Outside Counsel

To Portland, Maine this past weekend for the Rugby National Invitation Tournament. An interesting experience, on many levels. Although I've been to many a sporting event to watch my daughters, this was the first time I'd traveled to such an event. It seemed like the thing to do, particularly because this was the Nationals, but it was not especially a bonding, father-daughter kind of thing. The parents rented a couple of big ol' Econoline vans, and the team road in those, with the windows appropriately decorated with "CHS NYS Champions Next Stop Portland". Parents drove separately. I ended up lucky, with a guy whose thinking about a lot of the the things that I was thinking about-- issues that surfaced along the weekend, I suppose-- were similar to mine.

The emotional investment a lot of the parents had in their kids' sports was something to see, and it wasn't especially pretty. For the most part I thought the girls displayed excellent sportsmanship-- one of the things I like about rugby is that this seems to be an important part of the culture. It was not always that way on the sidelines, however, and that struck me funny. The only parent who'd played this sport was the coach, which means that he was the only one with a solid grasp of the nuances of the matches, but it is never cool to shout anything except encouragment in my book, and never, ever cool to bitch about the calls the official makes.

The event was scaled nicely-- big enough, but not too big, and it was fun to watch the athletes size each other up as they arrived at the gym for the registration and opening ceremonies-- I know our girls all thought the other teams would look like the Chicago Bears, and I am sure they were all relieved to see that everyone else were high school girls, just like them. Our motel was out by a big shopping Mall, but Scheherazade Fowler had been kind enough to give me a bit of a lowdown on things to do and see in Portland, so while everyone else went to the joints around the mall for dinner, I pulled CLA and her posse out of the pack, and we went and had fun in the Old Port part of town. It's a pretty little city, and it smells like a combination of the ocean and pine-- just beautiful. Some of the girls had SATs on Saturday morning, and I sensed an opportunity to do something helpful and self serving at the same time, so I volunteered to drive them to the school early. That way I was able get a run in, along the harbor. It rained buckets the entire weekend, and never harder than while I was running, but it was still good fun, and I felt better for having done something more athletic than just standing around getting wet. City Honors/Genesee lost the first game, but won the second (they lost the Sunday morning game as well), but they played well, I thought, and had a blast. I put up a flikr page here.. For the most part I found that talking to the other parents was less entertaining than watching the girls-- all of them mixed well, and danced together at the Saturday night picnic, so I took a lot of pictures. Parential conversation was too much about children, and took two tracks: I love my daughter, but she is spoiled; or, my daughter is the best ever. These are actually the same thing, of course. There may be qualities about these people that were interesting-- when I could get them off the subject they often did have things to say that were interesting-- but people who define themselves in terms of their children do not impress me as people who are doing either themselves or their children much of a favor.