Volleyball tournament
So last weekend was the volleyball tournament. We won two matches and lost the 3rd - meaning we had reached the quarterfinals. The varying levels of commitment to this competition were hugely and comically obvious. Walking into the gym during the morning practice session you could see on the one hand, some preppy team from a village nearby who had purchased numbered uniforms, had a team song and had made banners for their kids to wave in support. On the other hand you could see a team comprising entirely of flabby grey haired BOE employees wearing t-shirts that said things like “BARIBALL IS LANGUAGE HAVE SPORT SPIRITING. RACOON” who sweated after smoking cigarettes to catch their breath. During the matches my skill could have been described as ranging from “ooh that nearly looked good” to “almost catastrophically terrible in every single way”. As the team gradually realised that I was much more of an incumbent retard than they had previously thought, the occurrence of volleyballs being passed my way became something of a rarity. So much was the bullshit peer-pressure to goddamnbloodywell prove to my team members that I COULD hit the ball if required that I developed a kind of pathological fear-reaction to volleyballs that 90% of the time resulted in proving to my team members when the ball WAS passed to me to be hit, I could only do the precise and exact opposite of that.
Naturally my mistakes were accompanied with a smattering of compliments to prevent me from hanging myself from the umpires chair in self-loathing, and also a bunch of token volleyball engrish phrases such as “don’t mind don’t mind!” which I like to translate as “you suck balls, fricktard”.
Thankfully though, it wasn’t just me who was feeling that their presence on the volleyball court was both pointless and detrimental (because you know, we get in the way of the people who can actually play) as we stood around like lemons only to shriek our arses off in shock and excitement should a ball come our way. You see there were 3 players on our team who were actually, well, GOOD. The PE teacher, a volleyball coach and the Vice Principal all had a level of competence in the sport and a natural ability to read each other that faaaaar surpassed my ham-fisted attempts at simply making contact with the fricking ball with any part of my body.
So yes, after we won our first match and it became apparent that our team was maybe slightly more formidable than some of the (aforementioned cigarette smoking fatpack) other teams, rather than pulling together and ganbarimasu-ing, the team divided quite obviously into 2 groups - one a rather active group dominating all of the plays, and another group comprising the rest of the team who sort of stood around looking vacant, occasionally moving slightly to the left or right, to avoid the movement of the 3 good players.
