So hey! The landscape’s changed a bit since I talked to you all last, huh? If you have no idea what happened with the team in the offseason — well, if you have no idea, the hell are you doing reading this blog? Creeper. But the ten-second backstory is that there was the Boston Militia, right? And they were huge and awesome and had better funding than any other team. And then right before practices were supposed to start for this season, that funding was all LATER, SUCKAS! and dumped the team in the trashbin with no nothing.

I think they honestly thought that that would be the end of the team. I’d be curious to know if they had any idea how much people would pull together in order to make this season happen…well, not THAT curious ’cause I don’t want to talk to those goobers. But I do wonder. Anyway, you know what happened next – it’s all in this video right here, which we made with crappy sound and amateur editing and all the love in the world. The team — the real part of the team, not the write-the-checks part of the team — looked around at the trashbin and said, fuck this. We got games to play, Let’s get to work.

As such, I have decided that the motto of this Renegades season is:

2015: Less Money, More Awesome.

There are a few ways in which this motto may not be 100% accurate, but it still beat out the other contenders:

• 2015: The Season We Pulled Out of Our Ass
• 2015: Fake It ’til You Make It
• 2015: The Season Where I’m Not Supposed to Call  redacted  a Douchecanoe

Important update: I’m keeping my name. “Renegade Cheerleader” is fucking badass, don’t get me wrong, and as that’s technically what I am, I have moved the blog to this domain and updated branding as applicable. (I’m sure there are little format-y things that I still need to fix on this site on account of the move, by the way, so if you’re reading through old posts and something looks like ass, there’s a 80% chance it’s just ’cause I haven’t updated all the code.)

However, in practical conversation I will remain Militia Cheerleader (MC). There are a few reasons for this; one is that I can’t stand this cola. Another is that I’m from Boston and to me, my Renegade Cheerleader initials sound like this. But mostly, it’s just that MC’s my name. It’s who I’ve been from the start and I like it and also I’m old and tired and can’t remember new things that well. So I apologize if it’s weird, but that’s what I’m doing.

So the Boston Renegades take the field tonight for the first time as the Renegades, but to call this a new team is simply inaccurate. I know that lots and lots of people thought that the only reason the Militia won all the time was because they had money. And I saw that the reaction from other teams (and even in other sports) to stories like this was overwhelmingly “Oh, cry me a river, no one else is funded by a billionaire either and we make it work.” Is this accurate in a technical sense? Yes. Is it accurate in the true meaning of the statement? SO MUCH NO.

You didn’t do what we’re doing. No one has. When teams first form, they are small. You’re like 16 people and you get your asses handed to you and everyone expects that and that’s fine. Then you grow a little the next year, and you get more fans, and you get more visibility, and over time you gain traction and size and support. Or maybe you make the decision to splinter from an existing team, and you do so with your eyes open, choosing to go that route.

The Boston Renegades did not get to start as a little fledgling bird team, prepared to grow into a badass eagle over time. No, the Renegades team pretty much sprung forth fully grown from the head of Zeus with a mighty battle cry of “AAAAAHHHHH LET’S GET 50 PEOPLE TO FOUR CITIES IN FIVE WEEKS WITH ONLY TWO HOME GAMES, BITCHES!” It’s a little different. Yes, everyone else is self-funded too. But no one else started a season with a full roster, zero cash, a bullshit schedule and only a few months to fundraise. We weren’t even allowed to keep the team’s name.

This isn’t about me wanting sympathy. This is about me appreciating what it has taken to even get this team out on the field tonight. It’s been so much work, you guys — and it’s been so awesome to watch and to be a part of. I spend a lot of time worrying about stuff ’cause I’m me, but in the middle of a bunch of what-ifs the other day, something occurred to me: those dudes who peace’d out and ditched the team in January? They looked at this season and got scared. These people with virtually unlimited resources GAVE UP. They couldn’t make it happen.

We’re making it happen.

It might be ugly and difficult and it may not always be what we want. But when I watch this team step out onto the field in a few hours…in that moment, they will have already won.

Now, we’ve got games to play. Let’s get to work.

P.S. Tiny Coach — who is almost four!! — seems to have inherited his mother’s tendency towards insomnia, especially when anxious about something. Last night he woke up around midnight and found me at my laptop doing last-minute prep work for the game today. “Mama,” he said with absolutely sincere concern, “What if the Booball Aunties need to pee?”

Read More/Comments

Tiny Coach is down the Cape again with my mom today; they got on the road at seven in the morning. I didn’t get a chance to ask him before he left if he had anything to say to his Militia aunties before their big game, so I sent a text to my mother asking her to ask him if he had any good luck or inspirational messages that I could pass on. This is what I got back:

“About sitting.”

Take THAT, Vince Lombardi.

