I felt a lot of promise for us leading up to WCA 2013. We
managed to recover from our misstep at the start of the year, closing out the
PPL series with 3 consecutive wins, a 7man win and a big international win
mid-year at the second leg of the PALs (and $6k prize money if I need to remind
you, omg).
In retrospect now though, there were some chinks in the
armour. I'd developed a consciousness of who was better than others on the
team. Whether my opinions/inferences were valid doesn't matter because this kind
of thinking is totally destructive in paintball. I lost sight of building the
team and saw it more as a finished product entitled to do some winning. Some of our players improved more than others this year. I think I lost a bit
of humility this time and for the first time I felt frustrated that I had to perceive some players as less capable on the team. I could have been
more coaxing and nurturing. But rather I enjoyed playing strong at training. In previous years I've felt that if I'm consistently playing
well at training, something is wrong. Usually the team is so good that it's
hard to be good week in week out.
But these are just my musings and perhaps not even relevant.
Maybe we could have won WCA even with my new-found dick-attitude.
Actually, we went through WCA pretty standard. Finished the
prelims 4-2, a normal kind of position for us to go forward on. On Saturday, we
played a game against Beeswaxers and lost, only to come back 15 minutes later
in our first top 8 game and win 4-0 against them. I felt good about that, but
it wasn't a team effort. We played the same 5 guys the whole way through. I'd
softened to the "starting five" approach, which I now think was perhaps a mistake.
Following this, we had to play Infernal and then Datis.
Infernal beat us 2-4. Datis beat us 1-4. I wish I could say we lost outright,
but WE WERE PLAGUED BY PENALTIES. The majority of the time, I feel the reffing
is great at PALs events. But there were some outright weird calls going on.
Like, I got a bounce off my head, pointed to my head to the ref right next to
me, and he just instantly pulls a penalty? I wasn't even hit in the first
place, and second, I didn't even shoot/move/do anything after I got the bounce
on me other than ask for paint check. Of the 11 points we played against Datis
and Infernal, only in 3 points we didn't get a penalty. Something was really
wrong with the reffing because I seriously hope we are not stupid enough to
legitimately get that many penalties.
Regardless, this sent us onto the quarter finals to play
Datis. We had about 0 confidence at this point. It felt like we couldn't even
blink without getting a penalty. Stiffla even sat himself and didn't even play
a point because he felt like he couldn't get into the game without getting a penalty.
And that was it. We went down 1-4 to Datis and missed out on
a top 4 finish at WCA for the first time.
I feel disappointed. And I did feel bitter. But I think some
good can come from it like it did at Thailand at the beginning of the year. If
satisfaction is the death of desire, then this is about the farthest point from
being satisfied that we can be. I can also say now that the evidence is
insurmountable that STK doesn't win on individual players being good. We win
when we are a team.
If I want more from players I'm just going to tell them
rather than scoring them against each other in my head. I'm going to be totally
transparent in my thinking and go back to the "family" mindset.
That's my off-season goal anyway. Having no hierarchy has got us this far and slipping
from that has given us nothing.
