Yesterday and Henry is a Bad Captain.

Another weak turnout at practice yesterday. Which is beginning to just feel rather normal. We managed to be pretty productive, though, running go-to and break mark drills before a scrimmage cut short by impending darkness. I don't feel like I really need to talk about that.

Before practice yesterday, Babbitt clued me in on our status for this weekend's tournament at Yale. We had been planning, as we do every year, to play at the Yale Coffee Cup. Henry told us that he had submitted a bid for this tournament. As it turns out, he did not.

Apparently, Henry's first contact with the Yale captains had been through his personal email account instead of the team's. Why he did this is anyone's guess. It does appear, however, that he eventually decided to forward the string of Yale/Umass communication to the team email account so that Babbitt (the other captain) would be able to see what our team plans are. Things seemed pretty wrapped up until Yale changed the weekend that they would be holding the tournament and asked teams to resubmit their bids. Henry hit Reply on the forwarded email, which sent our bid to his personal account rather than to the Yale captain. Not hearing anything else from us, Yale left us off of their tournament list and it seems like we may be out of luck. Babbitt wouldn't have even known about this problem if he hadn't checked the tournament page to see what Other teams would be attending Coffee Cup. When he didn't see our name on the list, he checked the string of emails and deduced that Henry had completely fucked us in the ass. Babbitt emailed the Yale captains and said that we would love to play if anybody dropped, but I don't know the chances of this.

Henry has stunned me with his lack of commitment as a captain. A captain should be the team's most dedicated player. Henry, on the other hand, seems to among Zoodisc's least dedicated players. He routinely skips practice, and has rarely participated fully even in the practices he has attended. He has, maybe, been a full contributor in five practices this fall. That is unacceptable. Henry seems much more comfortable standing on the sideline, flexing his political muscle by ordering everybody else around. When he has played for us, Henry hasn't demonstrated any desire to play well. In our scrimmage against ARHS, for example, Henry literally had ten or eleven throwaways. Again, unacceptable. He makes some of the worst decisions that I have ever seen out of a player of his caliber, and has the nasty habit of getting on his teammates for failing to succeed on plays of a much higher percentage.

From an organizational standpoint, Henry is a complete failure as a captain. He claims that he wants other players on the team to give input and help make decisions, but he is generally unavailable or unwilling to listen to anybody else. He moves forward with wild plans, only to decide halfway through the process that he doesn't want to finish the job and dumps it off on Babbitt. Several times in this young season Henry has handed Babbitt the daunting task of cleaning up cleaning up the mess that he has made of team affairs.

Take, for example, this current situation. How the fuck did Henry not realize his mistake as soon as our bid arrive in his own Inbox?! How did a lightbulb not go off in his obtuse skull when he received an email addressed to another man? I don't even want to start getting into how stupid Henry must be to make such an inexcusable mistake.

Or how about our own tournament, which we hosted last weekend. Henry handled everything to do with this tournament until four days before the fact when he shoved the whole deal off on Babbitt and gave him the complete responsibility of handling the affair with little to no knowledge of the decisions that Henry had unilaterally made. It was only when teams began dropping from our tournament that we realized that Henry had made absolutely no effort to collect deposits from the teams that had announced an intention to come. Without deposits, other teams had no incentive not to drop out of a tournament scheduled for Halloween weekend.

Or how about Purple Valley, when Henry illogically thought (without consulting anybody) that we would like to stay for the tournament dinner even though we were not staying overnight or attending the tournament party. Had he asked anybody, he would have learned that it was ridiculous to assume that anybody would want to stay at Williams for three or four hours after our game just to eat some shitty tournament dinner. Any reasonable person would want to get home and shower and go to bed, but Henry didn't think of his because he was Skipping The Tournament. Commitment? That word is meaningless to Henry! He then paid for a tournament dinner for 25, which is eleven people more than we actually brought to Purple Valley. Henry just through our money away, but this was no problem for him because he wasn't playing with us anyway.

Or how about two nights ago, when Henry agreed to swing by my house to discuss plans for the team with Babbitt. He said that he would come at midnight, after he got off of work, and Babbitt waited up for him. At one in the morning, Henry called Babbitt to tell him he wasn't actually coming. Is this a considerate thing to do? No, it is a Henry thing to do and Henry is anything But considerate. Or respectful. Or punctual. Or reliable. He is egotistically incompetent, and it is going to be difficult to stop myself from hitting him in the mouth the next time that he deigns to actually show up to a team event. If he escapes physical violence, I should be lauded as a saint.

Henry barely deserves to be a player on this team, let alone a captain. The thought of my impending graduation makes me mourn the end of my Zoodisc career. It does, however, make me rejoice at the fact that I will never again be forced to play on the same team as Henry Brecher.