No Peace in the Middle East, No Peace in Kickball

Well, despite the best intentions of me and several others, there will be no Kickball Harmony Games. Much like the Middle East, kickball in DC seems to be about land space, what you believe in, and there seems to be no ground that people can meet on.

I have been working since at least a month ago to make the games happen and now have to admit defeat. NAKID was on board the whole time, so I appreciate that. District Sports was all for it too, so kudos to them. Seems like the older leagues that are in a court battle - WAKA and DC Kickball, didn't care.

I got some perfunctory "sounds good" comments from DC Kickball, but no real statement of support. Since those times and based on some unfortunate instances since then, it seemed like that group wasn't going to step up. And I'm not sure how they would have handled the beer if there was a rainout in any event. But I digress...

WAKA had by far the most interesting responses. I contacted a number of divisions and got the brush from most of them. Then I contacted one that responded. Because I am a kickball dork, I stalk all of the kickball message boards and found that one guy seemed to be moving to be the division President this season, so I contacted him. Here is his response:

Homer. I'm not the president in the fall. You'll have to speak to (name kept out by me). But I will tell you that very few people will care or want to do inter-league games. We barely have enough time to participate in our own division games, let alone play-offs and all-star games. Plus, NAKID is a bunch of disgruntled former players from our division and I, for one, don't want anything to do with them. Good luck with your effort.

Ooookkkk. I apologized to him and he wrote back to tell me that he was not speaking for all of WAKA, just his division. So I wrote to the President. He seemed cheerful enough but after speaking to people in his division (including I assume, the angry guy from the above email) told me:

As I was saying... now that this season is finally done and I had time to talk to a lot of people at the party... I'm sorry to say that the overwhelming response was "sounds like fun, but we need a break." That was even from the ones I figured would definitely play. Now we're actually talking about ignoring WAKA's tournament schedule in the fall to give ourselves a larger breather before starting the next season.

I thanked him and basically that was it.

This is odd. Essentially, I was trying to organize a thing where kickball people would come out one day for a few hours to play kickball, drink beer, and meet new people and NO ONE from DC Kickball or WAKA wanted to? Or not enough to make a real effort? People are getting burned out on KICKBALL? Just so we're clear, kickball is a sport that you play for about an hour before you go drink for 5 hours. Exactly what do these people need a breather from?

In the end, I believe the first guy that wrote me is right - and that's sad. I guess people from some leagues feel that they are better than people from others? Why, because the balls are a different color or they have different rules or they left because they didn't like the way they were treated by a league? Not playing kickball, meeting people, and drinking for free because of those reasons is as stupid as fighting a war because people have different religious beliefs or give women rights that you don't think they should have - oh wait...

I thought maybe if we could get the Middle East people together for some kickball and beer that would solve their problems. Based on this, I'm not so sure. Either way, it seems people could have cut out a few hours to play and drink and forget about their stupid kickball wars. I'll keep tryin'.