Back (with a LOT of shit to cover)

Alright so here's the skinny on the last couple of months. The All Blues beat everyone in league with each game getting tougher then the next. By the end of the year everyone was pretty much playing injured, the All Blues lack depth so it's not surprising that a longer harder season took it's toll. Nationals were really neat (despite the horrid weather, disappointing results, and my social anxiety over snoring and sharing a room with (relatively speaking) strangers). I guess I stopped blogging because there was a limit to how much I could deal with my existential crisis in the public medium of blogging. It's been a pretty tough year...it took me a while to realize that pretty much everyone is a bit scared, threatened, whatever right now and everyone is more then a wee bit prickly and not to take things too personally. I needed to cool my jets a bit and get ok with my current lot in life. I think I've figured out a few general long term goals so that's helpful too. Here's to 2010...shit people let's get excited! It's a frickin world cup year!

Alright so Berkeley U19 aka the Vigorous Gold Stars have started practicing. We have a full lineup of games as we're actually going to be competing in league this year. There's a two new squads that may or may not be forming up so as always the schedule is subject to change:

Saturday, February 6: Nor Cal girls' round robin tournament
Sunday, February 21: BHS at Alameda
Saturday, February 27: BYE (or maybe Humboldt; they don't currently have a team)
Saturday, March 6: home game vs. Sacramento
Saturday, March 20: home game vs. Davis
Saturday, April 10: home game vs. MotherLode

The All Blues will be starting up after a nice break for spring (aka developmental) season, our first meeting is on Jan 19th (comment if you need details but I doubt anyone reads this blog) but practice dates will be decided later but our schedule so far looks like this:

Sat Feb 27: SF Fog at Home
Sat March 6-7: Champagne Classic in San Diego
Sat March 13: Triple Threat in Chico
Sat March 20: Sacramento Amazons at Home
Sun March 28: San Diego Surfers at Home

UC Santa Cruz has a scrappy young squad with a long regular season ahead of it. They hosted a solid tournament (slugfest) with SLOboldt (SLO + Humboldt), Sac State, UC Davis. They won(?) the social bracket down at scrum by the sea. They narrowly lost a friendly against Stanford's mixed Crawford side. Just this weekend they had their annual clinic and friendly against cal playing mixed squad, rolling subs, for 3 rounds and won roughly 25-10(I wasn't keeping track of conversions sorry). So here's their schedule going forward (subject to change...duh):

1/9: UCSC @ Cal (clinic/DI friendly)
1/16: UCSC @ Santa Clara (league)
1/23: UCSC @ Sac State (DI friendly)
1/30: UCSC @ USF (league)
2/6: UCSC @ Humboldt (league)
(2/13: USA sevens in Las Vegas -- not an official team
event)
2/20: Santa Clara @ UCSC (league)
2/27: Humboldt @ UCSC (league)
3/6: USF @ UCSC (league)
(3/20: PCRFU (Pacific Coast) play-in, host: Nor Cal RFU)
(4/3: PCRFU playoffs, host: Utah RFU)

If you're wondering/keeping track...yea we lost St. Mary's this year...no clue what happened, something about numbers clearly (d1 lost chico due to suspension for social reasons). I'll ask St. Mary's coach next time I see him (he's been assistant reffing lately). So yea DII NorCal teams need a lot of help, if you're near a college please start up a team or think up ways to donate money time or whatev. It's really sad that our league has deteriorated from...I mean my frosh year we had CSU Monterey Bay, San Jose State, St. Mary's Santa Clara, Sac State, and us. C'mon DII!

In international news USA is playing Canada in the 'atlantic cup' or whatever down in Florida. A bunch of teammates are down there and good luck to them, kick some ass, specifically Canada's 8-man.

What else....argh too much to get to. Oh well I'll leave you with some sick ass vids that have been posted in my absence (I don't know if anyone has posted them but I'm still working my way through the YSC archives so meh)


An English promo vid (gotta love what the world cup does to the promotion of the sport)


Old school world cup footage showing why Crawford is the shiznit


some footage from the black ferns vs england game


Check out Las Banditos (they're in the prison stripes kicking ass)
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Ignore the super cheesy 80s music for a minute..this is contains some awesome freaking show of the flair of the NZ women's running game. Auckland is basically the # domestic team down there