Swim Meet

So Today, I am going to get a little off topic and talk about a swim meet I went to last weekend. It was a prelims/finals meet, which means that qualifying is in the morning and finals are at night. I swam the 100 free, 50 free, and 100 back. My morning sucked. I did really bad. My 100 free was really slow. I went a 57 when my best time was a 54. When I went to talk to my coach after the race, I said that it was really bad, and he said, "Yeah. I had to watch it". He said it was aweful and I knew it was. My 50 was a little better. He told me to go a 24. I went a 24 ... .97. I said to him, "Hey, It was a 24". The 100 back was also pretty bad. I went around my best time. The top 8 from each event go to finals at night. I qualified 7th in the 100 free, 3rd in the 50, and 8th in the 100 back. I was really close to not making it back. I told people, "Yeah I meant to do that. I just wanted to go fast enough to make it back", but actually I tried to go fast. I went home in between the sessions and I was just thinking to myself, "How I am gonna go fast at night". My dad kept telling me that I went really slow, and I said that I was gonna go a lot faster at finals.

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I showed up to finals that day really nervous, but also excited. Warm-up was a bit of a struggle, because the water was so hot. It was like a hot tub. I don't understand why they would pay so much money to keep it that hot. Honestly I would've like it to be really cold than really hot. I tried to keep my mind off how hot the pool was and on how I was going to swim. My first race that night was the 100 free. I went really slow in the morning and knew that I had to redeem myself that night. I was behined the blocks and was really nervous, but in my head all I was saying was, "Lets kick some ass" over and over again. It sounds really dumb, but it worked, because I dropped 5 secounds from the morning. I went a 52. I looked up at the scoreboard and then saw the time I went and I thought, "No way". I didn't think that I could go that fast, but apperently I did. I look over at my coach and there were a bunch of my teameates there and they looked as confused as I did. I was really happy with that. My next 2 races also went really well and it was very good meet for me.

Championships

So we had water polo finals a while back and it went pretty well. For the varsity game however, we lost by 1 point. We played against porkchops team, but he didn't play. I have no idea where he was, but everyone else from that team was there. We started off with the lead and I thought that we could actually win the game, but our third quarter was one of the worst quarters we have ever played. All of us just sucked. We couldn't play defence or offence. I had a really bad game. I couldn't make a single shot. Something was really off with my shot. I should've scored 2 to 3 more goals. There were six on fives where I had a wide open shot from around 4 meters and I just missed the shot. I don't know what was happening. It was probably one of the worst shooting performances I have ever had. In the end it was a pretty good game for the whole team, but the third quarter just killed us. They came back and took the lead from us, and we just couldn't get it back. Our first half was amazing and probably was the best water polo that we had ever played, but the third quarter was just really bad. We almost won, but almost winning isn't winning.

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The JV game went better than the varsity game. We won and got third place in the entire tornement. My shooting was a little bit better than the varsity game, but that was probably because the goalie was a lot worse in the JV game. I scored 4 goals in that game and we ended up winning by 1 point. We had the lead with 40 seconds left in the game, but I thought that there was less time and that I could just hold the ball for the rest of the game. I was wrong. The shot clock was gonna run out before the game ended. I was just swimming around with the ball trying to waste time, when I looked up at the clock and realized that I wouldn't make it to the end, I thought, "O crap, what am I gonna do". The shot clock ran out and there was 5 seconds left in the game. The other team got the ball and started swimming down the pool. Luckily I was all the way down on the otherside so they would have to go the enitre length of the pool to score. At about half way the person with the ball shot it and luckily our goalie blocked it. If that went in, everyone would've gotten pissed at me and I wouldn't have heard the end of it. It was an ok game for us and we got third which was really good. It was a fun season and now I really don't know what to do with my life. Water polo doesn't start again until February and I don't know how I am going to make it through all that time. It's gonna be a struggle.

People Need To Swim

There are not many swimmers on our water polo team. There a couple football player, a hockey player and some people that just joined and don't play any other sports. The biggest problem we have is that There are only 3 people that are on the swim team. One of them just joined, and he is not that fast. So really there are only 2 people that are fast on our team. Other teams can destroy us on counters, because their guys can out swim most of our guys. When we set up our defense is really good, but our transition defense is really bad. We need more people to start swimming. It would help us so much if everyone on the team could out swim everyone on the other team. I need to get the team to be on the swim team, or just swim in general, because they are really bad. I can get 3 body lengths on basically everyone on the team and there is one kid thats faster than me. He is our sprinter and we haven't lost a sprint since he joined the team. The rest of our team on the other hand, has to swim. Also our counter attacks are pretty bad.  Luckily that's like the only thing we have been working on in practice the last week.

