Famous last words

I'm good about wearing sunscreen. Sure, I hadn't always been good about it, say, back in high school when no one my age was good about it. However, sunburns suck. I may like the delicious feeling of ache after a hard workout, but I despise the touch-sensitive heat of a sunburn, and wore sunscreen to avoid it.

So, when DanO commented at some tournament in Davis about the amount of sunscreen I put on and how I always have sunscreen available, and I stated something along the lines that, well, not only am I not going to burn, I'm not going to get skin cancer either, the irony was not lost on me.

I often wondered about those words, how prophetic they seemed after the diagnosis. A reader would call that foreshadowing in a novel. The superstitious would call tempting fate. The religious would call it taunting their gods. I wonder if maybe it was just a numbers game: growing up in Arizona, spending a lot of time at the pool means a lot of sun and a lot of skin damage, especially for someone with the pale skin of the Hodsdens.

A couple days ago, when Andy tweeted about ultimate, and included the teams still practicing since they were going to Nationals, I had to look twice and confirm: Zeitgeist, a local women's team that isn't Fury, was going to Nationals.

And it made me think about those famous last words, and how I had another set.

Early in the season, Mischief was recruiting a strong female player. She has a history of going to Nationals, having played on a team that's gone for the last who knows how many years. Five? Six? Eight? I don't know. She played for a top women's team in a regional that could send only 4 teams, but any of the top five or six would finish in the top half at Nationals, so only the artificial restrictions of the series prevented her team from going every year.

One of the arguments that other teams were making against Mischief was that the team didn't throw to its women. The statement incredibly annoyed me, so I wrote a long email to the team about how teams don't have even throwing distributions, no team does. Based on player roles and skills, there's a distribution of throws, some players throw a lot, some don't. To blanketly state Mischief doesn't throw to its women without also stating Fury doesn't throw to its worst players is a screwed up, "Let's not show we're good, let's just badmouth them" campaigning strategy.

Not that it was Fury who did that. It was Zeitgeist.

Having been the person who took the stats, I could show that not only did Mischief throw to its women, but its women were evenly distributed in the distribution. Sure, our top thrower was male, but he was also the center of the offensive zone handlers, and touched the disc twice for every time the side handlers touched it once, much less the cutters' touches.

To my surprise, I didn't post the whole email here.

Probably because at the end of the email, I made the comment, "You can tell her if she wants to have the most touches on the team, sure, she should go play with Zeitgeist, but she's not going to Nationals."

And we know how that turned out.

I can help but think, "Famous last words, Kitt. Nice foreshadowing." I'm totally full of 'em.

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