Ben Pierce
January 18, 2017 10:41 AM
Sports Club in the Sports Room by Ben Pierce
Ben stood in the middle of the room on Sunday afternoon, the day after the Teppenpaw Crotalus Quidditch game. He'd already been planning this meeting by himself, as Gabe was busy with his pre-match training, but then his friend and co-coordinator fell sick the day of the match, so Ben wasn't really expecting him to even show up today."Hey everyone," he greeted cheerfully as people started arriving. "We're going to see how many people we've got, but I'm thinking we'll do a ping pong tournament today." This was evident by the number of table tennis tables set up in the room. Ping pong had the nice advantage of being pretty quick so they could get through a lot of games if they had a big turn-out today, and not needing teams if they got an odd number of people. If turnout was low, they just wouldn't use as many tables, and they'd still all get to play a bunch. Good deal all around.
"So pick out a paddle," he pointed out the bin of paddles in a variety of different colors, "and gather around that table there for the demo. Does anyone else already know how to play? I need a volunteer for the demo."
Once he had one, and everyone seemed to have arrived, he went through the basic rules of the game, first in lecture format then as he and his volunteer faced off against each other in the demonstration game. "Any other questions?" He fielded the ones raised now, then instructed, "Okay, I'm going to quick set up a some round robin pools, then we'll rank those and get into direct eliminations. I won't be playing today, so I can answer any of your questions and keep the tournament running smoothly. Give me a minute." He started filling out some pool sheets then directed people off to tables once he had them filled out. "Grab a ping pong ball from the bucket and get started. Games in the pools go to five. When you finish, tell me your winner and final score and I'll tell you who you are up against next."
Once everyone was playing he walked among the groups, offering advice or recording game scores on his sheets.
OOC: For simplicity, I'm not going to assign pools, so whoever posts second is playing against whoever posts first, third poster starts another game and fourth person is playing against #3, and so forth. Feel free to call over Ben and have him answer simple questions, or tag me to settle greater disputes.
Subthreads: You think that you can take me on? by Emilia-Louise Scott
What is this? (Table#2) by Jax Donovan with Luke Powell
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Sports Club in the Sports Room
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Emilia-Louise Scott
January 18, 2017 1:34 PM
You think that you can take me on? by Emilia-Louise Scott
Emmy-Lou had thoroughly enjoyed a wide range of sports before starting Sonora and had tried to keep as many of them up as she could since. In some cases, she’d just had to wait until she went home for the holidays because of the limitations of school resources. Thus she had been thrilled when a couple of boys from the year below had started up a Sports Club, opening up the opportunity to play muggle team sports that she’d believed to be pretty much off the table beforehand.Today they were playing ping pong, which admittedly wasn’t one of Emmy-Lou’s favourite sports but she had a competitive streak so would try her hand at not getting knocked out of the tournament too early on.
“I do,” Emmy-Lou offered herself up as a volunteer for the demo, having grabbed a green bat. She had always liked the fact that she knew some muggle things (because growing up she’d been surrounded by people who knew next to nothing about the muggle world) so wasn’t going to shy away from that now, even when there were actual muggles in the mix. She did as Ben Pierce asked of her, helping him to demonstrate how the game worked, and then went to the table she was directed to.
Having had a little warm up with the demo, she was rather keen now to get underway with the tournament and hopefully kick some butt.
“You ready? Do you know what you’re doing?” Emmy-Lou asked her first opponent, ball in hand and ready to start whenever they were. She might want to do well in the tournament but it was really just about having fun and for that to happen, she wanted to make sure her opponents understood the game so they could share that fun.
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You think that you can take me on?
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Jax Donovan
January 19, 2017 4:48 PM
What is this? (Table#2) by Jax Donovan
Jax had only joined the Sports Club because of Sammy Meeks. She loved to play these things and for some reason, Jax was the only person she could think of to do them with her. He didn’t really mind as it usually was a nice way to sort of get rid of the extra energy he could have from time to time, but some of these sports were strange and people in this school were far too competitive with these things than he really cared to be.For a while, Sammy stopped reminding him (or rather, dragging) him to the meetings, so he didn’t really make much effort to attend them. He assumed she had found another person to go with or was too busy with her own schedule to be able to make the meetings. He didn’t care one way or another. Playing catch with her was fun, coming to the meetings were interesting enough, but Jax wasn’t a group joiner so without Sammy, he felt no urge to go.
