The Summer Saucony O’s Office League comes to a close in the Windy City next Tuesday with the Kick Ball Championship game! Venus Zine has led the series in Chicago with 4 wins for the season. My Open Bar is close behind with 3 wins, followed by WXRT with 2 and Mr Design with 1.

Venus Zine may have the championship in the bag, but we’ll still pit them against My Open Bar on the kick ball field to see if MOB can beat the ladies (well, mostly ladies) in yellow for one last “in your face” moment of the season.

Meanwhile we’ll see if underdogs Mr Design — the tallest team in the league, if not the winningest — can score one more win against WXRT to close out the season. Good luck Chicago!

From the beginning, Team XRT has always kinda sat on the back burner. It seems we are always so close to a victory to only have it pulled out from underneath us. It’s our own fault, we let things slide that other teams might argue in order to win. I’ve said it before, winning isn’t everything, but with the possibility of taking the lead on the W chart for the Sacony Originals office summer league games, something fueled the fire within us …plus our team caption said we had to win or he would fire us. (Okay, he really didn’t say that, but I could tell it was what he was thinking.)

I’ve never been good at softball. I played tee-ball in kindergarten; I was the kid in deep, deep right, which is really the parking lot, doing kart wheels and picking daisies for the duration of the game. Not only was I an awful player, but to this day I’m terrified of the ball. But wiffle ball seemed harmless, right? Wrong. Although the game is much safer with the ball weighing about the same as a stick of gum, we now had to be cautious of the shards of glass covering the ground in Humboldt Park.

Team XRT had a rough start as the girls (and one guy) from Venus took an early two to nothing lead. As the innings went on, the sun started to set making the sky a pretty purple color as the breeze softly made the trees…oh wait we are in the middle of a game (I guess not much has changed since kindergarten). The wiffle ball became increasingly harder as it got darker and darker, and members of the other teams who had finished their game in half the time of our game grew cranky.

This crankiness only provoked team XRT to finish our game. We wanted our fair shot to win this time around and although the other teams wanted us to quit, we were determined to finish the game for we still had hope…plus it is so fun to do the opposite of what everyone else wants you to.

Bottom of the fifth and we are still down by two. Really, I don’t know what happened. We just decided to be good all the sudden. I even pulled off a bunt…okay I didn’t mean to bunt, I just swung the bat and the ball didn’t go very far, but with a double by Zack, hits from Emily, Nicole, and Kristin, and an amazing defensive play by Analise that had her diving into the dirt, we waved our “W” flag tall and proud….that’s just said for imagery, we didn’t really have a flag (I don’t like lying), but it woulda been cool if we did.

We were the underdogs. And if you have no fear of the underdog, you will not survive. (Okay, for plagiarisms sake, I stole that from a song from Spoon. What do you expect, we are XRT after all.)

The Saucony O’s summer office sports league is in full swing, and we have a game lineup next week that’s gonna knock your socks right out of your Jazz Lo-Pros.

Monday August 3rd & Tuesday August 4th - NYC teams plays Kubb in Central Park.

Tuesday August 4th - Chicago teams play wiffle ball in Humboldt Park and our Boston teams play steal the bacon at Boston Common (pray for no rain this time!)

Wednesday August 5th - Seattle teams play touch football under the Space Needle while our SF teams play field crumpets at Draves Field.

Now what the eff is field crumpets, you ask? Field Crumpets is a game played with two teams of players which try to score points by hitting the “crumpet” (generally one of those squishy playground balls) into the opposing team’s goal using their crumpet sticks (big fat wiffle bats). Field Crumpets is highly related to the games Field Hockey and Soccer, though it references several other sports. The game also includes various unique rules, many of which reflect the founders’ desire to emphasize fun and silliness over competition.

We look forward to the silliness!

Field Crumpets photo courtesy of fieldcrumpets.com

If there is any consistency in the Saucony office summer league, it is the fact that the organization keeps introducing me to games I have never heard of. Team XRT was challenged to a game of Kubb, and after two straight losses, we were given the opportunity to redeem ourselves.

Known as the Viking Game (really, I’m not making this up) Kubb, is a cross between bags, a block set, and that game at the fair where you try to knock down the milk jugs with a ball. Okay, so maybe that is not the most accurate description. I could go into more detail, however the only thing that seems important is the game’s house rule: You must knock down the final piece of the game, the King Kubb, by throwing one of the smaller Kubbs between your legs. Upon hearing this rule is when we decided that the Saucony officials wanted nothing more than to embarrass the offices that participate, and boy did they succeed.

The game went smoothly until it came down to knocking over that final King Kubb.  Never in my twenty-one years have I witnessed something so impossible in athletics, (okay, maybe the Cubs winning the world series is up there too), but that final kubb seemed to take forever to knock down…or at least a good half hour.

Facing a team of Gumby’s, (Pitchfork employees must have a height requirement of at least 6ft), team XRT seemed to be at a slight disadvantage. Myself standing tall at an unimpressive 5’2, was actually told by our acting team captain and one of my bosses, Zack, that and I could not longer compete in the final round of my height restriction. Talk about EEA violations.

However, after several failed (and epic failed) attempts from both parties to knock the King Kubb over by throwing between our legs, the house rule was abandoned. (We’re not quitters, we just were hungry.) And okay, I don’t care, I’m gonna brag, I knocked down that final King Kubb and victory has never tasted so sweet (TAKE THAT, ZACK!) However, that was my one and only contribution to the game. It was in fact a team effort that earned Team XRT our first win.

When trying to rely on something as unpredictable as weather in Chicago, it is always nice to have a back up plan ready to kick into gear. Rainy weather forced round two of the Saucony Original’s Office Summer League’s game of kickball to be altered to fit into a more suitable and dryer location.

Instead of our physical strength being put to the test, our minds were challenged instead when the troops resorted to a game of Trivial Pursuit. The great thing about Trivial Pursuit is that not only do you learn new, random trivia, but you learn things you never knew that you already knew…and don’t know why you know them. Still following me?

We settled in at the Crocodile to play and when the tab is on someone else, what you end up drinking can almost be as unpredictable as the above said Chicago weather. One member from Team XRT ordered a hard apple cider called Crispin and from this simple act sparked the formation of one of the greatest inside jokes I have ever had the privilege of being apart of.

And what’s even funnier, is that the more I try to explain why Crispin is so funny, the less funny it becomes to other people. All I know is that we ran the bar dry out of Crispin, forcing the bartender to go down to the basement to get more cases of this delicious concoction, which we are pretty sure he had to dust off just to double check to make sure they weren’t expired.