As many of you have gathered from my recent Facebook updates, I will be commanding an elite squadron of athletes for the forthcoming 2010 Green Bay Park and Rec Kickball League.
If you didn’t get the memo, I was toying with the idea of calling our team The Situation in honor of everyone’s favorite Guido but it just didn’t feel right and coming up with a team name is important, arguably the most crucial aspect of having a productive kickball season.
I’m not kidding. You show me a championship kickball team and I’ll show you a cohesive group of kids rallying behind a clever euphemism of the word “balls”.
And they will have matching t-shirts. That’s the other key ingredient. Matching t-shirts.
But we got both aspects covered. Greg proposed What? What? In the Butt and I immediately fell in love with the name. It’s got a catchy beat and it’s culturally relevant. Well I thought it was. Apparently the song is like three years old but it’s new to me so back off!
Shenanigans is sponsoring our team and supplying t-shirts. Mega.
The third component of creating a championship kickball team is coaching. That’s where its Benny’s time to shine.
After studying a variety of different managing strategies, I’ve decided to adopt a blend between famed Oakland A’s manager Billy Beane and legendary player, recently sacked, Argentina national team manager Diego Maradona.
On the one hand, Billy Beane’s use of sabermetrics greatly appeals to my love of spreadsheets and statistics, exploiting patterns in cold hard data against conventional wisdom to minimize outs and maximize runs scored.
More importantly, I really like the idea of having this conversation.
“Sorry, Greg, I have to put in a pitch hitter for you. Your On-Base Plus Slugging percentage tends to rapidly deteriorate after your third Busch Light.”
But more likely, I will adopt the Diego Maradona style of coaching where I will simply let my best players run wild all over the field and deflect any criticism if we happen to lose with wild and erratic off-field behavior like partying so hard as to make Keith Richards blush or repeatedly refusing to take phone calls from the president of the country.
This is by far the simplest (and most fun) coaching style but a lack of on-field discipline can lead to things like this. I’ll take my chances.
The fourth key component is getting everybody to understand the concept of tagging up. See this post for details. It’s still as timely as ever.
All this typing is getting me really excited. I live for kickball. I once hit 5 home runs in one game once. True story. Ask my old roommate, Pat. He was there. I know no one else is going to believe me.
5 comments:
You are right, we don't believe you.
It's a shame you can't utilize the Annexation of Puerto Rico.
I'm a believer! I've seen you kick the ball to hard it popped on impact. What? What? In the Butt...
the only thing that popped on impact was Ben's butt cherry. Thats what what was in the butt.
No, I believe the previous comment was more accurate. I did crush the hell out of a kickball once that busted at the seams. A KICKBALL, not my butt cherry.
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