hadji

qb coffee corner 3

i kind of realize now most of our teammates or williamstown residents might not realize what that meant (from qb coffee corner 2)

google julia !

my first memory of carlos was in the first grade when our class had a running race around the mitchell school recess playground, and carlos beat me i remember thinking 'wow someone is faster than me !' idk if bret or skeeter we're in that race or not i remember them from first grade on also

then carlos and i got into an argument by the slide and we started shoving each other we weren't really mad i forget what had upset us

but 2 german kids started yelling a racial slur chant - this is in the first grade about 1969 - we all were about 6 years old

where do 2 six year olds learn a racist slur chant in such a small town, i have wondered many years since ?

carlos and i competed against each other and were teammates many times in baseball, football and basketball, and when he lived on ide road he, the beverly's, john weedon and i used to play together

i just realized when we played schuler league baseball and they made the 3 best williamstown players - carlos, jeff and marcel - play for the north adams teams, it might have been because marcel and jeff had moved to williamstown from north adams in about the 3rd grade... but carlos should have been on our team

in the 4th grade we had a basketball competition between the classes and carlos and i were on the same team, and we had drama after our team made it to the final game

tracy was in the class we were competing against

we had the best 5 players including carlos, robby and skeeter, in the school in our class, besides me, but i thought i was maybe the 5th best and when i didn't start i became angry

so when the opposing class sent tracy over to our bench to try to distract us by asking us if we wanted to play flip cards (baseball cards) with her, i did - it was espionage, high drama and tracy ! - how could i resist ?

i think it was that summer carlos's boy's club team, hojo's, and our boys club team williamstown savings bank, faced off in the championship also - we beat them by 2 points and i might have actually caused our victory by literally hacking carlos to the foul line because it was so hard to cover him - i think i fouled out in the 3rd quarter

the point is carlos and i competed with and against each other for most of our youth

dad once said people told him carlos was too old to play little league in our age group because for some reason, carlos did not have a birth certificate

but then i realized something - in all our years playing against each other and even when we grew up - carlos and i were the same height which meant we had to be about the same age

and that is how maybe i found out just what a loss it was that carlos didn't play football, or any other sport - after his freshman year

we were in gym class in the 8th grade when i was maybe 5'7" - 5'8" - and we were playing basketball for the gym class

carlos picked up a basketball and dunked

nobody said anything

none of us would have been surprised at anything carlos could do

but as you see now, he probably would have been the best player on our varsity high school basketball team - while he was still in the 8th grade ...

we, none of us - realized that back then - it would have been the same situation for baseball, football, track and field, tennis, you name it and carlos would have been the best at it

but we just didn't realize it somehow

our freshman year football season might have been why carlos stopped playing and now it horrifies me

i was just a really skinny kid the other older kids made fun of, so i really didn't think there was anything i could do

the first two teams were practicing offense one time and most of us freshmen were resting and watching, keeping our mouths shut lest we would be put in our place

carlos grabbed some footballs and the kicking tee and put the tee on the 45 yardline - 45 yards from the end zone

he began kicking balls through the uprights - 55 yards away - in the 9th grade

there was a docent at the clark art museum who looked very similar to the primitives' singer tracy louise cattell in this video

- the primitives

the last time i remember speaking to carlos in highschool i member asking him why he didn't come out for football

he said he just didn't feel like it

i didn't talk to carlos again until i guess around 1984 - 85 ran into him on the indoor track around the basketball court at lasall gym

it was shocking

i remember carlos always saying strange things and kind of shouting them out, but suddenly i was talking to an erudite, learned person who sounded like a professor from oxford in the u k

i asked him why he talked so good and he said the blonde woman who worked at the college bookstore tutored him

i am not sure why i made the connection but for some reason i believed the docent was the lady carlos was referring to

i know i saw her in the bookstore but i didn't know that she had worked there

see, i learned a lesson because of that docent (and from tracy in the 4th grade) that every young male should know beforehand

go to qb coffee corner 7

- ann

so there is a new drop back to pass theory called the shuffle step ?

chris was our pitcher and left fielder in baseball, and he was going to play football for the first time as a senior the year after i graduated - i got mad at him for not coming out to play earlier because i believed one needed to practice the footwork for the plays for more than one year - at least i did

but chris got the last laugh - he started at qb the next year and their team went undefeated and...beat hoosac valley !!!!

he asked me for an advice

i told him to 'drop back fast' because that is really the important part of the drop back - to get back away from the rushers and set up as quickly as you can because that gives you more time to see the recievers or to release the ball quickly if you have to

the dropping back to pass is intuitive you don't need to over think it - just do it very rapidly