Game 8: An Anti-Climactic End and an Angry Note to the City

I may not always expect to win, but I certainly always want to and am willing to give it a try. So, for the second straight week, I was prepared to play, knowing that we were likely to get destroyed by the first-place Hickory Hoosiers.

Last week, of course, we arrived for our 9:30 game with no opponent on the other side of the floor. We didn't know until 9:30 sharp that the game was a forfeit, but we made the most of the open gym time by playing some three-on-three and went home with our rather thankless win. The warning came a little sooner this week.

Game 8: July 22 vs. Hickory Hoosiers

I received an email Wednesday evening stating that our game was again a forfeit. Woo-fucking-hoo, we win again. But what an anti-climactic end to the season. Honestly, as brutally as we probably would have beaten by this team -- seeing as they'd already beaten everyone else in the league -- even a horribly humbling loss might have felt better. Fuck, at least we would have gotten to play.

I responded to the Parks & Rec representative by email to let him know that some of our team would likely show up at our 8:30 timeslot so we can take advantage of our floor time as we had the previous week. I was none too fucking pleased Wednesday morning when the city responded to inform me that our floor time would be 9:30pm. So these assholes asked the teams that were scheduled for the 9:30 game if they could move up to 8:30 (that's a fucking no-brainer), and then our team, which had already been screwed by not being able to play an actual game, was given the unfavorable late time for our private open gym session. They clearly knew it was much less likely any of us would show up at that time. So I figured I should let them know.

Here's my response:

Thanks for letting me know, but I want you to know that I'm not at all happy about this. It seems to me that this move is motivated entirely by the idea of closing the gym/community center as quickly as possible, and I don't think that's fair to my team. When our 9:30 game was forfeited last week, my team stayed to practice against each other, and we were told by multiple employees at 10:00 that we needed to leave because that's when the center closed. Well, we would have been there longer than that had our game not been cancelled; likewise with tonight as well. The truth is that no one wants to stay any longer than necessary, and no one really wants to play at 9:30, but we paid for that court. We paid to play eight games and we're only getting six. I'm sure we'd be run out of the gym at 10:00 again tonight, too, so it's not as if we're getting the full court time we paid for.

It's unlikely anyone on my team will be willing to make the journey to the gym at 9:30 tonight simply to shoot around and/or hope that enough guys show up for a short pickup game. In reality, our season basically ends with the equivalent of a full team ejection, as none of us got to play the last two games of the season. We certainly did nothing to earn this sort of two-game suspension, and we are not very pleased about it. What exactly is the $10 forfeit fee intended to cover? In a fair world, it would seem most appropriate to direct that toward the team that got screwed out of playing (twice).

Since we were a winless team prior to these forfeits, you might think we wouldn't mind getting a couple of free wins. But in the spirit of competition, we all look forward to getting out to play each week. This is a terrible way for our season to end.

Steve

It took everything I had not to use profanity throughout that email, but I did my best to cling to some professionalism, which we clearly hadn't been shown. I obviously pushed the right buttons, though, because I'd received a voicemail on my work phone and cell phone from the league coordinator within 30 minutes. I never did call the prick back, and he's since responded by email to acknowledge that "forfeits are a problem" and he offered my team an hour of free open gym at a future date at a time of our choosing. Nice, I suppose, but small potatoes compared to two games that we were hosed out of. (FYI, two games are essentially worth $70 of our entry fee. That could pay for a few rounds of drinks for our team and is probably at least three times what it would normally cost to rent the gym for an hour.)

So that's where things end. With a fucking whimper.

Final Record: 2-6
SJI Contribution (based on my postgame recollections): 10.2 pts per game for the six games we actually played. Not bad for a hot-headed little turd like myself.

Next game: TBD. I'm currently searching for late summer/fall league availability. Considering our 2009 record to date is 5-13, with two of those wins via forfeit, let's hope I can do a better job of finding the right fit for our squad. Until then ...