CRUD time

Last Friday, Tyndall AFB had their annual ladies CRUD tournament at the Club on base. This was my 3rd year playing for our squadron and our team consisted of 7 players. Sam, Jonelle, Elizabeth and Laurie (whose husband was TDY) have never played before, ever! Kristen played once in the past, and that one time being the game she was in at her last base (no practices), and finally Tamara (whose husband is deployed) and I who have played before. Sam and Jonelle are active duty in the squadron and the other 5 of us wives have 10 kids between us, so getting us all together to practice was tough to say the least. Our squadron is dwindling down to no one due to its closure in less than 2 weeks, so it was hard to scrounge up a team. But those of us dedicated wives got together when we could and practiced, and at these practices it was apparent that as a whole, our team stunk. And I can say that because we'd all agree!

We would try to get together once a week (starting about a month prior to the tournament) at the community center on base with our kids. No, not with all 10, but usually at least 5, and my 3 have to go to the bathroom every 10 minutes, and Laurie has a newborn so clearly our practices were very distracted. A week prior to the tournament, a scrimmage was set up and games were played between all the teams with the judges so we could be fully aware of the rules and get some strategies and see how other teams played. It was at this scrimmage in which a few of my team members got very down-hearted and embarrassed at our quick losses and they couldn't stand to stay and take it any longer and left for the evening. Last Tuesday and Thursday we got together again in the mornings and luckily we played against the other flying squadron teams and slowly, we sort of got our act together. We just accepted we'd be out of the first two games and get home to pay our baby sitters and call it a night.


Friday night, we all arrived at the club in our black F15 embroidered Tshirts. The other teams got WAY more creative than us and their shirts were really cute, but at least the rest of us can wear our shirts again. :) I was our team's captain and after we re-heard rules from the head judge along with the other team captains, and after we drew for our order and to see who we'd play against first, we were all ready to go! We shockingly started out pretty good and wouldn't you know it...one of our least experienced girls won the game for us with just one life left! We played the Med group gals, who were last years champions (none of us knew this at the time, which was a good thing because I think it would have psyched us out in a bad way). It was awesome! We screamed and shouted and got ready for our next games. Could we really stand a chance?

Next game-we played the F22 gals and they pretty much whooped us. It was fun to heckle those girls since most of them are friends of ours, but they practiced a lot more than we did and they were really good, so they deserved to win.

Next game-we played the girls from the 83rd. We quickly lost lots of lives (each girl gets 3 lives then they are out---this makes for a total of 18 lives per team per game). It came down to just me playing for our team (having 2 lives left) and 4 girls from the other team, and between them they had 9 lives left. No pressure, right? I assumed I'd be out after a few plays, but wouldn't you know it, I ran the table and our team won again! We weren't out yet! I do need to thank my husband as well as Kristen's husband for continually screaming at the girls from the other team. I'm convinced their yelling distracted them and helped me play better.

Next game-we were up against the Med group gals again. This time, we lost against them. I don't want to make excuses, but we had already been there for about 2 1/2 hours, we were tired and had to sit and wait to play this game so our energy had dropped, and the Med group was really good. I think we got lucky to beat them the first time.

Game 5-FINALLY we got to play the other F15 squadron, the 95th. I was hoping to play them because my wonderful friend Candace is on the team and I was ready to go up against her, and boy did we heckle each other. It was so much fun! We had a great time playing them, especially since we'll all be in the same squadron next week, so it was friendly competition, but we needed to step up our game because we weren't going down like that! It came down to me and one other girl playing single man against each other and
I WON AGAIN!!!

Myself, Kelly (who has played on our team in the past, but she's with child) and Candace.

In the past, we would have normally been done after losing 2 games, but this year there was a losers bracket playing for 3rd place, and this is where we were. After beating the 95th, we had one last game to play, and wouldn't you know it, it was against the Med group AGAIN! It was about 10:45, about half of the club, including our judge was drunk and we had all calculated our babysitters were making a small fortune between us all. We just wanted it to be over! We were happy we had made it this far, but we wanted to get the game over and done with. Yes, we lost and ultimately came in 4th place. However, our team came home with the Grand Champion trophy (frog holding a ball), so you could say we came in first place!