Spring Break Approaches

The plan is to meet at the Robsham Visitor Center Parking Lot at 8 o'clock this evening. That should get us on the road by 8:15 or 8:30 and in Atlanta by mid-day tomorrow. Barring anything unexpected.

It's been a tough couple days for me in terms of getting my shit done and getting ready for this trip. I met with Babbitt yesterday afternoon in the Student Union Center for Student Development to use the school credit cards to pay for our UPA memberships. This meant that we needed to sign in to every player's UPA account, one at a time, and reenter the credit card information for each individual's online payment. As arduous of a task as this was, it really wouldn't have been too much of a pain if it were not for the number of people who gave us incomplete or incorrect information. It really messed with our rhythm whenever we had to stop and call somebody to get their proper email address or whenever we had to find somebody's facebook page to enter their proper birth month and year. And so forth. The UPA requires our roster to be completed and sent in by March 20th, which is only 8 days away. Considering we are leaving for Georgia tonight and will be practically powerless to deal with any of this administrative junk, it really needs to be done today. And that's where the next wave of trouble started.

I had a ton of homework to do last night, but I wasn't feeling motivated to start. I had a bunch of spanish online assignments, a draft of a spanish composition, a philosophy take-home exam.... I ended up blowing off most of my work (I had done some spanish online assignments a couple nights ago, so that wasn't a total wash) and focusing solely on the philosophy exam. Jesse and I finally made it to the library, after a fun evening of sitting around the house, at about midnight. Off to a rough start already. We only had one copy of the exam between us, and Jesse wanted to have the text of the exam in front of her at all times (the professor gave us a two page case study and asked us questions about the study, which meant that we didn't really need to draw on any of the information covered by his lectures or by our class readings). She ended up typing the entire case study into a word document, which took about an hour. I was a little iritated at first, but this final delay probably saved our entire team.

While I waited for Jesse to finish so that I could actually start in on my exam, I messed around with our online roster. I knew that today was our last day to submit the roster before we left for spring break and I was, honestly, a bit nervous about the whole situation. It seemed imprudent to wait until just before we left to click "submit", as that would give us very little time to troubleshoot the problem. After some hesitation due to the fact that we have not been able to get Rob Brazile on to the roster - there is some problem with his UPA membership - I read the guidlines and realized that we could add players to our roster after the roster submission deadline. I decided to submit the roster, and that's when I realized our mistake.

For this entire process, I had been operating under the assumption that we just needed to submit our online application to the UPA. This is the process that you have to go through to submit a roster for Club Sectionals, and I believed that the process for submitting a roster to College Sectionals would be nearly identical. While I knew that the UPA needed to verify that every member of our team was enrolled at our university, I thought that the UPA was responsible for contacting the registrar after our roster submission. I was wrong.

Apparently, once you submit a roster, the website brings you to a document that you need to print out and give to the registrar. This document includes the names and identifying information of the members of your team, and the registrar has to go through the entire list, ascertain the validity of each player, sign the document, and mark it with the "seal of the registrar" (I'm assuming that this is some kind of stamp). It is then My responsibility to mail the document, with the registrar's approval, to the UPA headquarters. According to the UPA website, a roster submission is not considered complete until it has both been submitted online And the UPA receives the registrar approval document. And all of this is due March 20th.

Well, at this point I really started to freak out. The UPA website warned me to begin the process early, as some registrars can take several weeks to complete the necessary documents. I didn't have several weeks. I had one day.

I woke up at 8 this morning after not being able to fall asleep until about 5am. I was nervous. I got to the registar's office at about 8:45. While she didn't exactly seem thrilled to see me bustling in at the zero hour, the woman at the registrar's desk was very nice. She told me that she would be able to get my documents completed by 4 or 5 o'clock this afternoon, but I would need to get the UMass student id number's for every player on our team. So I called everybody. On the first run through the list, probably about half the team picked up and gave me their id numbers. The second run through woke up a few more people, and the third gained a few more numbers. After that, the phones went dead. There seemed to be about five members of this team who did not want to answer their phones this morning. I ended up calling, taking short breaks to send text messages and leave voice mail messages, from 8:45 until about 10:35. Without stopping. My incessent calling left me with a headache and killed half of my phone's battery. When I finally turned in the forms, I had the student id numbers for everybody on the team except Henry, Chase, and Galen. All three of them, thankfully, called me back within the next hour and I was able to return to the registrar's desk and add them to the list before it was too late. Phew.

Now I just have to hope that the lady at the registrar's desk keeps her word and finishes our forms this afternoon. If she gets it done in time I will be forever grateful. If she doesn't, well.... I don't want to even consider that possibility. I spent all last night lying in bed, wondering if our season was going to end before it even had the chance to begin. It was terrifying. I can't let that happen. I won't let that happen.

I'm set to meet Babbitt at the Student Union in a little while to finish paying for UPA memberships. Hopefully, that won't take very long and I will have plenty of time to take a nap with Jesse before I have to go back to the registrar's office and pick up those documents. Then, I need to mail the documents and our waivers, pack for the trip, and leave. Ugh. I am completely exhausted and I still need to drive through the night to get to Atlanta. I don't know how I'm going to feel when I finally get there, but I have to imagine that it will be better than this.