Oh Hay

Peep the new mallet with a telescopic ski pole and the pipe Zach gave me. Found my old skateboard helmet. Polo bike is done too. I'll be back Thursday! Can't wait to get schooled by everyone.

ps. does anyone have some hockey tape I could use?

PoloWheel?

From  Fixed Gear Blog. 

ATX

Really nice video outta Austin, Texas. Tennis courts, yeah! 

Bike Polo Work Sample from Leah Michelle Ross on Vimeo.

bikepolo.ca?

is it down?  Or is having registration issues?  Who knows, but I need my polo forum fix. This is what I got around 10:33 pm.

UPDATE: use leagueofbikepolo.com

Friendlies In St. Louis

Seeing Zach's blog post reminded me that I needed to make a post about the friendlies that are comming up. Bloomington is headed down to St. Louis on the 5th of December to play some friendly matches against their team. Remember that their A team destroyed us at Midwest 7, but hopefuly we'll stand a chance against them in a less competitive arena. Let's try and get a bunch of players from here heading down there, I've got room for 4 plus bikes, already I've got 3(me, Zach, and Rinzin) in my car. Any more then that and we'll need to have another car. I'm(Edwin) planning on being back in town before noon the next day, Sunday 6th.

In other news, bids have been submitted for the 2010 North America's, the two contenders are in Boston, MA and Madison, WI. In the voting process the country is divided into 6 regions, and each region has 4 reps; we are Midwest, so our's are Ben(Chicago), Chris(CoMo), Jonny (Madison), Jake(Milwaukee). If you want to contact them and encourage them to vote for one or the other, the easiest way might be through bikepolo.ca. At some point in the near future, we should also appoint a city rep. for Bloomington. We can have a poll taken, or what ever. This is going to be important someday, when the North American Hardcourt really gets off the ground as an organizing body.

Also, not playing polo on Thanksgiving Day!

Radball

Today while looking at Long Johns (an awesome type of dutch cargo bike), I stumbled across this video, and starting watching others like them. It's a sport called "Radball", and is basically soccer on bikes. The video reminded me of Zach talking about Chris from COMO, and how he played without a mallet for a while. Imagine having these skills out on the polo court. It's also interesing to see how heavily modified the bikes they use are, with the extremely weird saddle placement, ape hangers, and 1 to 1 gearing.

Wheel Covers!

Fran and Nick went to St. Louis this weekend, when they came home they had all of this coroplast, 40ish sheets in all(I think they dropped like $80)! It ended up costing us about $2 a sheet, way more economical then what we could buy locally, and it means we no longer will have jank cardboard covers. It almost covers a 700c wheel, and perfectly fits the 26'' wheels a lot of us use for our fronts. There is also a ton more yellow coroplast signs for a phish show lining 7th around Grant, a new collecting mission for tonight?


We made up some of the covers court side, and a lot more of players went home with material for awesome new covers! Hopefully they'll all be made, decorated and banged up soon!


On the more experimental side of polo tech, Legit Bike Polo seems obsessed with making everything collapsible. I think the idea is for people who have a long way to travel, but on days as windy as this one, being able to bike around with out your covers acting like sails would be awesome, and a collapsible mallet would make SOMA abbey like me a lot more when I go in there on Saturdays after polo!

Bloomington @ the Midwestern Champeenships!

This past weekend Ashley, Evan, and I drove to beautiful Columbia, Missouri for the biggest polo tournament in the Midwest. We had tons of fun and learned all sorts of new stuff- most of which we brought back to our weekly pickup games. New mallets, new boards, new shots and skills.


^The other two-thirds of TEAM Good Intentions, the first team to represent Indiana (let alone Bloomington) in hardcourt competition. Evan brought his camera and took lots of really good pictures, so sorry you have to deal with my crappy ones at the moment. I'm sure he'll post 'em on here once they're up. Oh, and did I mention Ashley played on the only folding bike in the entire tournament? At one point there were hundreds of people chanting 'fold-ing-bike, fold-ing-bike'!!


^The court we played on was huge and most of the team were fairly experienced. Nevertheless we accomplished our goal of winning a game! During the swiss rounds we went 0-3-1, and in the elimination 'super fun' tournament we went 1-2-0. 'Super fun' was short for 'losers bracket', but was great as we got to play similarly skilled teams.



^This shot shows an all-girl game featuring players from Austin, TX and Colorado Springs, CO. In the background you can see some of the wooden boards used to construct impromptu courts. We've totally borrowed this idea and built some boards to fill in our gaps at the tennis courts. If you've played on them you can really tell a difference. Also, our host Nick from COMO hooked us up with a bunch of HDPE gas pipe to make mallet heads out of! This specific pipe is better than anything we can buy around here, so if you want one just ask!

I posted more photos and a really awesome video of the final match over at my ramble fest of a blog --> Polo-Velo-Bloomington. So check that out if you want to read more about bike polo related jazz. And if you really want to geek out about bike polo check out Bikepolo.CA.

See you Saturday at the big court on 2nd!

-Zachary

New Flier!

Newer flier idea, what do people think? I left Saturday out for now, I think we should tell people about it if they show up, the game at the basketball courts is way more intense.

Tournaments

BFF polo tournament- paris 2009 -clip HD (v.02) from Uolmo on Vimeo.

The Midwest Champeenships are this weekend, and Bloomington is sending down a crew. We've barely started playing, and I think everyone knows that we are going to get creamed, but it will be nice to know where we are, and know what to work on for The St. Louis Lock-In. Good luck to the players going down: Zach, Evan, Ashley, and Nick.

COG Highlights from Mr.Do on Vimeo.

These are the highlights from The COG invitational. Videos like this are nice because we can see what we are heading towards in terms of play quality. This weekend will be a great chance to see really high quality play.