What happened to common courtesy?

This past weekend was spent in the lovely state of New Hampshire. Season (the girl) and I made our trek up to attain what turned out to be unattainable (to us or to anyone), The Beer Pong Cup.* Unfortunately, due to differing opinions, the Cup was not on the line and it is in question on whether or not a tournament was played.

That's not what this story is all about. Sure, I could probably write a blog on it, but why open up sore wounds? The initial plan was to drive up Friday and come home Sunday. No big deal. The catch was that we would have to leave earlier than normal on Sunday b/c I had a Men's League Championship Game that night at 8:20. So instead of being able to leave at 5 or so and get to spend more time with Chris, Diana, and the gang we had to be out sometime around noon.

Around 11:30 or so we made our way to Dunkin Donuts. I'd like to make a little sidetrack from our story to point out two things. 1.) Select Dunkin Donuts are serving hash browns. I HIGHLY recommend them. 2.) This Dunkin Donuts served pizza. Where, exactly, does pizza fit into Dunkin Donuts? It started as a coffee & donut shop. Then breakfast sandwiches came along as did iced coffee and coolattas. All of which fits right in. But pizza? COME ON! Pizza at Dunkin Donuts fits in as well as poker on ESPN.#

Anyway, this time we make it back to Season's house around 5. I'm exhausted so I take a nap...leave her place...stop off at home...then make my way to the rink. Now we've had some problems with both the Northeast & Pennsauken Skatezones so when I pulled into the parking lot and saw Justin & Greg by their cars I wasn't necessarily surprised. Turns out that the game was postponed until Tuesday. Just great! We could have went to lunch or have seen The Simpsons movie...but nooooooooooooo! I feel bad for Steve Dinoia. He was on a two week vacation in Virginia with his family. He wasn't due back up until this Sunday (a full week after our originally scheduled game), but he drove up just to play and was going to go back the next morning. Well, he drove up all right, and he drove back Monday morning. He drove God knows how many hours for nothing.

Now what had happened was this. We had won our semifinal game on Thursday night. Since we were going to be missing a few of our key players on Sunday, Justin, our captain, emailed the guy that runs the league to see if our game could be pushed back to Monday or Tuesday. The guy never got back to him. Ok, no big deal, the game's still on Sunday. Sunday at 4 o'clock Justin checked the league website and the schedule still showed the game being that night. Ok, no big deal, the game's still at Sunday at 8:20 as originally scheduled. Apparently not. Turns out they pushed the game back to Tuesday but conveniently forgot to tell anybody on our team. The Lubers (Opposing team; Undefeated; Gay), however, must have gotten a call because nobody from their team showed up.

Where's the common decency? What type of operation are they running at this place? It's bush league! But like I said before, I wasn't surprised. This is the same operation whose zambonis were broken so they could only give us a dry cut.+ It's also the same operation whose referees went on strike (and one of our games was canceled without any prior notification) because the refs haven't been getting paid. And it's also the very same operation that bumped one of our games from 9:40 to 8:40 without telling us, but everybody on the other team happened to get the memo. Needless to say, it is poorly run, and needs the likes of an NHC Sports Management Graduate to take over.

Oh, we lost to the Lubers 9-0 on Tuesday night.



*The Beer Pong Cup is not the official name of the trophy. However, since there is no official name for it as of yet that's what it will be known as in this blog.
#Everything but SPorts Network by Keith Detjen (http://reverse-peephole.blogspot.com/2007/08/everything-but-sports-network.html)
+A dry cut is exactly how it sounds. The zamboni shaves the ice like it normally would, but it doesn't put any water down. So while it's better than a surface that was skated on it's not exactly smooth.