After the veteran IOF sports editor recently accepted a promotion to postdoc, he agreed to let an eager intern take their shot at the weekly softball update (with close supervision, he’ll have you all know).
IOF loses 12-8 to Psychology Department
Softball equipment. Image by pictureback from Pixabay
As the game was about to begin, both teams realized they were short a few players. This prompted debate about whether it was even legal [within the UBC grad student rec league softball rules…] to play the game. Dana “microplastic” Price thought to herself, “team captain Kristen Sora isn’t here, this bodes about as well for us as the future of our ocean under the current level of plastic consumption”, but stand-in-team-captain, Jake “war paint” Lerner, newly freed from his sports writing responsibilities, exclaimed, “the show must go on.” And they played.
The first few innings were tough for the Reefs – they had the bare minimum 9 players and the other team had a below-board 8, but they were still losing. Max “black eye” Miner, the star of last week’s game, missed two fly balls in a row in the outfield while watching a mouse run across the field. Other members of the team thought to themselves, is he an ecologist or an anthropologist? He needs to make up his mind and get his head in the game. They were down on their luck.
But miraculously, from out of left field (literally), Brian Hunt and two of his 27 grad students showed up to cheer the team on. There was a renewed sense of purpose (mostly because the other 25 made up the majority of the team, and they were now stressed their advisor was watching).
The Reefs got 5 runs in one inning (unheard of), novice player Loic Jacquemot, fired up from a successful eDNA sampling trip that very morning, made an incredible catch, and Kaleigh Davis, one week away from her defense, and happy to not be thinking about zooplankton (or whatever they study in zoology) shut the Psychotics down in the outfield. Suddenly the game was tied.
Top of the final inning, tensions were high, and the bad-guys up to bat. Anna “thiamine” McLaskey whispered to another seasoned postdoc, Iria Garcia Lorenzo, who was still brushing off her jersey from the dive she took for a ball behind home plate, “man, the times have changed. Maybe if grad students these days took everything a little more seriously, we would be winning.”
And then it all fell apart; a few missed ground balls, a couple of uncoordinated attempts at catching, too much chatting in the outfield (you don’t think I joined the team to actually play softball, do you?), and the Psychotics took a 4 point lead. A lead that couldn’t be made up in the tragic two-bat final inning. Another one lost. After she begrudgingly congratulated the Psychotics, Maggie “thermal variability” Slein was heard saying, “if I had known this is how it was gonna turn out, I wouldn’t have walked all the way from my temporary office space in Ponderosa.”
There’s always next Thursday… When the Reefs take on Pharmacology’s Druggers and Sluggers for the second time this season at 5:30pm at Thunderbird Stadium.