On Thursday morning we drove about 3 hrs from Noosa down the coast to the Surfers Paradise on the Gold Coast (south of Brisbane). We made the trip to help Ray Trevaskis with his annual Paradise Lacrosse Tournament , which I attended in '99 with a team of Americans called the Crease Monkeys (a US wide team that travels to major tournaments around the world). In '99, the tournament hosted about 150 players at the same the same venue. This year, Ray is only expecting about 50 players tops due to many of the typical Aussie Paradise players attending the World Lacrosse Games which were held in Perth during June this year (hadn't been in Australia in over 10 yrs).
Marisa and I were just planning to help out with organizing stuff and helping take pics and make pages for the tourney website which we helped out with during registration & social Thursday evening. Even less people showed up than expected disappointing both Ray and the players who made the trip. Most of the teams are very small, only have 1 or 2 substitutes.
I was watching the pathetic attempts of the teams to field a full squad (i.e. - players who are usually on offense were playing defense or goalie!) and decided to play since I was able-bodied and not busy with tournament duties. So I scraped together some extra gear, completely going against my superstition of only using my equipment. I was worried that my chi would become mis-aligned and boy was I ever right. My back became mis-aligned after about 10 minutes of lively play. Here's the sad truth revealed.... I didn't even get hurt playing! It was as simple as chasing a ball out of bounds and deciding to leap a waist high fence to retrieve it. Now normally jumping a waist high fence presents little trouble for me, but after putting my back through the paces during my grueling surfing lesson earlier this week my back screamed "Uncle" and gave out. I pretty much couldn't even walk and my back felt like a corkscrew looks...