In addition to that pearl of wisdom, however, I have compiled a brief list of additional life lessons from the 3-and-under set that may be of help to you in today’s epic matchup:

1. If you’re using something and someone else takes it away without asking, go get it back.
2. If something is too heavy for you to move by yourself, get some friends to help you move it.
3. If you need something, ask for it with your words and your signs.
4. Sometimes you just need a timeout.
5. If you’re outside, you can use your outside voice.
6. Now is what matters. Not before and after. Just right now.
7. No matter what, at the end of the day, you get to have a bottle.

I can already feel the excitement of this game like electricity in my body. (Granted, some of that may be partially attributable to the fact that I’m still on a bunch of pain meds after having outpatient surgery on Thursday, but I’m pretty sure I’d feel like that anyway.)

Kick ass and stay safe, my friends. Oh – and even if you don’t think you have to go potty, you should probably try anyway before you get all your outside clothes on.

See you soon…

xoxo
the first fan family

Read More/Comments

[Scene: last night at the First Fan Family’s house]

MC: Did you see the promo pic for the game?
BSC: I saw that there was one, but I didn’t really look at it.
MC: Uh huh. Here, look at the awesomeness and tell me what you see. [hands laptop to BSC] BSC: Whoa! Well… you got Brickhouse (retired).
MC: Uh huh.
BSC: You got Molly (retired).
MC: Uh huh.
BSC: You got… is Dot flipping us off?
MC: I think so. I’m pretty sure Cahill is too, though, so maybe it’s a thing.
BSC: #22? who? that’s?
MC: #22’s Hollandberg¹ now.
BSC: But that’s [in PA announcer voice] Patty Hefferman (baby-retired).
MC: Yeah. Why’s she so short, though?
BSC: ‘Cause giant Cahill.
MC: …throwing one of the two IWFL balls depicted in the WFA playoff promo.
BSC: Awesome! Why didn’t I notice that?
MC: I dunno. ‘Cause giant Cahill?
BSC: [serious face] Wait a second.

[Stands on chair, gets stack of old Boston Militia program books. Flips through and stops at 2009.]

BSC: Whoa ho! Looks like some serious recycling happened here.
MC: Yeah, man! There’s the same Cahill, and Alpo, and Dot, and…Dot again. Huh. Double Dot. D to the fourth power.
BSC: And yet they didn’t use Bri, right there, who actually IS still on the team.
MC: Oh oh oh! The city! In the background! It’s the same!
BSC: That’s what I was saying – they just recycled the same photo.
MC: And had some art student recreate it in colored beans?
BSC: That’s a photoshop filter, babe.
MC: That’s a BEAN filter is what that is.

¹That will only make sense if you saw my Facebook post about it. Sorry if you didn’t. ^{Back to top}

Read More/Comments

Typos happen all the time.

Some are amusing, like the time I was doing temp work for the state Public Health Association and sat down to assemble a mailing going out to six hundred people, then saw that whoever had printed the return address labels had left out a pretty crucial “L” in the organization’s name.

And some are totally mortifying.

And some get all up in my face when I’m supposed to be doing other things. Like yesterday, for example, when the WFA updated their homepage with the following Conference Championship matchups:

Huh.

So all of a sudden, a whole bunch of people from a number of different teams all collectively freaked the fuck out. I like to think it drew us all closer, really. A little bonding moment of abject disbelief in the middle of the work day. Was this real? Had the bracket been changed? Was this part of a larger agenda? Where is Kansas City, anyway? And hadn’t teams already booked travel? Was San Diego expected to get their whole team up to Seattle and then out to Chicago and then potentially out to Chicago again, all within a few weeks? It’s the one that you’d think should be in Kansas but it’s not, right?

Oddly enough, I found myself being the one giving the league the benefit of the doubt. (I know – weird, right?) Not that we haven’t seen the WFA make bizarre and influential rules (and changes to rules) a number of times before, but in this case, I was going with “typo” over “we restructured the entire Conference system two games before the end of the season.”

Backseat Coach was with me on Team Typo, and he confirmed with the league that it was a design error and not a unilateral earth-shattering revamping of the final rounds of the playoffs.

So now this is up there:

Much better! Although the absence of any text in Chicago’s logo kind of makes it look like someone’s gonna light a bunch of footballs on fire and chuck ‘em at the Militia. (Whatever – you know The Ten would catch that shit anyway. And you know what else fears no flame as long as boiling water isn’t involved? Lobster claws. They’d be all over that.)

Which brings me to my next point. All the freaking out that people did here in Boston – that wasn’t because they didn’t want to play Chicago in the championship game. I think that would have been amazing. And when you play the same three or so teams all season, every season, new opponents are a very welcome thing so I think it would have been awesome to play Kansas City too.

