NAH – Boston Hardcourt Bike Polo

August 19, 2014August 19, 2014

Crease is Coming

Rumor has it that the folks in charge want a crease rule. Chances are a crease is coming to a polo game near you. Here is a lil preview.

What are the specs of the future crease?

-A crease will extend about one foot out from the posts along the goal line.
-The NAH crease will have a 4 foot radius. Note that our nets are of NYC’s Red Menace Era vintage and are 2m wide so we used a 4.5 foot radius.
-The crease should be green gold and red.

How does the crease work? It is not perfect, but we’re still trying to smooth things out. Here is how its working for us:

-Only one defender may become stationary in the crease.
-Others defenders may enter the crease but only one can become stationary.
-No one can mess with a stationary person within the crease.
-When the ball is in the crease, anyone may enter the crease.

In Boston we don’t play much double goalie, so the crease hasn’t had a huge impact on game play. But between the crease and the popularity face offs have gained here, we might actually have to change the name of our game to Bike Hockey =^O

June 11, 2014

Eastside Quali Roundup

We’re finally finished recovering from our amazing camping/tourney/party experience in Lancaster, PA for the Eastside Regional Qualifiers.

Big ups to our Boston teams White Fang and Holy Ghost who qualified to play in the North American Hardcourt BIke Polo Championships in Minneapolis, MN in July.

Heres a few photos from Justin Saglio

May 27, 2014May 27, 2014

Referee Hand Signals

To allow the referee to communicate information about stoppages of play and penalties the NAH has implemented the use of hand signals. They are simple and effective – one look at the ref and you know he saw you lean into the innocent off-ball opponent. I’m not sure how much use they’ve seen in the qualifiers because they take a little more experience to master.

Peep this cheat-sheet so you don’t start chirpsing before you know what you got called on.

May 14, 2014June 13, 2014

Eastside Qualifier 2014

Boston is sending 3.666 teams to the 2014 NAH Eastside Qualifiers, all with hopes to represent Boston at the 2014 North American Hardcourt Bike Polo Championship. Wish them luck.

White Fang (Addison, Jake, Javier)
Holy Ghost (Nick, Tyler, Zac)
Mean Muggers (Bob, Charlotte, Howell)
Hexmen (Graham, Alan)

Saturday, May 31, 2014 – Sunday, June 1, 2014

Host club:

Lancaster United Bike Polo

http://lancasterpolo.com

Contact info:

thiscarcrash1@gmail.com

Court size:

2 Courts 60×140 4 ft boards

Podium URL:

https://www.podiumbikepolo.com/esq2014

Eastside Qualifier 2014
May 31/June1
32 Teams, 24 in Sundays Bracket
Swiss Saturday/Double Elimination Sunday
Top 6 teams advance to NA’s.

March 18, 2014March 18, 2014

NAH Bench Champs – Where does your club stand?

As you know, NAH announced that they will be hosting a NAH Club Bench Championship. Basically, the 12 top polo clubs in North America will be traveling to Lexington, KY this fall to find out who is the best. The catch: clubs will be invited based on their 2014 NAH Series Rankings. In each of the NAH qualifiers, and at the NAHBPC, players will earn points for their club.

For the ranking at the NAH qualifying series players will earn the following points: 1st : 10 Points; 2nd: 7 points; 3rd: 5 points; 4th: 4 points; 5th: 3 points; 7th: 2 points; <7th 1 point.

At the NAH Championships players will earn the following points: 1st: 50 points; 2nd: 35 points; 3rd: 23 points; 4th: 15 points; 5th: 10 points; 7th: 7 points; 9th: 5 points; 13th: 4 points; 17th: 3 points, <17th: 2 points.

It may not seem like it, but 12 clubs is a lot. Obviously, clubs with teams advancing to and performing well at Nationals have the advantage. However, clubs that roll deep but don’t necessarily have podium teams will squeeze smaller squads out.

The top spots will surely be taken by the historically top performing clubs, aka Cascadia: Seattle, East Van, Portland. San Fran will be a gimme because of The Beavers and that other handsome team from Cali. But the rest are up for grabs.

