With Scott out of the line-up and my knee taking a couple weeks off, Brian and Bob filled in for our two games at ADK Lanes. Below Julee sets Bill while Bob, Chris, Brian and Kathryn are in the background.
Bill blocks a shot while Bob covers the tip. Chris, Brian and Kathryn are in the ready position.
While our Wednesday night Volley Llamas team is near the top of the standings our Thursday night Sand Fleas team is hanging around the middle of the 10 team league.
The 3rd and 4th Grade held a track meet. Eric competed in the 55 meter run. Eric competed in a heat vs James, Dylan, and unknown and Jonathon.
Eric and James were side by side the entire race. Eric told me he was afraid his sneaker was going to come off. In this picture it looks rather loosely tied. In fact, in several races kids lost one or more sneakers during their run.
After their event the kids headed over to the drink tent for water and socializing. Eric’s buddy, Jack, had a tough time in his mile run and couldn’t finish.
The kids had a lot of fun in the bleachers cheering for their friends. It was a raucous group.
An ‘ordered pair’ is simply two numbers in a certain order. For example, the numbers ‘2’ and ‘3’ can form two ordered pairs: 2, 3 and 3, 2. Ordered pairs can also contain the same number twice. For example: 2, 2 and 3, 3
A very important application of ordered pairs is to locate points on a grid or map. For street maps it is common to use a letter and a number, eg: B17 or D5. This is not very accurate, but if two numbers were used instead of a number and a letter, then people would easily get them in the wrong order and get lost! In mathematics, we use two numbers to accurately locate a position on a rectangular grid. Eric has been doing ordered pairs in school and used worksheets to make several pictures. Foghorn Leghorn was one of his more complicated graphs.
Eric had a 6pm lacrosse game last night vs. another Whitesboro team. Eric got to play middie last night for the 1st time and participated in a face-off for the 1st time. He scored two goals as the beneficiary of nice passes from his buddy, DeVante. Below Eric (#6) shoots on goal. He wore one black sock and one white sock to help his Mom differentiate him from the other players but he ended up with one black sock and one grey sock. There was 1/2″ of water laying on the field.
There was some discrepancy about the score… we might have won 6-5, but either way it was a decent close game. We got soaked, despite raincoats, etc….
Afterwards Kathryn and Eric jumped into the hot tub to warm up.
HP Gold won a good game vs. Waterville 3-1 on a warm Sunday afternoon. Goals by Trevor, Eric and Sawyer. Waterville came in a little short-handed so we loaned them 2 players each quarter and played 8v8.
Afterwards we took a team photo and handed out ice cream coupons.
1st row: Hunter, Jonas, Carter, Andrew, Sawyer, Nick
2nd row: Zach, Logan, Eric, Trevor, Nicco
Coaches: Jim & Jim
In early May I received a telephone call from Michael Houghton, a High School classmate. Michael had entered a volleyball team into the Empire State Senior Games and then had a couple of his players back out on him. Michael and I had talked and emailed about volleyball several times, but never played together. Mike said he was desperate for players so I agreed to participate, although I was concerned I might be trying to play at a level over my head.
The Empire State Games are a set of annual Olympic-style competitions for amateur athletes from the state of New York, encompassing several divisions and allowing athletes of all ages to compete. The Senior Games consisted of a number of competitions specifically for athletes age 50 and older. New York State is divided into six regions for the Empire State Games, and each region fields its own athletic teams through tryouts before the Games begin: Adirondack, Central, Hudson Valley, Long Island, New York City and Western. The games at SUNY Cortland collected participants from the Western, Central and Adirondack regions.
The volleyball games were all day Saturday June 8, with 31 women and men teams entered. Games were at the Lusk Field House at SUNY Cortland. There were six nets with continuous play starting at 9am. Games were broken up by breaks and working as linesmen and score keepers. During breaks I walked laps on the tracks around the volleyball games to keep loosened up.
We had 6 teams in our 60-65 age group pool: two from Buffalo, a team from Binghamton, and one from Albany. All the teams were established entities with a team from Buffalo having played together for 17 years. We had not played together as a group and I hadn’t played a 6-2 set in over 13 years. Our lack of familiarity and practice showed, but over the course of the day we improved and managed to finish in 4th place in our pool. Our record tied us with another team but we lost a placing due to point differential.
Seeded 4th we played the #1 seed and lost two games. Our 2nd game we were leading at the end but made too many mistakes at the end. At the end of a long day we played the 3rd place team about 7:30pm. They were tired and asked us if we wanted to play just 1 game for the bronze medal position. We declined and decided to get our monies worth. It was a wise decision as we dropped game 1. We won game 2 and then played a close final match. We were in the lead 8-6 at the mid-game court switch over. We expanded our lead to be the 1st to 15 points and winning the bronze medal.
