Winter Workouts have begun.

We started offseason lifting last week. This is an important part of our workout regimen, as we need to strengthen and build muscle before we start more aggressive workouts as a team. Not only does this make us better prepared for practice, giving us a higher maximum ceiling, but it helps ensure that we don't get injured right at the beginning of the Spring season. Traditionally, not everybody on the team manages to consistantly make it down to the gym. You can always figure out which players on our team are dedicated workers and which are just posers: the workers breeze through the first couple weeks of practice while the posers pull themselves out of workouts with panting breathes and phantom pains.

I just finished calling everybody on our team to check up on their workout statuses. Really, I've only seen a handful of my teammates at the gym, which is a little disappointing. We've been meeting at 3:30 in the Boyden weight room most days, doing a quick lifting workout and then heading to the basketball courts for some pickup basketball. Anyway, as I suspected, most of the people I talked to hadn't gotten around to doing much of anything in the way of offseason workouts. A lot of them didn't sound too excited, but I coerced a good portion of my team into agreeing to meet me at Boyden tomorrow afternoon. I hope that most of them show up tomorrow, though that's only the first (easiest) step towards a Winter of hard work. It's hard to get started, but it's even harder to stay motivated. I'm really going to put in the extra effort to stay on my teammates and do everything that I can to get them all into the best possible shape.

We had a team meeting on Friday, which was very productive (by our standards). We started by discussing the tournaments that we will be attending this Spring. We are planning on heading down to Terminus in Atlanta at the beginning of Spring Break, hitting High Tide in Savannah during Spring Break, and then stopping at Easterns in North Carolina on the final weekend of Spring Break. The following weekend, we're going to head back down to Washington D.C. for Roll Call. Then we (hopefully) will have our tournament and Yale Cup before Sectionals. A pretty good lineup of tournaments, I think. Mitch ran through the numbers and figured out that we would be able to do all of this for only $250 per player, which we will be collecting as dues in the first week of the Spring Semester. This is much cheaper than any other Spring Season has been, so we are discussing the possibility of either trying to add Vegas or the Stanford Invite to our tournament schedule. Both of these tournaments would be very expensive, so we are only going to seriously consider the possibility if we can get a fair amount of money from the school, but that is certainly a possibility. Babbitt and I need to meet with our advisor as soon as possible to discuss our team's budget for the Spring Semester and see if that is even remotely feasible.

We also voted on our uniform design. I think we came up with a pretty dope look for this season. On our white jersey, we are going to have the seal of Massachusetts with a nautical star in the background instead of the regular old star that usually appears on the state seal. The back of our light jersey will have our last names and our numbers. Our dark jersey is going to have the Zoodisc Z on the front with "Massachusetts Ultimate" and our numbers on the back. Our shorts are going to be maroon with our numbers on the front of the left leg and a Zoodisc Z on the back of the right leg. I think we're also going to get warmups, though I don't really know what the design for that is going to be.

Friday night we had a surprise birthday party for Josh (he turned 22 this weekend) and then we had a semi-formal at our house. There was a fair amount of stupid drama surrounding the semi-formal (which I was not to helpful in preventing), but that's neither here nor there: the party went prety well, overall. I had a bit much to drink, however, and yesterday was a complete wash. I was up all night drinking, finishing a large number of beers and taking whiskey shots in rapid succession until the sun came up. I'm too old for that shit. It totally wrecked my ass, and I'm only really feeling better now. I also jammed my left thumb on a basketball this afternoon, which is just peachy.

Alright, enough of the whining. I need to figure out an ab workout that I can email out to the team tonight to get a more structured workout going in addition to the individual lifting that everybody should be doing. I want to give out a workout that everybody can do twice a day, at wakeup and at bedtime, at least five days a week, but I need to make sure that I don't give them something too time intensive or else not a lot of people are going to commit to doing it. Ergh. Maybe I'll do some abs myself and try to figure out how large of a workout I can tell people to do and have them actually do it.

I'll have to give it some thought.