Floor Hockey Champs

Most of our team (minus Freda, Ken and Brian).

Our Cornerstone Sports Night team, The Atomic Green Beans, capped off an undefeated seven weeks of floor hockey last Monday. I believe we were the only team to have ever done this since Cornerstone Sports Night was started many years ago. It was an unbelievable run that may not ever be duplicated. Along with our 22 regular season wins we had 5 ties leading into the one day playoff.

Our first playoff game was against Hollis and Chung-Yen's orange team. Surprisingly, they ended up in last, a scant 2 points behind 5th place Blue (Josh's team). Team Orange has given us trouble before tying us one game. This game wouldn't be a walk in the park. And, as it turned out, they tied us again. Not a good start for us.

Next we played Rupert's White Team. We did well against them. That was the end of the round robin part of the playoffs. We would play Josh's Blue team in the next round.

The game against Josh's team wasn't very close. We scored a lot of goals against them. In the middle part of the season they were another team that tied us. But, later on we pretty much scored at will on them. Sometimes they can be overly aggressive leaving themselves open defensively which we capitalized on. Our team is good as moving the ball with accurate passes to one another.

The win over Blue catapulted us into the finals against Alan Ho's Black team. They've given us the most trouble overall with at least a couple of ties in the regular season. They have a good player who was rumoured to have played on the Thai national hockey team (for what that's worth).

For the finals they brought in their "ringer", Benson, to play goal. Benson had been away for most of the season doing his studies. But, I guess he made an exception to come out for the finals. Now we have a girl, Freda, in net. That frees up an extra guy for us to play out. That can be a big advantage as long as we limit the shots our opponents get on net.

One big disadvantage we faced on the night of the finals was our best girl (who plays out), Holly, was missing. She had damaged her ACL (or MCL possibly) skiing the day or two before our game and would likely be out the rest of the season (European Handball was next).

Holly was great at scoring goals for us. We planted her right beside the opponent's net and fed her the ball and she regularly scored. She just had that hand-eye coordination that was required.

Nevertheless, our team sucked it up and played hard earning a two or three goal victory over Black. I think the score was either 3-1 or 4-1. Our team was really happy. Hopefully we'll do alright at European Handball as well.

Skating @ Harbourfront

Our Cornerstone Sports Night team went skating at Harbourfront on Saturday. Well, at least four of us did. We had asked people to pick a day that suited them best and this was supposed to be it. But, there were some last minute cancellations and one person forgot and another just didn't show. So there ended up being four of us.

It was still good. I like skating outdoors. And the Harbourfront is a great place to skate outside. The scenery is nicer than Nathan Philips Square where you're surrounded by concrete and buildings. At least you have Lake Ontario nearby when you're by the waterfront.

After skating we went to dinner at Gonoe Sushi which was just across the street. We ordered a huge 80-piece sushi boat and split it between the four of us. It was impressive looking I have to say. Maybe we'll try again soon and see if we can get a few more people out.

Atomic Green Beans

Danny, me, Andrew, Joe, Winnie, Holly, Karen and Jennifer

Atomic Green Beans - No, it's not some post apocalyptic food item, it's the name of our current Cornerstone Multi-Sport team (aka - the Beans). We're so named because of our bright, lime-green sports jerseys if you must know.

Our season began at the beginning of October. We played a variety of team building games. The following week was Thanksgiving so, of course, we had it off. After that we started eight weeks of volleyball.

Our team did well in volleyball. We had the best record during the regular season. The playoffs were a different story. We skipped directly into the semis where we lost the best of three series 2 games to 1 to Michael's Yellow Team (the eventual winners).

We ended up winning the rest of the games we played that evening unofficially ending up in third. That's alright... it was fun. We put in a good effort.

The picture (above) is from our team dinner at Holly's place. We met up on the first Sunday in December. It was hard finding a day where most people could make it especially in December (close to Christmas). Unfortunately Ken and Brian couldn't come. Freda came late.

Dinner was a little sparse. We didn't really coordinate it as well as we could have I suppose. Winnie and Andrew bought duck and roast pork. Jennifer made a vegetable platter with some dip she bought at the One-of-a-Kind Show,  Holly made some pork and a pot of rice and I bought a tray of sushi with the $50 the Multi-Sport organizers gave us.

For dessert Danny bought ice cream and pie, I bought pie and Joe and Karen bought two tubs of ice cream. Needless to say we had a lot of pie and ice cream.

After dinner we headed to the basement to play board games. I don't remember the names of any of the games we played, but they were fun. Holly has a lot of games.

Our next idea for a team outing is skating at Harbourfront. That ought to be fun.