Road Trip Blog #4 (First Camp)

The only downside of going to the World Baseball classic on the Tuesday night we arrived in Florida was that our first camp was the next day on Wednesday and we only knew who was in our group and which baseball station we were running. None of us had worked together before and weren't 100% sure what to do. We had to get together at 10:30 in the morning in what I'm calling an impromptu meeting. I'm calling it that because we received a text message at 2am that morning saying we should meet up with our groups at 10:30. I had contacted the guys in my group and we were going to meet up with each other but I ended up getting a phone call by the guy who is tournament director for this stretch of camps asking where I was. Well I was in the bathroom taking a dump so I told him I'd be down in a few minutes and he told me to get down there now because everyone was waiting on me and my roommate. Needless to say I have not gotten off to a good start with the tournament director so far. We got our speeches down and practiced them in from of the tournament director. I executed flawlessly I thought because I didn't have any interruptions and also I believe because I studied the binder and I also wrote down an outline of what I planned on saying. At this point I didn't want to give the director anymore fuel to dislike me. We showed up to our camp way earlier than we needed to be because our sponsor wanted us to. I understood it being that first camp that we needed extra time to setup and get stuff situated but we literally were standing around for about 3 hours before the camp even started. The good thing about it was that I walked out to a spot to be a greeter and I got to know one of the other coaches on the team that I hadn't talked to much. At this point after driving 18 hours with my car of four I had gotten to know each of those guys pretty well. When we stopped to eat and such we usually stayed with the people in our cars. I had talked with a few of the other guys but not him at all. The coach I was talking with, his name is Brady. Originally I couldn't get a read on him and neither could my car. We didn't now if he was just shy or if he might just be a jerk. Well I took the time to talk with him and my roommate, Fred, came down and was talking with us as well and he's a great guy. We traded jokes and stories. We talked about the job and what we planned to do while we were in Florida. We traded stories about strip clubs. I did most of the talking since Fred had never been and Brady had only been to one once for about a half hour. I have been to a couple strip clubs all around the US so I had a handful of funny stories. Once the camp started it went by well. The next camp was the next day and it was smaller and had kids that were better mannered. I talked with Brady and Fred again when we were greeting and we found a lot of similarities in common.