Today, however, he came. He wasn’t sure why other than he had a lot on his mind and he didn’t want to be alone to think about any of it. This was a decent enough distraction and typically can get his heart rate pumping that he thought he would come without the prompting of Sammy (maybe even surprise her if she came to this particular meeting by being there). He was a little disappointed to see tables with small nets across the middle as though shrunken people were going to play that volleyball sport they had played last year.
He watched as Ben demonstrated the game alongside Emilia Louise and wondered where Gabe and gone off too. They were fun to watch host this club together. The game itself seemed straightforward but Jax did not want to work with Emilia Louise because she had just proven that she could play it and as he had never even heard of ping pong, he didn’t really want to try that hard at it. He grabbed a random paddle and an empty table, swinging his arm slightly to familiarize himself with the feeling of it. What a weird sport. Why would Muggles find this enjoyable?
Jax’s face had a sour look to it as he thought about how useless this was and his eyes narrowed when someone came up to stand across from him at the table. “I do not play so if you are looking for a competitor, it will not be me.” He advised them firmly.
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What is this? (Table#2)
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Luke Powell
January 21, 2017 2:52 PM
It's ping pong, luggy. by Luke Powell
Even though surfing was his passion, Luke loved many sports. He felt a need to be active and sports gave him an outlet for his energy, in a super fun way. The main reason he’d started playing Quidditch in particular was because he knew it was the one sport played at Sonora. As it turned out he was kind of wrong there, to some extent at least, because there was a sport club.This club had been the first that he’d signed up for and the one he’d easily been most eager to attend. Luke had been surprised that they played Muggle sports, which was awesome. He knew a lot of Muggle sports, having gone to a Muggle school and had Muggle friends, and had always been particularly good at volleyball since he got to play it a lot on the beach.
Today wasn’t quite as fun as some previous Sports Club sessions since they were playing ping pong. Luke wasn’t very experienced in this sport at all, but from what he knew it sounded pretty boring. He probably wouldn’t have thought that if he could play it better and do all the cool shots, but he didn’t know any so would have to accept that he might look like a loser. Ping pong was kind of like mini Swivenhodge, but a boring version without brooms.
He watched Ben and Emmy-Lou’s demonstration, although he wasn’t expecting to see any cool tricks that he could pick up. They were teaching a bunch of people who had never come across most Muggle sports before so it wasn’t going to get too advanced. That wasn’t to say Luke didn’t think that Ben and Emmy-Lou could play to such a standard. Ben had to be pretty good since he was the leader of the club, and if his Quidditch skills were anything to go by, he was an awesome athlete. And Luke knew that Emmy-Lou knew her Muggle sports, which had surprised him the first time he’d met her, given that she was Zane and Ryan’s cousin. Even though the Kinsell brothers considered themselves sporting kings (or rather Zane did - Ryan was way too modest) they’d never been clued up on non-magical sports. They didn’t really know anything about Muggles full stop, probably because they were Kinsells. Although in a world so full of Muggles, Luke found it hard to believe that anyone could lack so much knowledge about them and put it down to snobbery.
Whatever his thoughts were on the sport, Luke could see the session being fun, if he could pull it together and play decently. He naturally had good ball skills so he didn’t see ping pong really being too tough, especially against those without any prior experience playing it. Sports Club was run well (props to Ben and his friend Gabe) and a tournament was a cool idea.
Grabbing a bat and a ball, he headed off to his first table. The older guy across from him didn’t look so friendly, which was strange because Luke was fairly sure he was the one that Joella hung around with. The first year wondered if the guy was taking this a bit seriously until he spoke. This was a tournament and thus every game they played would be a competition, whether an easy win for one person or not.
He felt a bit unnerved by the foreign-sounding guy’s attitude, but Luke wasn’t going to let that show. Luke shrugged. “I’ve not played much before either. But we have to compete, otherwise we’ll mess up the whole tournament,” he explained, not understanding why the older boy didn’t get that. Was a tournament really that hard a concept to comprehend? They couldn’t just have a bat about as they liked - they needed to keep score. Maybe they didn’t have tournaments wherever this guy was from. Weird.
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It's ping pong, luggy.
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