I signed up to play in another volleyball league. Last year, I signed up for one and it worked out pretty well. The team was made up of a good combination old and young and everyone pretty much got along and agreed that the while winning is fun, it's better to get along. The season ended with it turning into the usual San Francisco experience where after a season of everyone telling each other how much they love each other and how much we should all hang out and keep playing volleyball with each other, half the team bailed to another team and that was the end of that. Which is kind of what I expected and why I never quite joined in on the "I love you guys" bit (see previous post about neurotic being right).

Anyways, so tonight was the first volleyball game of the season. Unlike my last team, this team was pretty much a bunch of kids. Like fresh out of college kids. Two of the guys on the team were the big, athletic types with varisty t-shirts representing the various varsity college teams they played in. Which is fine, except I've gotten old enough to not really like dealing with young bucks straight out of school. Young, dumb and full of cum, I guess you'd say, which in sports means wanna win, don't care about being dicks about it, not to bright about it.

Not that they were dicks, but because there were two guys who were big jock types, it was quickly agreed before we started playing that our entire strategy would be setting the ball up for them so they could spike the ball, something they were really eager to do because while warming up, intsead of just hitting the ball back and forth, they'd just practice spiking the shit out of the ball. So how this would work is that no matter what your position, you'd make it so that you'd do whatever you could to set them up.

Now, when I was playing earlier, I had problems learning what were the basics of volley ball- guy in the front row center would always get the second ball and set, first person who touches the ball hits it to center so they can set. It wasn't like I didn't learn the rule as much as I didn't see the point in doing it when the team wasn't very good. I'd hit it to the setter, for instance, only to watch them whiff completely. But after playing on that other team, with a bunch of people who were pretty good, I learned what to do. Guy in middle always sets and if they can't get to it, call "need help."

But in this team, none of that mattered. Because it was all about setting it up for the big dudes to spike it. So what was inevitably happening is that as soon as the ball was served, people in the front line would do some sort of whacky rotation to set things up, like the Indianapolis Colts running their high-powered offense complete with Peyton Manning audibles. As a result, all the rules I had learned and all the positioning I had learned, was pretty much thrown out the window.

Let's just say i didn't fare well. I didn't exactly know what I was doing or where I was going. When I went after the second hit to set it, I'd be waved away. When I didn't, I was told I should have. And I spent most of the game wondering whether or not I should do this or do that.

But the main reason why I didn't do so well is because being a little older, i've long since believed that my purpose in life it so set up the big jocks to do their big jock thing. Homey don't play that. And that's the problem with playing on a team full of young kids, they're still young enough to think jocks deserve special things and the jocks haven't been battered down enough to no longer think they're that special. Not to mention, I'm not into stupidity. Stupidity makes me want to not deal with it. And playing a certain style of volleyball in which the first thing you have to do when the ball is served is to spend more time concentrating on not running into somebody while you're moving into some weird position doesn't seem like that smart of a strategy.