Image courtesy of JeffCable

The people on my team are kind of clueless when it comes to counter attacks. We go over it a lot in practice, but when it comes to a game it just doesn't happen. Everyone forgets what we did all week in practice and they all just swim straight to the goal. There is no organization. Nothing. Everyone is just swimming around like a chicken with its head cut off. It gets real old real fast having to yell at everyone to go where they are supposed to every time there is a turn over.

Image courtesy of NeslsonNDHS

Except in practice when we are doing a counter attack drill, we can do it perfectly fine. I just don't get it. In a game no one can do a counter attack right, but in practice we can. Does everyone else on the team just like freak out and just start swimming to the goal during the game? or what? I makes no sense to me. How do you do something perfectly in practice, but then when it comes to game time we just forget everything and do it all wrong? We have championships in two weeks and I hope we can get it together before then so that we can win our game.

Finals

We don't have any games for the next two weeks, and that is the last week this season. It is the finals and for JV we are playing for 3 against Kearns A, B, or C. We lost to all of them during the season. I know what you're thinking. How did you lose to a C team? Well... Half the team was gone. There was a swim meet and there was no one at the game. We only lost by 1. I was carrying, but I missed the last second shot to tie the game. I just barely hit the cross bar with 2 seconds to go. We also lost to the B team, but I'd rather not talk about that one. It was kind of sad how we lost. There was one super aggresive kid on the C team that really pissed me off. When I was guarding him he would shove his head into mine. I have no idea what he was doing. I was so confused.

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For the Varsity we are playing for 6th place. We lost our first 3 games, then tied one, and won the last 3. We ended off the regular season looking really strong. We finally got it together and won some games. Hopefully we can win against whoever we are playing against for 6th. We probalby should have done better than 6th, but at the start of the season we weren't really playing at our best. We have won the last 3 games we played and we should carry the momentum into the last weekend. I have no idea who we are playing, but I hope that we can beat them. There haven't been many people that I have hated in the varsity games lately. We have been winning and it is way more fun when you are winning. I haven't had the urge to hit someone in a varsity game for a while. I guess that's a good thing. Only 2 more weeks until the end of the season. I'm really sad about that and really don't know what I am going to do with my life once the season ends.

Destroying Kids

Last weekend I had another 3 water polo games. 1 of them was a varsity game and the other 2 were JV. The first varsity game we won 12-1. Our defence was amazing and our offence finally started to work. We scored on a lot of counter attacks and we finally were able to score goals when we set up our offence. I didn't even have to play the whole game. Our entire team finally showed up and we had 3 subs. It was the most we've had all season.

Image courtesy of The National

The next game we had was a JV game. There was one really annoying kid on the other team. He was number 2 and I hated him so much. He was chubby and when I was guarding him he tried to be tough and fight me, but he had the weakest puches I've ever seen. He was like tapping me. It was like he thought he was tough, but was to scared to actually hit because I would've kicked his ass. I was really close to destroying him, but I just elbowed him in the ribs once and he got super scared and stopped. When destroyed there team so in the fourth quarter I wasn't playing, and he hit our goalie in the face, with the ball, twice within a minute. I was about to jump in the pool and just wreck him. That kid is lucky that I didn't find him in the locker room after the game.

Image courtesy of Water Polo World

The third game was another JV game. There wasn't anyone that really pissed me off, but we absolutly destroyed the team we were playing. I scored 11 goals and 4 or 5 of them were half court shots. The goalie was really small so basically every shot I took went in. There was one girl that was drowning one kid on my team. He couldn't do anything about it. He was drinking a lot of water when she was guarding him. It was funny watching some girl half his size drowning him. The final score of the game was 15-9. That was the first day all season that we have one every game. It was a good day.

PorkChop

Last weekend I had a water polo game. It was a varsity game, so there were a lot of people that were a lot bigger than me. I was one of the smallest ones there. When we started I was guarding this super fat kid that couldn't swim. Everyone on my team nick named him Pork Chop. He was really annoying. I couldn't move him. I would try to push him out of the way, but he was so big that I would move. 

Throughout the game I started to hate him more and more. He was really bad at swimming though, and it was really funny. 

Image 

Courtesy of Whats Your Beef Butcher Shop

One time, he got kicked out and had to go to the corner. It took him so long to swim there and then when he was allowed to get back in we were all on the other side of the pool and he just didn't want to swim. His coach started yelling at him to swim, but it took him at least a minute to get down to the other side. He looked like he was dying. Towrds the end of the game he started to stay on one side of the pool and didn't even bother swimming back. He just sat there. When I was gaurding him I could hear him breathing really heavily and then he would try to grab onto me when we had to swim to the other side. He missed every time, but it got really annoying. 

Image Courtsey of Wikipedia

Sadly, my team lost to the hands of Pork Chop and his team. It was a really close game and we were winning at the start of the second quarter. It was a really low scoring game and there wasn't much off offense. We couldn't really get much going. The end score was 7-9. I'm still mad that we lost and especially mad that we lost to Pork Chop. He was really annoying. I wish we beat them