SHUFFLE KERFUFFLE

Boasters League round 4~~

Plenty of movement this week with the standings. No, no, don’t worry… Mongoose are still comfortably in the lead, albeit only 19 points ahead of second place as opposed to the 21 points after week 3. The biggest mover this time was Winky-Dinks jumping 3 places to second spot and picking up the second most points this round with 32. That’s actually a worrying sign for all the other teams, because as I mentioned last week, Winky-Dinks had their bye in the third round already. The teams currently sitting in first, third and fourth place are still to have theirs…

Vivio’s suffered the most this week on the ladder dropping 3 spots to 5^th but that is because they had the bye week. They still managed 14 points anyway, just 2 less than the active Foss Nation and are actually in fairly decent standing considering.

Believe it or not, the best performing team this week was… Over Served! After three weeks of lollygagging around, they seemed to have found some footing this week they scored 35 points, dragging themselves out of the cellar, pushing Nick at Night into that dubious position. Surprisingly, only 1 team has reached the triple figures so far, things need to pick up for sure.

There was a little election hangover last night as there usually is every year and attendance was rather… “meh..”! Apparently there were quite a few cars left in the garage and Uber coincidently experienced a huge bump in business. Those who shook off the fog included Michael Siegel (Over Served) and Tom Shafer (Butter Nutz). I was just getting to the fitness room at the end of this match and out of the corner of my saw Michael go crashing down in what appeared to be an awkward fall. How mistaken I was when the 2 then walked off, Michael smiling and bragging about his final point ‘graceful’ dive to win the point. As graceful as a three-legged giraffe having a seizure maybe…? Take the points anyway you can I suppose, Tom ended up with the 2-1 match victory though.

Stefan Houbtchev (Over Served) seemed to have escaped from Guantanamo, albeit without his squash shoes (he had to borrow from me!) and still managed to scrape past Jed Elley (Butter Nutz) 2-1; Andrew Peleman (Nicker Ballers) won 3-0 against Peter Ulbrich (Foss Nation) but all three games were within 2 points; and Mark Fikany (Mongoose) dropped his first game – not match – with a 2-1 take down over Chris Langenburg (Winky-Dinks) handing Chris his first loss of the half.

Round 5 is upon us next week – marking the half-way mark of the second half already – and the day before the DAC Classic starts. Great time to get that last minute match practice going before the tournament! Will Mongoose Captain Paul Huth send out another weird e-mail to his team this week straight from the National Geographic Animal Kingdom channel? Will Michael Siegel perfect his diving technique and save the DAC from having to fix some floorboards in the future? Will Stefan find his squash shoes that I sold on e-Bay for a skimpy $30…? Ah yes, the mysteries of the squash world!

NO STOPPING MONGOOSE?

Boasters League round 3~~

Mongoose are chugging along just fine. They aren’t doing much out of the ordinary, in fact it’s rather standard to be perfectly honest. Their current win percentage so far is just a hair above 50% and they are averaging 12 bonus points per round. They are leading the pack simply because of a: they are turning up on Wednesday, and b: they currently have played the most matches overall as well. Simple. It’s like hitting good consistent length. Not much can go wrong if you do that.

That being said, as the season moves forward, Winky-Dinks could actually be the team to watch out for. They had the bye this week, and so suffered on the standings by dropping from 2^nd to 5^th, but they by far have the best win percentage after three rounds – almost 70% - an ominous sign to be sure. The good news (or not-so-bad-news) for the other teams is that they only win those matches 3-0 under 40% of time so they are a little vulnerable.

Over Served are not doing themselves any favors whatsoever with picking up only 14 points this week. Between them and Nick at Night they have the least amount of matches played and the least amount of bonus points. Yes – they both have had the bye, but average-wise they are falling behind. Catch-up will become very difficult very quickly if they aren’t careful.

It was not a fantastic turnout last night especially since it was a chance to meet the candidates for the upcoming DAC election and there was more free tacos to be consumed that what anybody could possible eat… although Stu certainly gave it the good ol’ college try. But it wasn’t too bad either and a handful of matches were still managed.

Julie Vande Vusse (Mongoose) picked up her second win of the half with a 2-1 win over Brady Savage (Vivio’s). Brady said that Julie ‘let’ him have the first game, which I can certainly see would be in Julie’s nature to do as she is nothing but extremely kind, however, I doubt Julie’s generosity extends to the squash court. I think Julie wouldn’t have lost any sleep if she could have taken all 3 games.  

Paul Gormley (Nick at Night) picked up his first win of the half and his first ever win over Curt Pedersen (Over Served) with a 2-1 victory. No doubt a great confidence booster for Paul, and of course the win had nothing to do with his freshly strung racquet and the extra couple of perfect length rails I weaved into it.

Newcomer to the league Maryanne Dunleavy (Nicker Ballers) scored her first win with a 2-1 take down of Landon Lefler (Wardogs). Impressive hustle from both players in this match! Also a first for the half, Nick Petcoff (Foss Nation) picked up a 2-1 triumph over Rene Peleman (Butter Nutz); and Stefan Houbtchev (Over Served) was pulled in for a random search at the border crossing and couldn’t make his doubles match at 6pm (thankfully Jed Elley could step in). We haven’t heard from Stefan since so it’s very possible he is still there or has been shipped off to Guantanamo.

So will Over Served pick up their game? Can anyone stop Mongoose from increasing their lead in the standings? Will Paul Gormley’s racquet have any good lengths left in the stringing? Will Stefan Houbtchev ever be seen again? Will Vikram Chopra ever play a point and not comment afterwards? Stay tuned for week 4!