The problem was the perceived last-minute change to something that people had already been mentally and physically preparing for in a major way. Like if your friend was all, come over tonight and we’ll watch The Avengers! And you get psyched for that and now you’re totally in the mood for some Marvel superhero awesomeness and you get to your friend’s house and they’re like OK! Here’s Finding Nemo! And you’re like WHAT THE SHIT WHERE IS SAM JACKSON IN AN EYEPATCH. It’s not that you don’t like Finding Nemo (turtles! Willem Dafoe as a fish!), it’s just that you were all set for something else and it’s jarring to have that changed.

There’s one more thing here that bears mentioning. I think it says something about your management of a league when people see something patently absurd and actually find it plausible. This should have been in the Amusing Sports Typos category, like this one. Instead, it became more of a virtual vote of no confidence.

Read More/Comments

So I’ve been trying to figure out how to start this post for weeks now, and finally I was inspired by Tiny Coach’s new-found love of making up jokes. (NB: If those jokes ever expand to have actual punchlines, I will share them with you.) So here is the one I made up this morning:

Knock knock.
Who’s there?
This bracket.
This bracket who?
This bracket’s fucking broken and I hate it.

Ha ha! See, ’cause maybe if I pretend this whole thing is funny instead of an insulting abomination of a playoff system, I won’t be so angry all the time. (Ha ha! That part actually IS funny.)
(more…)

Read More/Comments

Here’s why:

Read More/Comments

I’m going to preface this post by saying that I hate that I have to even write it, but I would hate more for this issue not to be addressed directly. This is totally not what I wanted to be writing about right now. I wanted to be putting together something about the results of all of yesterday’s games, and what is and is not yet known about the playoff bracket and schedule. But I can’t until I take care of this. So let’s take care of this.

In the write-up about last night’s Boston/DC game that appeared on the DC Divas’ official Facebook page, it is stated that after their 29-28 victory, Boston gathered on their side of the field and at one point chanted “Whose house? Our house!”

This is true.

It is also stated that the Boston players did this because it was the “signature chant’ of a beloved coach of the Divas who passed away this offseason, and that this was done as an intentional mockery of him and DC’s dedication of this season to his memory.

This is wrong on so many levels that it makes me sick.

Here is a key piece of information that you won’t find in that write-up: in an effort to gain an advantage on a gameday forecast to be oppressively hot and sunny, the DC Divas informed Boston that they (DC) would be wearing their white away jerseys during the game. This meant that the Militia would need to wear their (darker, heavier) home jerseys, even though they were the traveling team.

So Boston did. And they won. And after the game, when they were gathered together in the endzone celebrating the win that earned them home field in the playoffs, a player suggested that since they were wearing their home jerseys, they must be at home already. And if they were at home, it must be their house! Whose house? Their house!

Obnoxious? Yeah, maybe. An intentional insult to the memory of a beloved coach? Absurd to the point of insult.

Each of the players who talked to me about this today were a bit incredulous at learning that DC assumed the whose house/our house chant was aimed at – and as such, belonged to – one specific DC coach. You know why? ‘Cause people do it everywhere. In virtually every sport. (I don’t feel the need to prove this, but if you have the ability and inclination to do a basic search of YouTube or Google, this will become immediately apparent.)

Here’s the thing. I don’t think that that piece was written with the intent of slandering the Boston Militia. I really don’t. But if you’re going to publicly accuse someone of openly mocking your grief over a lost loved one, you better goddamn well know what you’re talking about because that is not a small thing to say about someone, and that is some big fuel to throw on a fire that should have gone out the year before you tuned in.

But it’s easier to feel intentionally wronged than it is to deal directly with a one-point defeat in a game you came minutes away from winning.

I don’t often give a damn what people I don’t know think of me or the people I care about. I just have a limited supply of damns to give, and I don’t like using them up on people I’ll never meet. But this was over the line.

Last night I was hanging out with some of the players in the hotel lobby, and the talk inevitably turned to the playoffs. Someone asked if the well-known Chicago quarterback was back on the field after an injury sustained early in the season. “What was it that happened?” someone asked. “Torn ACL?” “Hairline fracture of the ukulele,” I responded.

I will own that particular mockery, especially since I think that if you can’t handle mockery at all, you maybe shouldn’t play the ukulele. I will own that manner of mockery. I actually think that sports in general may have been developed largely as an excuse for people to talk shit, and I am happy to carry on that storied tradition. And I think a lot of shit gets said behind locker room doors and in email chains and at practice, and that is what it is and it’s pretty universal.

But this morning, in an official, public statement issued by the DC organization, the Boston Militia were accused of a viciously inappropriate form of mockery. I’m intentionally not linking to the post, by the way – I honestly, truly don’t want anything else to grow there. I want it to end there, as it never should have started in the first place. But that misinterpretation was so ugly that I couldn’t let it end for me without saying something here, in my own space, so I did. And now I’m done.

Read More/Comments