17 Things Every NWLA Tournament Team Manager (or Player) Goes Through

We are just days away from attending the most looked forward to wiffle event in the history of mankind. I can barely contain my excitement. As promised in my previous article, here's a THIRD pre-tournament article...so the bar has been raised gentlemen - rise with me won't you? I love buzzfeed articles. I'm not particularly sure why but if I had to guess it's because I love .gif images. So I have taken that format that many of us are probably familiar with, their list articles with gifs, and applied it to the NWLA Tournament and what managers (in my opinion) frequently go through leading up to and during the event. Enjoy.

1. You're excited to attend the tournament for the first time or return after a fun time last year. You haven't really put any thought into how you will win it all just yet but the idea of partying for a whole weekend and playing wiffleball has you almost aroused.

2. You start thinking of who to put in your lineup and you realize that it's actually very challenging and you might be in over your head. But not to worry, you've got tons of players to choose from.

3. Once you've set your roster you start sizing your team up to everyone elses and it's either a good or awful feeling. You start picking out opponents you feel confident you can beat. Who cares if you have limited knowledge of the team and that the tournament is a month away!?

4. You start reading people's articles leading up to the tournament. Our wiffle lord and savior Chris Gallaway has mandated each team post two pre-tournament articles and it should mean that there's going to be tons of good reading material but it usually just ends up being a bunch of power rankings that hardly vary from one league to the next.

5. Assembling the team was not your most difficult task. No! It's finding a way to ask your boss for a weekend off to play wiffleball without getting laughed out of the office. It is a delicate art that must be handled with tact...and lying. Lots of lying. "You want the weekend off to do what?..."

6. The tournament is coming up soon and you have a player or two you haven't heard from in a while and you find out they may not be able to come. Is there a more crippling fear for a team manager?

7. You have to start packing for the trip and you find yourself wondering what you need to pack for such a strange trip. Stick to the basics: uniform, underwear, hygeine products, and most importantly...alcohol.

8. You finally get to the tournament site in Columbus and the enormousness of it all starts to hit you. And it hits hard. The excitement and other range of emotions start to take their toll. It's almost too much. Is that an avenue of flags? Is that a jumpotron? Sweet. Baby. Jesus.

9. You meet everyone and everyone is all like, "How long was your drive?" But really all you want to know is the details of their team so you can determine if they are a threat. You scan the fields searching for weaknesses and strengths of each team. Your eyes see all!

10. You meet the Cincinnati Wiffle Ball Club guys and hear that everyone says they aren't a real league because they're pretty small and they have the word "Club" in their league name. At first you laugh at them too only to find out they are really cool guys who have a lot of skill for being a medium-pitch league.

11. You meet Carl Coffee and are not quite sure what to think of him. He hashtags all the time and always wants to be friends. You're sort of weirded out at first but then you discover he has one of the oddest and most unique senses of humor and will be laughing a lot in his company. Guys in his league are pretty amusing as well. In fact their league is off-the-wall but very effective and interesting.

12. Part of you wants to relax but the other part of you realizes that Gallaway still wants you to do stuff like write articles and tweet so you are constantly watching your back wondering when he may finally decide to stop waiting and make an example of you. Gallaway don't play!

13. By Sunday morning you are either hungover, sunburned, sore, or a combinatino of the three. Getting up and to the field by 8:00 AM becomes more challenging than any game you have had up to that point.

14. You lose at least one game that you feel you should have won. And you feel a lot of emotions toward your team and the team that beat you.

15. Finally your team is eliminated and you feel your time was cut short. You had a great season, built a great team, but now the party is over. No NWLA Tournament title for you. And the ride home is how long? Damn! It's going to be a quiet ride home.

16. But you don't stay sad for long. You realize that you were part of something pretty cool and that the NWLA Tournament is one of a kind. You met a lot of cool people, including Chris Gallaway (the primary organizer) and the rest of the organizing committee. And you didn't walk away with nothing. You walked out of the venue with a flag and more friends then when you came in. So the experience was worth all of the hard work even if you did finish in last place.

17. But then you remember winning (or not losing as much) is the most important thing in life. You have one guy that was on the team from last year and he's all "victory is life" and you start the process for building a team for next year much earlier than you did the year before. You become determined to improve upon last year's results. You may have lost but you were not defeated. You'll be back next year to make another run at that beautiful gold cup...and get in on that sweet MarioKart Tournament action.