I play volleyball with a group of guys in Chicago. We’re not super good, but we’re reasonably competitive. A few years ago I blogged about learning to play volleyball. Like, literally had no idea what was going on the first few months. Now I would say I know more of what is going on.
Recently, we found out we could actually play volleyball in cool places by signing up. You don’t have to be that good, you can just show up, pay, and they have to let you play. It’s every millennials dream, acceptance with no effort and minimal upfront cash!
I fought to go play in Reno, but lost to Puerto Rico (I know, right?!). What would Dolores Van Cartier say? But, what started as going to a place to play in a volleyball tournament, quickly degraded into us inviting all our friends to Puerto Rico for 5 days and then something or something, we’ll play volleyball?
The first day of the tournament we barely got there on time, and then proceeded to lose every game. But Tedd, I thought the title of this was how inspiring the team was?
Weelllll, the morning we woke up for the tournament, one of the guys on our team, Jay, actually lost his voice completely. It was goooonnne. No sound could come from his mouth.
So, we’re playing volleyball and Jay couldn’t say anything, but for some reason other people on our team forgot that they could use words, even if Jay couldn’t. This lead to a lot of hysterical miming and huffy faces on the court. After the tournament and a few drinks, this ended in us doing chicken dances to mimic what our on-court interactions had looked like.
During one of our many losses, I took a seat on a bench because I rotated out. A man with a clipboard goes:
“Is your friend deaf?”
“No,” I said. “He lost his voice.”
“Oh…,” the ref said, “he’s really dramatic.”
I didn’t think too much of this until later in the day, when we were playing and the crowd started to chant. Jay had another player’s jersey on, so there were a bunch of Puerto Rican people in the stands cheering for the name on the back of Jay’s shirt – “Quisha.”
“Puedes hacerlo, Quisha!”
“Quisha! Quisha!”
Jay was newer to our team, so he wasn’t quite as competitive as some of other teammates, but he wasn’t bad, by any means. He was playing well.
So the crowd is roaring when Jay does stuff on the court and we’re all kind of laughing because we think it’s because our team is so bad and has lost every game.
The day ends and we head home. We’re all sitting around talking to our other friends about how supportive the crowd was. This lead to me offhandedly telling the story about the guy thinking Jay was deaf…
Wait for it…
Yup. Everyone at the tournament REALLY thought that Jay was deaf.
“My god,” Jay said, “they think I’m like a Make a Wish Kid…”
This was further confirmed later in the night at the volleyball party bar when one of the other teams sent a drunk ambassador to gush about Jay/Quisha.
“I love him!” the guy said. “Can you sign I love you to him for me?”
“He can hear you…”
The next day it was super awkward, however, as Jay felt like he had to pretend to be deaf again so that… it wasn’t weirder?
Jay had another good hit that game and another guy put his hand under the net, grabbed Jay’s hand and loudly mouthed, “Good job. Very good job!”
Luckily, by the end of the first loss, we were hungover, tired, and had no hope of winning, so we skedaddled out of the gym.
For not being any good our team had a lot of support on the trip:
- Jay’s roaring crowd
- At the McDonald’s next to the gym, the cashiers asked to take a picture of us
- Our friend posted a picture with us outside the gym and “Fourth Place Finishers!” as the caption (there were only four teams). This elicited a bunch of congratulatory FB messages: “You did it!” “Good win guys!” “Wow!”
I think if I learned anything from this trip it’s…
You know what, I learned nothing. If we’d gone to Reno, though… It would have been a completely different story.