I was hecka curious to see what the spread looked like, especially with big dreams for Boston’s future in bench league. So I nerded out HELLA and tabulated up the stats from the 2103 qualifier. Heres what it looked like:

(Note that I accounted for a few small “changes” from the NAHBPC 2013 podium.com results: Seattle gets the commish, Chicago gets Lomax, San Francisco gets the Beavers(duh), Boston is fanged, Porch gets the rad caps 2x points bonus, Emmet doesn’t count and as well as few other low point transfers from folks’ relocation.)

EDIT 3-18-14 13:00: Greg Valentine has been moved from CHI to ATX. Woadie’s city points go to EVAN.

2013 NAH City Ranking
City	City Rank	City Points	City Players
SEA	1	218	19
SF	2	179	10
EVAN	3	49	5
ATX	4	37	9
PDX	5	32	3
BOS	6	24	6
TO	7	23	6
OTT	8	21	6
LEX	8	21	4
SKN	10	15	3
NYC	10	15	5
TLH	10	15	6

Rad! Get top 3 and secure your club an invite. For all other clubs, it is a toss up. You will be rewarded for bringing a whole bunch of players (Austin), for bringing only a few if they kill it (E.Van & PDX), or if you do both (Seattle). And don’t forget about the sleeper clubs that couldn’t make it to their qualifier last year. Either way, I’m stoked to see what the points totals will look like in 6 months from now.

If you’re interested, please help contribute so we can get a full season of stats by adding your regional qualifier using the attached spreadsheet. Just replace the proper existing cells with your results, and you can send it back to me [aminott(at)gmail.com]. I’ll keep the updated tallys attached to this post.
EDIT 3-18-14 13:00: CASCADIA Quals has been added. I will update cumulative totals once all qualifiers are tabulatedClick for excel spreadsheet

March 10, 2014March 10, 2014

Podium Rolling Out New Features

Podium, the brainchild of Portland Bike Polo’s Vince Foley, is arguably the most useful technological advance in the history of the poloverse. The software has streamlined the organization 129 tournaments throughout it’s history, including the past 3 World Championships (975 games collectively) and the 2013 European Hardcourt Championship, which clocks in as the largest tournament EVER with 63 teams. The Podium interface allows tournament organizers to seamlessly queue up games while players can look on from their iPhones while fishbowling their tent on the other side of the venue in the shade.

Hardcourt Podium has started rolling out some new features for the upcoming season. Users now have the ability to register themselves to track their careers, a feature first debuted by the ill-fated www.Hardcourtbikepolo.org. Podium spit out a player’s tournament history, as well as statistics associated with his or her team. The user can easily see the statistics from their profile, which includes tournament and game totals, cumulative and average goal counts (for and against them), as well as their goal differential per game and per tournament.

It appears as if this new user based version of Podium will be the go-to source for the 2014 NAH Tournament Season. Registration and qualification processes will likely be built into the software, further easing the load on the tournament organization front.

Up until this week, the software has been free to use. But with the new ‘registration’ capabilities comes a small fee. Users can pay on a sliding scale, from $2 to $20, to take advantage of the new features. Quite frankly, given all the time Vince has put into Podium, this small fee is an absolute steal. Alas, there will be penny-pinchers.

It is only a matter of time before these doubters come around and realize that the price of a pint is simply worth a fluid and interactive experience at the next tournament you attend, especially when someone finally steps up their Podium display from a big screen TV to a big screen TOUCH TV.

Thanks Vince!

December 17, 2013December 17, 2013

Welcome to the Eastside, Vermont!

Our very fine friends in Vermont, the Burlington Bike Polo Club, have been officially added to the Eastside Region. The NAH board gathered in Detroit at their secret polo chamber late Monday night and voted to approve nine revisions to the current regional boundaries. The Eastside Region now extends to the same boundaries us New Englanders have held dear since the Treaty of Paris.

Burlington Bike Polo was once considered a “Farm Team”. Now, however, they have been given an opportunity to join ranks of Eastside clubs such as Richmond, VA, New York, NY and Philadelphia, PA who are some of the most revered clubs in all of Hardcourt Polo. Colin of Burlington says “we can bring more numbers to tournaments WITH players from nearby cities”. By nearby he means “in the United States” because those who aren’t allowed into Canada have been effectively banned from the Northside. We look forward to seeing Burlington show what they’ve got this upcoming season!

Boston Bike Polo would like to extend a warm welcome the friendliest, iriest, and all around awesome folks this side of Lake Champlain. Come play pickup with us soon!

