The only thing to we have to fear is fear itself

Unfortunately, on Thursday night the Evil Empire lost for the first time this season. We were playing a team called the Hell Spawns at Fieldstone Day School up near Lawrence and Dufferin. Although the Empire has won the majority of its matches, when it loses it follows a very set formula.

We win the first few rounds.

We lose a round.

We win a round, but in an unsatisfying manner.

We get frustrated.

The wheels come off the bus.

We lose a bunch of rounds.

We lose the game.

Although it's a frustrating cycle, it just illustrates how much emotion and passion we play with. When something gets us down, it takes us way down. And when we get frustrated, our frustration just builds and builds and it's very hard to break out of.

This week, the frustration was stemming from a couple of issues. The first was that we had three players playing who were not able to play the previous week, specifically Hot Sauce, The Deal and Smirnoff, and so all three had to work through some rust. Personally, I was dealing with an arm that had gotten creaky during my Tuesday night rec league game. Although all three guys played very well and made some great catches, it was clear that they needed some time to feel comfortable on the court again.

Something that added to that discomfort was the Hell Spawns insistence on sticking to some of TCSSC's new rules, specifically:

iv. Once in possession of a ball, a player cannot under any circumstances place a ball back down on their own side of the court. By doing so, that player is out. This includes putting a ball down in an attempt to catch on a second incoming ball. If you drop the original ball (by accident or on purpose), you are out.

Many times he had players make a big catch, and then throw the ball down to look for a second catch or just because they didn't like the feel of the ball. So although they got the big out, they were also out. We even had players dribbling the ball as they were winding up for a throw, which also meant they were out.

Third of all, the TCSSC rep was unable to find a janitor at the school, so there was no wall between the two dodgeball games being played in the gym. This meant that our balls were constantly going out of bounds (that's what she said?) and landing in the midst of the adjacent game.

Finally, our opponents, the Hell Spawns, were impressively inconsistent in their application of the rules. They'd make a big show of counting down our ten second time limit with the balls, but if we did the same, they'd ignore us. Their captain asked that we call all head shots as neutral, and then they called us out if we accidentally hit them in the head. In one ugly incident, they argued a call with Jellybean, and as she was seeking clarification from them, one of their players hit her directly in the head.

Although we played well for the first twenty minutes, the combination of rust, struggling with the new rules, the balls constantly leaving or entering the court, and the scattershot interpretation of the rules by our opponents was just too much for us. We got frustrated, and when we're frustrated we play angry and stupid. We need to stay loose and have fun to play well, and everything just got us wound up too tight. One of our players ended up yelling at the TCSSC rep, and I had to bench him for the remaining round.

As Yogi Berra once said, half of this game is ninety percent mental. Thursday night underscored that for me. We can definitely bounce back from this game, and I wholly expect we will, but it just goes to show that the only team in the league that can beat the Evil Empire is the Evil Empire itself.