A Kickin' Good Time

A few weeks ago, I noticed the the official AtlantaMINIS meets for May, June, and July were either out of town (Dragon weekend) or centered around a performance driving event (Phil Wicks school.  That's a long time to go for the members that aren't into that sort of thing.  Angel had suggested a softball game, and I thought that might be just the thing to add to the mix.  When I started looking into it at work one day, Stephen suggested we do a kickball game instead.  His reasoning was that more folks could do that than play softball- little kids, big kids, etc.  Well, I thought it was a great idea and ran with it.  It was a little tricky finding a place to play.  We ended up in Alpharetta at North Park off of Windward Pkwy this past Sunday. 

Some of us got there a little early, and munched on some chips while waiting for the rest of the folks to show up with real food.  Once everyone got there, we had quite a good spread of fried chicken, lasagna, taco salad, chips, cheese, baked beans, cookies, ambrosia fruit salad, sweet tea, soda, and even some Starbucks coffee complete with sugar and half and half.  We had two picnic tables full of food. 

I had printed out some rules that I found on 3 different websites, so I figured they must be decent, right? Jeremy, who plays for a state worthy kickball team at school, looked them over for posterity before we headed to the field to figure out what exactly we were going to do. He didn't exactly give the balls I purchased at Target the green light though.  They were a little bit bigger than kickballs are supposed to be, but I kinda did that on purpose to make the game a little more challenging and a lot more fun.  We decided to use the infield, and the guys moved the bases off the mud.  Angel and Tom volunteered to be team captains and picked until we ran out of people.  Then we got started.  Jeremy showed us what happens when someone runs full speed then tries to stop quickly on rain saturated grass.  I think Pete made him ride home with a tarp between him and the seat.

I was on Angel's team.  We had a secret weapon- Kali.  She's small, but can kick and run with the best.  Another thing, we could only hit someone out with the ball below the waist, but as you can see from the picture- the ball was almost as big as she is so it was really hard to get her out.  She ended up running home twice!

Apparently, Jeremy's slip and slide was just the beginning, as many of us, including myself, ended up hitting the ground in futile attempts of stopping. 

Some of us were more prepared than others- namely Maddlyn.  She came dressed for success. Unfortunately for her mom's MINI Dory, she still fell a couple of time as well. 

I'm not exactly sure what happened when Angel went up to kick.  From where I was standing, it looked like this:

1. She runs up to kick.
2. she missed.
3. she started to trip over the ball.
4. the ball hit her other leg.
5. as she fell, the ball got stuck between her knees.

I don't think she could do it again if she tried. 

We took a water break, and headed for the pavilion.  Right about when we decided to head back out, it started raining.  It came down so hard it was sideways.  So we ended up not going back out on the field.  I'm not sure what the final score was, but I think it was pretty close.  I don't think it really mattered anyway, all I know is we had a really good time, which was the whole point anyway!

Charles took this picture of Angel and me on a really nice Jet Black JCW MCS just before we all decided to head home.  If you look really close, you can see the mud on my jeans. Yeah, jeans are just not the best thing to wear if you get wet.  We are so gonna have to do this again, hopefully when its a little drier.

Please check out the photo album here.  Several folks couldn't play for whatever reason, and so they took some great pics instead.  There's just something indescribably funny about people frozen in time with their leg stuck out for a kick.