December 9, 2013December 9, 2013

Too Cool for Rules? Don’t Be That Guy.

MARK IT ZERO, DUDE. — I am not proud that this meme is attached to this post. It’s so obvious, it’s the laziest thing I’ve ever done.

For fuck’s sake, follow the rules of bike polo. The rules are there to keep you safe (you fucking goon), and they are there to protect your disgusting body and your piece-of-shit bike and your expensive polo gear. The truly beautiful thing about our sport is that there are so few rules in the first place. I recently read something I really liked on League of Bike Polo: every new sport is advanced in the space between the rules, and that strategic advancement is not dictated by the rules themselves. For example, with the development of bike polo specific equipment, such as mallet heads that enhance scooping ability and frames that center your weight more appropriately for hopping and pivot turning, we are each individually granted the new tactics, and those tactics give us exponentially more choices to make as a team on the court. And that’s a beautiful thing if you ask me.

Now, I realize that not everyone shares my peachy idealistic view of the rules. Some kids want to be Spartan renegades and play by their own rules, and I have been trying my best to appreciate that position. I understand that everyone interprets “the rules” differently, specifically the definitions for high sticking, slashing, and off-ball contact. Some kids want to play exclusively by our golden rule of polo, Don’t Be A Dick. But can’t you see how this reductionist point of view leads to less of a grey area and more of a black hole? If there are enough kids on the court playing by different definitions of a slash or hack, aggression will escalate wicked quick. Retaliatory strikes (guilty of these myself) are arguably even more egregious than offending actions such as slashing, because they are motivated by vengeance and anger, and are way more likely to cause accidents. Also, that’s like totally the definition of being a dick, and we all JUST agreed that we shouldn’t be dicks like thirty seconds ago.

If I were reffing this game, I would eject every player for tucking his shirt into his underwear. Also this is a high stick, that's a turnover. — If I were reffing this game, I would eject every player for tucking his shirt into his fucking underwear. (Also this is a high stick, that’s a turnover)

I want to take a moment and recognize the work Nick Kruse is putting into updating the rules. He recently showed me a few of his updates, and his language is so clear and his writing is so effective that I swear I saw a flock of doves fly out of his laptop’s screen. But what do we do when we have a disagreement about the rules at pickup? Shouldn’t the rules be more flexible (i.e. allowing wrist shots, throwing your mallet at the ball) since there are beginners present and we’re all just drinking and having fun? I suggested to our club that we use the most current version of NAH rules and regulations at pickup, but only to enforce turnovers. That way, we have good habits on the court when traveling to other cities for tournaments. You might argue that strictly reffing and enforcing turnovers during pickup games takes away the inherent punk-rock nature that is essential to the spirit of bike polo. To that, I say you are dead fucking wrong, kiddo. We all have lives outside of bike polo, even if we don’t want to admit it; we can’t go around breaking each others’ bones and sporting black eyes to the office— I’m not sixteen anymore. I know that taking hits and falls is part of the game, I know that the smart thing to do is wear pads and a face cage, because accidents (that is to say, accidents caused by Tobi) happen. But should I dress like a NFL linebacker just to play a pickup game of bike polo? I have responsibilities as a human being— I have cats to feed, man!

Classic Tobi (edit: this is actually zac) photo:@TP6017 — Nice salmon head. But keep it under your shoulders or else it’s a turnover.
(photo: @TP6017)

Let me reframe my argument: I don’t particularly care if people break the rules. It doesn’t make me cry and it doesn’t make me cum, I am completely indifferent to it. Really, I just want to play polo, and if you break the rules and endanger my well-being, frankly that’s ok because I should have expected it— bike polo is dangerous. However, there is a line that any reasonable person should not cross, and it is an admittedly fuzzy line. How do you quantify the aggression in Lomax’s wild swing? If Zach Blackburn elbows you in the chest while you’re playing goal, how aggressively can you protect yourself? I don’t have the answers to these questions. I only hope that we can get back to what the game is truly about, in my opinion, which is mallet skill and speed. Picks and hits have a place in bike polo, but slamming on your friends’ steering arms and knocking them off their bikes seems unnecessarily barbaric. As Bill and Ted once said on their excellent adventure, “Be excellent to each another, and party on, dudes!” -ZS