All our games were competitive. Every team was comprised of good volleyball players and most all played an aggressive 6-2 offense. Our team was comprised of Craig, Phil, Michael and Phil in the front row with Jim, Larry and Chris in the back row.
After two successful games vs. New Hartford teams the HP lacrosse team took a 12-0 drubbing from Whitesboro. Eric played attack and was more inclined to engage in the ‘dig the ball out’ scrums than previously. He wore one white sock and one black sock to help his mom identify him on the field.
the Volley Llamas had two Wednesday night volleyball games, one against Carolyn Niedzielski’s team which we won 2-1. Liz subbed for Margaret and Jay played with us. Our 2nd game was against the all-female SandStorm with Kathryn, Laura, Beth, Kayla, Amy and Amanda. Again we won 2-1.
Our Thursday night Sand Fleas team played vs a new team (Team 5) and took all 3 games. Then we played Nice Set of Tips and lost 1-2. We had close games.
Eric started lacrosse this week and it is his new favorite sport. Saturday’s opening game featured two games vs. New Hartford Red and then New Hartford White. Eric played defense in the 1st game and was attack in the 2nd game. He scored one goal in the 2nd game. The HP team was happy as they achieved their 1st wins in three years of youth lacrosse.
It was 80 degrees on Saturday. Afterwards, Eric and Trevor jumped in the pond to cool off.
Saturday evening I managed to finish mowing all my pasture.
Sunday Eric played AYSO soccer vs a good Utica team. The weather cooperated and 10 the kids showed up. I think we scored 4 goals (Sawyer, Nick, Andrew and Jonas) and we took an overwhelming number of shots on goal. Eric must have taken 8 shots on goal.
I had a discussion with the referee buddy about ‘free substituting’ during dead balls during the last quarter so I didn’t have kids who only played 2 quarters. He didn’t understand how that could be possible so I showed him my roster rotation sheet. I think that convinced him – he permitted me to substitute on a dead ball near the 5 minute mark. I put Eric, Sawyer, Hunter in and we shored up the defense and rode out the rest of the game. We got a couple more nice shots on goal, but didn’t capitalize on them.
We had a couple problems.. The biggest one is in front of the goal. We didn’t follow our shots in and by this I mean the players around the shooter. In my opinion everyone on offense stopped to see if the goal went in and we missed opportunities where the ball came off the goalie and was available for a tap in. Hunter and Nick especially missed those opportunities. We didn’t always rotate on defense. Jonas especially tend to stand in his ‘spot’ regardless of which side the ball is coming from. Maybe some 3 v 2 defensive drills is in order.
Nick is fast, fearless with the ball but can’t dribble with his head up. When he got the ball near the goal he inevitably got double and triple teamed but was too focused on the ball to see it coming or see an open team mate to pass to. Once when I was yelling to get his head up, he did pick his head up and promptly tripped over the ball and fell down…
The coach of the Utica team complimented our boys.
After the game we went to Tony’s Pizza with Jennifer and then took Eric to his Sunday night Odyssey soccer practice.
A long sport’s filled week.
Our weather turned wet, rainy and cool on Friday and stayed that way through Sunday evening. Some of the outdoor chores we planned for early in the week got delayed until the end of the weekend. So mowing the lawn, planting tomatoes and beans in the garden, mowing pastures and deploying the floating dock all got delayed to Sunday and Monday.
Eric had lots of play days. On Friday DeVante rode the school bus with Eric and the boys played lots of MineCraft together as well as ping pong.
Saturday Eric had Jack over for the day. Jack’s morning baseball game was cancelled due to the weather. Sunday Jennifer took Eric out to play miniature golf at Gold Rush.
Monday Eric got invited to Jack’s house and went swimming.
We picked four loads of rocks off the minnow pond dam and dumped them into the overflow, hoping to raise the level of the pond. I then unhooked the slip scoop and pulled out the old stone boat I had built. We loaded our floating dock onto the stone boat, dragged it down to the pond and deployed it. The 55 gallon drums shifted to one side and clearly need a better method of securing them.
I started mowing the pasture and got the front portion of the pasture completed.
I planted egg plant, tomato plants, and pole beans in the remaining garden space. New this year are a full row of potatoes, broccoli and egg plant. I think I have ~36 tomato plants in the garden.
We had a bobwhite, rare in our area, blown in by the high winds. He/she hung around our deck for a couple of days.
