Chasing Irish, Part 1: Playing with Tir na nOg

At first I thought the team, like my kickball team from last year (Nerdy Sanchez 4eva), was affiliated with the Tir na nOg pub I know to be defunct in Somerville, MA. It was a tremendous pub, actually, a total hole in the wall with a threadbare-velvet-seated nook in the back perfect for secret trysts and whatnot. I usually just trysted with MKA, but the principle is important. You need to have nooks in which to tryst in your life. But it turns out, according to one of my friends who somehow managed to convince me despite a deep-rooted fear and distaste for team sports (ones that I have to actively participate in; I do it anyway, because It's Good For You, but I don't like them) that the Tir na nOg women's Gaelic football team isn't actually affiliated with any pub in particular. They're just a team of girls who get together to play Gaelic football, not just because It's Good For You but also because it's really, really fun.

The Superball, the Redhead and I got together on Saturday morning to hand-pass (kind of like a little volleyball under-arm pass, just a bump to another player with the heel of your hand), kick-pass (what it sounds like) and solo (a move requiring multitasking abilities, e.g., running and tossing a ball with your foot, so that it comes back up to you and you do it all over again four steps later). I got better at the first two and must have been quite amusing doing the third, so I at least had some idea of what the other women on the team were doing when we got right in the thick of it, with the coach telling us to simply run around and hand pass to each other in a big swirling morass of players. As a new person, people usually paused before passing the ball to me to ask "what's your name?" -- one of those sports things, you know, where you call the name of the person you're passing to -- and I successfully established a solid reputation for missing the ball and letting it slip through my fingers and NOT for remembering my teammate's names. Hopefully they'll wait until the third practice to start calling me Butterfingers. It was chaotic, to say the least.

The rest of practice was drills: sprinting drills, passing drills, sprinting drills, and sprinting drills. I suspect the coach (a young Irish guy named, what else, Sean) wanted to see how his new players were doing. There are a couple girls I know who started the team before I had, and I imagine there's probably a process of testing out the flock for a couple weeks to get some idea of what kind of players you have. In me, he has a player who does not like suicides and doesn't really hustle. Except when blocking. I'm on people like white on rice, and the only problem is that I have no real peripheral vision. So if I want to be known as a good blocker, I'll have to start paying a lot more attention. Ask my mom about my 9-year-old habit of zoning out in the field when I played fullback on the Jefferson County AYSO league. They'd have been better off with Weeble-Wobbles playing defense.

So we'll see how it goes. I'm not 100% committed yet and right now I'm still in the sulky, getting-over-how-hard that was phase. I'd guess by Wednesday I'll be fully recovered, but I might require a little egging still.