Monday, November 10, 2008

I'm a Liar

So I lied about two things: updating my blog the weekend following the last post and that I hate intramural football. I apologize for not updating more but life is packed full of good stuff and writing has not even been in the back of my mind until now.

Since my last post, life has been great to say the least. We ended up winning the intramural football championship in dominating fashion. We ended the regular season with an undesirable 2-2 record. The intramural coordinator made some poor decisions in the format of the single elimination playoffs. First of all, all nine teams made the playoffs. So normally, a nine team playoff would include a play-in game for the 8 and 9 seeds to get in the eight team tourney and play the 1 seed in the first round. Well this coordinator just advanced the 1 seed (a team that includes a bunch of different coaches from different sports including football. I still have friends in school, so I chose to play with them instead) to the championship game and had the other eight teams play a tourney to get to the championship. We cruised through the first two games while improving drastically. Then we squeaked by a really good team to get to the championship against the coaches. The coaches were really ticked off at the format of the tourney because they just wanted to play games. So after us having played three playoff games and the coaches having played none, we proved that we had become a unstoppable. We had played them in the regular season and lost pretty bad (we didn’t have two of our better athletes for that game, but still). This was a different story though. We jumped out to a 35-0 lead and just owned them. We were not stopped the entire game from scoring a touchdown. In fact, I think we were only stopped twice the entire playoffs. Our quarterback, Ben Ahlman, was a 4-year starting QB for his high school and he was extremely poise in the clutch. Maybe he should have played three sports here at Concordia instead of basketball (1 year) and baseball (3 years- he is graduating in 3 and half years so couldn’t play his 4th season). Then, two other guys and I made up the receiving corps. The keys though were the three guys on the line that blocked well and then caught dump off passes if they blitzed. We were definitely a well oiled machine by the end of the season that couldn’t be stopped. I love intramural football now!

We have started the basketball season 4-1. Our one loss was a 2 point loss to St. Mary’s in Kansas where we were up nine with 3 minutes left. So that was heartbreaking. We have a chance to get back at them at home on Wednesday though, which we will be ready for. I made my head coaching debut with the JV team on Wednesday and jumped out to a 17-7 lead before turning the ball over an absurd amount and losing by 8. So that was disappointing. I absolutely love coaching though right now and am just praying that I can find the right spot to continue my coaching career next year. I can’t remember if I talked about this or not, but I am going to look for a different place to go to graduate school and be a Grad Assistant on the basketball team there. I want to get a Master’s Degree in some sort of PE/Coaching/Health/Human Performance subject. So the look is underway even though coaches won’t look to hire GA’s until probably February or March.

Student teaching continues to fly by as I believe there is less that five weeks left. Every day I find out something new about my kids. Some of them have it really rough. I think I can make a difference though as a health teacher as we talk about all types of topics. Even though I am in a public school, there are definitely times when I can get the class to bring up God and/or what happens after you die. Also, I can tell them who I turn to in times of high stress or unhappiness. I think that being a high school health teacher can definitely be a fulfilling life, but for now I want to give coaching college basketball a try.