I kept with the guy even though he had the ball and managed to force a mistake close to their goal, giving me a close-range shot, and the keeper didn’t have a chance because it was across and low.

Game 2, Goal 2: Wednesday, February 3, 2010

Game 2, Goal 2: Wednesday, February 3, 2010

This was just all great setup by a teammate. He had the ball near midfield and I snuck a bit behind the two opposing defenders, they didn’t know I was running on the other side of the field behind them while they paid attention to my teammate. He played a perfect pass between the two defenders to the point where, as you can see above, I met the ball. I didn’t even stop the ball for a shot, it was a one-timer where I hit the ball about mid-range vertically and to the right side of the goal. The keeper was on her back foot and had no chance. Great placement of the pass and shot. All my teammate’s doing.

Game 3, Goal 3: Thursday, February 4, 2010

Game 3, Goal 3: Thursday, February 4, 2010

One of my teammates kicked the ball along the right side of the field and it was a bit past me. I got hung up in the corner of the field, but there were no opponents near, the closest was probably at midfield on the left side of the field. This is very similar to what happened on my first goal. I brought the ball out from the corner, set it up a little and took a couple steps, then shot low and across the goal. It bounced off of the side post and in, the keeper had absolutely no shot.

This one was a little bit more special as it was (is likely) my last game with Brittany Gauldin. She’s been on my Thursday team for quite some time and this was her second-to-last game. She wanted to get a team picture and I was the holdout because I can’t make the Thursday games unless they’re 9pm or later. I managed to move some things around with my classes on this day so I could make the game, so it ended up pretty cool. I think I annihilated my accounting exam I took early, too.

Robert Athletics goals, soccer

34 inches? I know what you’re thinking about but no, I’m not talking about that. 34 would be selling myself way short anyway.

The latest chapter in my whole “make myself look and feel better” thing has arrived. I’ve been putting off getting new clothes mainly because I wanted to complete my weight loss first. I didn’t want to have to buy a bunch of clothes in a stopgap fashion. Unfortunately, my last two pairs of jeans bit the dust, so I was forced to replace them. They were Levi’s, and they were built rather well. The only problem was that it was tough to find 38-30s that weren’t below my heels. They weren’t truly 30s so I kept stepping on them and wearing down the bottom of the pant legs. For the record, I really needed 37s, not 38s. They don’t make 37s.

Now I’m in 34s! 34-30s and they aren’t too long. This makes me a very happy person. I’ve lost at least 30 pounds and 3 inches off of my waist. Good stuff. I’ve recently begun making progress again and I anticipate hitting the 175 mark by the end of this month or early February. That would be 35 pounds off since I started nearly a year ago. I think my target is 160, but I won’t really know until I get there.

I recently looked at photos of me when I went to just the mustache, the Robstache. Wow I’ve lost weight since then. I do look better. Still got further to go. Additionally, I’m going to try to start running in the mornings with Pepper (and potentially Laura). I was supposed to start this week, but being excessively tired when my alarm went off put the kabash on things. Hopefully I’ll start tomorrow.

And if I do start tomorrow, wow what a day it will be. Today I start my next semester of MBA courses. In 50 minutes, actually. I’m in Lied Library right now. But because my classes are on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I’ve signed up to play soccer on Wednesdays. I was originally waffling on the decision, but Laura’s support for me switching days and the fear of getting really out of shape spurred me to sign up. In any case, tomorrow’s my first Wednesday day of soccer on a new individual coed team, and for some odd reason we have two games tomorrow… What the fuck. Two games? A doubleheader? I’ve done it before, but by choice not by facility scheduling. Running in the morning plus two soccer games in the evening. Wow.

And that’s not the end of it! I told my Thursday soccer team I’d make the games if they were late enough, which is basically 9pm or later. So the 9:10 game this Thursday? Yup, I can make that. And I’m hoping to run on Thursday morning as well. Which would make three runs (Wednesday, Thursday and Friday) and three soccer games from Wednesday morning to Friday morning. Wow. See why I think I’ll hit 175 this month?

