Haifa Underdogs

So about two or three months ago I joined an Israeli football team here. I think I mentioned it in a previous post. I don't really understand how it works but for some reason they have a ridiculously long season. I joined, not in the beginning, sometime in June and our first real game is November 13th. Football season usually starts in September and ends in December. Here it starts in November and ends in March. Who knew?

Anyway, I had a scrimmage a few weeks ago in Tel Aviv and a preseason game a week ago in Jerusalem. The scrimmage was pretty fun, we had fifteen plays of offense and fifteen plays of defense against the team from Tel Aviv and the team from Modi'in. The picture above is from the scrimmage. In the scrimmage I played running back, linebacker, and safety. I had some good runs, but didn't score any touchdowns (I'm saving that for the real games). On defense I think I played about 11 plays altogether and probably had 8 tackles (why I didn't play defense in high school I'll never know). It was pretty fun and Blayke was able to come out and see me, so that was nice.

Last Thursday was a preseason game against Be'er Sheva. I didn't think I was going to be able to play because it was on Thursday, but somehow we ended up getting out of the army on Thursday evening and one of the guys was able to swing by and pick me up on the way to the game.

I wasn't sure what to expect in the game because the scrimmage was tough to tell because we tried to let everybody play. Plus we run the wishbone and don't exactly have a quarterback who can throw. To give you an idea of how little we throw the ball at one point the announcer said over the microphone, "Here comes Haifa, and what are they gonna do this time...run the ball!". This works well for me since I play running back, but it doesn't take a defensive genius to realize how to slow us down (or at least I thought). Turns out we are a little better than I thought. By the third quarter when they took me out (I played pretty much every play except for special teams as either running back or safety) we were winning 40 to 0. I ran for probably 150 yards, 1 touchdown, and 3 two point conversions.

Our first game is on the 13th of November, but I'm not sure if I'll be able to make it or not.

Navigating...again

This week was our first week of the upcoming three month training session. Each week has a different "theme," this past week everyone trained on their specific profession within the team. Some people went to learn about various reconnaissance equipment, some camouflage, others rockets, and I went to practice my navigation skills.

As it turns out this was almost a punishment of sorts. Why do I say that, while everyone else had lessons during the day and the rest of the night off to do whatever they want (poker has really picked up in popularity here lately), the navigators, there was about 2 from each of the three units, had lessons during the day and then navigated all night.

I had navigated several times before, I would estimate that at least a third of our training was navigation, but this time was a little different. First of all, these navigations were alone instead of in pairs. Second, they added a few twists. The first and second night in addition to the normal navigations in which they ask you to find a specific location and describe what is written there (something they spray painted) we were also asked to point out specific houses. What does this mean? We would navigate to a point on the border of an Arab village and then someone would be waiting with night vision goggles and we would be asked to take a laser pointer (that can only be seen with thermal night vision) and point out our house to them.

The third night we were given 4 houses that were inside of an Arab village and asked to make drawings of them, which they would later check against pictures they had.

The truth is that it did make the navigations a little more interesting to have a new element thrown in, but I still couldn't help myself from thinking how everyone else was watching movies and basically doing whatever they want while I was walking from 9 PM until 3 or 4 in the morning.

On a side note, on my last navigation I wasted an hour looking for a code that apparently wasn't even in the right place. I new I was in the right place based on the aerial photographs I had seen, but the code wasn't there. I called my friend who was in charge of the navigations (as a general rule phones are not allowed, but since this was a week for self improvement I don't think they minded) and described to him the place where I was located only to have him tell me that someone had had the same point two weeks ago and told him that it was 20 meters south of the place it was supposed to be. Needless to say that after wasting close to an hour looking for that spot I was pretty frustrated.