For Country and Club

Two things dominated my life over the last five or six days. The first was Olympic Hockey. Both the men’s and women’s team clawed their way into the finals. The women, as is often the case, needed an injured Marie-Philip Poulin to carry them with two goals in the semi-finals to give them a 2-1 win over Finland. Facing a much favoured US team in the gold medal game, they came within two minutes of the gold before the US tied it up on a Hilary Knight deflection to force OT and then losing 2-1. Lots to be proud about, though.

Knight announced that she isn’t coming back. MPP is 34, will she be back for another Olympics at 38? Can Canada replace their aging stars and compete with the much younger and faster American team? Will someone take out Britta Curl with a violent body check on or off the ice? Hopefully, I doubt it, and please, in that order.

As for the men, they were strong favourites to win. Both the US and Canada had the best collection of players they have ever had. Canada went up 1-0. I said that one goal is absolutely not enough to win it. The US tied it 1-1. Then Canada went into overdrive for the last period of the game, totally dominating play. And, as is so often the case, even with a roster of deadly snipers and goal scorers, they could not score, even if gifted an open net (see Suzuki, MacKinnon). Being a fatalist, I expected them to lose in OT. And they did. Hellebuyck played one of the best games a goalie could play. Binnington played well enough and made one brilliant save in OT, but that goal, that goal. His five hole was open wider than something clever I would put here to say how wide it was open. A lot. There is no way Hughes could have missed it. The only good thing to come of it was to expose the level of repugnance and casual misogyny of the players on the US hockey team.

So that was Thursday and Sunday.

In between, the pickleball tournament (Pickleball Hamilton Heated Rivalry 2026) I organized took place on Saturday. It’s the fourth one I have done since mid-August and the first since we moved indoors for the winter. They are a lot of work to pull off. Fortunately some very nice club members volunteered to help manage the courts for the tournament or it wouldn’t have happened. Them and the software I use to run it, with which I probably continually break the spirit of the trial offer by setting up the tournament in a way to keep us in the free tier. They really need to work on their monetization plan. I have thoughts, but it’s not like I’m going to tell them. Is that ethical? I go with a mostly. I’m following the rules they have put in place and I have guilt over everything else real and imagined, so I’ll cut myself some slack this once. If the club had to pay a reasonable fee for what I use it for, we would gladly pay. Although the more I write about it, the worse I feel.

Anyway.

I plan these within an inch of their lives. I can’t help it. I love scheduling and planning things. I am fascinated by how sports, particularly baseball, manage their schedules. 32 teams, 162 games per team. It’s mind-blowing. Especially, until recently, they did it all by hand. I don’t know if they still do. I mean it seems like you could drop the (extremely complicated) parameters into your favourite advanced AI program (I doubt the free tier would cut it), go for coffee, and come back to 32 schedules.

Pickleball, right. As we we driving to the courts, Tina asked me if I was excited for the tournament. Even though I had spent hours pouring over the set up again and again, communicated with all the players, set up a different website for each of the five levels so the players could track their schedule and the standings (see above comments about the tournament software and dumping in parameters), my answer was one of dread, because I’m worst case scenario guy. Especially when it comes to me. My answer was either it goes as planned and nearly everyone has a great time (except for the one or two people who always complain), so it’s no big accomplishment. It’s what was expected. C+ on my report card. Or it fails miserably and I go into witness protection. F.

It did go off without a hitch. The only complaint was from one of the 2.5-3.0 level men, saying that not enough photos were taken of their group. Which was true, but I was busy and they were the farthest away from where I was wandering around all morning. So yeah, if that was the biggest (only) complaint, it went pretty well. I am proud of it, but I think that me doing this bothers [redacted] and that takes some of the joy out of it for me (Tina will ask me who I’m talking about, then she will tell me to get over myself). That was especially true with the outdoor tournaments last August. There were four or five members who thought they were better than everyone else. Former members now, to the relief of everyone at the club. Pretty much we were all happy to see them go. It has made our life on the board much easier and created a cooperative atmosphere at the club instead of the confrontational one that they relished. But I know they hated me doing the tournaments and being responsible for people having fun with something they weren’t part of.

Onward.

So the tournament went great. A good time was had by all. Many people thanked me and commented on the club WhatsApp chat. I really enjoyed doing it. And yet. I still have a feeling that I didn’t do something right, even though I know that wasn’t the case (besides the photos for that one guy). I did call someone by the wrong name, which created an awkward moment that took a couple of days to straighten out. That will haunt me until the day I day die. Thirty years from now, if you ask me about these tournaments and what they meant to me, I will tell you that I called Theresa Gianna and made an aside regarding something that Gianna and I been talking about that left Theresa and her husband confused and I was too embarrassed to explain, as I knew it was wrong as I was saying it. It would have taken five seconds to explain but I didn’t want Theresa to know that I thought she was Gianna for a split second, even though I knew she was Theresa as she, her husband and I had been having a conversation for five minutes. They do look alike, though, especially if your mind is on other things at the time.

Probably the wrong takeaway from the tournament.

(Oh, Max was home for reading week. That was the highlight by far. He’s an awesome kid.)