In other news, I wish I had endless time to do everything I want to do. Not only am I trying to find time to work on OMGN 4, I want to write a memoir about my video game life until, well, now. I think it would be very interesting because I don’t think there’s much of anything like that out now. And I’m a pretty good example of someone who gamed a lot when they were a kid and make the transition to being a responsible (well, at least I think so) adult with a married life and a job and other normal responsibilities.

This brings me to another subject: video games. Specifically, the original Atari joystick. See, my friend Jonathan recently got a tattoo in Elvish from Lord of the Rings. He loves it and I’ve always wanted a tattoo and I’ve always loved video games. I wasn’t 100% set on what tattoo I wanted but I knew I wanted a video game-related one, especially after seeing Anne’s roommate Ed’s “Mario 1up” tattoo he’s got. See, I didn’t want a tattoo that was system- or franchise-specific, I wanted one that represented video games as a whole. Now I know the Atari joystick is still Atari, but it represents so much more than that these days. And I’m asking Jonathan to give me a nice illustration of it so I can verify I indeed want to get it permanently marked on my body.

Laura’s been making sure I really want one, and I do. I am, however, curious to know what you all think of it…

Anyway, that’s it for now. Chat at you all later when I know more about my spring courses and I can let you know if I think I’ll be on track to continue my pursuit of a 4.0.

Robert Athletics, Life, Musings, School soccer, unlv, Video Games, weight loss

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.

Robert Life, Work corporate challenge, selling source, soccer

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.

Robert Musings corporate challenge, soccer, sports

I don’t really have much to write about at the moment, but oh well. I wanted to post to keep in touch with all of you wonderful people.

So money sucks… It seems like every time that Laura and I make a sizable purchase, something goes relatively wrong soon after. After getting our iPhones and HDTV, we’ve seen our bank account plummet with some unexpected expenses… Oy. But we’ll be alright. I’ve already started identifying areas where I will be spending less, such as canceling my Sports Illustrated subscription (since I haven’t been reading it much), and I’ll probably be quitting soccer for awhile. I haven’t had a break since I started playing again 5 years ago and I think I need one.

Anyway, Christmas is coming soon and the whole commercialization of it has started to bother me a bit. Everybody just expects gifts unless you explicitly tell them “Hey, we’re giftless this year!” Then they may get upset, especially if said person just purchased an HDTV… Yeah, I know. I just got an HDTV, so I ought to be able to afford gifts for everybody, right? Well, I’d done freelance work this fall and saved it up, not to mention I’ve been wanting one for 2 years and a great deal finally came along. That, and unexpected expenses.

I regrettably ended up telling all of my friends that Laura and I are focusing gifts this year on immediate family. We needed to do it. That, and we have a very large number of friends, so it would have been mighty expensive on us to get gifts for everybody, even if we were buying affordable gifts.

That, and we don’t really have a big list of things we want people to get for us. We usually just get things that we want or need when we want or need them (although sometimes we should wait, i.e. HDTV and iPhones…). Really, I’d just be happy to get a text message or a phone call from friends and family that aren’t in town, wishing me Merry Christmas or Happy Hanukkah or whatever they believe.

So Samantha is doing well now. She’s settled in to the whole house finally. She hangs out wherever we’re at in the house now, which is nice. Before she would only hang out upstairs, but the breakthrough really came when we moved her food and water downstairs. Previously, they were in the master bathroom on the opposite side of her litter box. We’d read that you should separate good & water from the litter box as best you can, so we moved them downstairs to along a wall in the kitchen. Since she was forced to go downstairs to eat, that worked.

She’s gotten into a habit of waking me up at 4:30-5:30 area by purring in my ear and walking all over me. Oy…

Hm. Can’t think of much else to yak about. See you later.

Robert Life, Musings, Samantha, iPhone christmas, money, soccer