Brian Stinar's Blog: February 2013

The Dog Bowl is Albuquerque's biggest handball tournament. This year, 45 people participated. My blog post is a bit late - the Dog Bowl happened November 30 through December 2. Lately I have been competing in many different handball tournaments (one per month has been my goal!), and I wanted to put my images, videos, and descriptions of the Dog Bowl up before too much time passed, and my memory of events stopped being quite as clear when all the tournaments blended together, or my phone broke and I lost all the media...

William Cervantes was the tournament director, and Carl White helped with the organization. It was always very clear to me when and where the matches were to be located, and everyone involved in organizing the tournament was very friendly to me. Putting together an event like the Dog Bowl is a lot of work, and I'm happy that William did it, and other people helped. I played doubles in the "B" doubles division with William's brother - Gerald Cervantes.

Gerald and I played well in the "B" doubles division. We won! The division only had four teams enter (eight players), so it was structured as a round robin tournament. We were undefeated.

The "B" singles division also had eight players, but since each player was an entrant in itself, the tournament was able to have a more traditional ladder bracket. With playing in two divisions, I'm happy that the "B" singles was not round robin, double elimination, or with a loser's bracket. It was already a lot of handball to play in one weekend.

Me and Gerald Cervantes with our trophies.

These were the trophies. I have liked handmade ceramics since I dated a potter about eight years ago. These are the only trophies I've actually planned on keeping around my small apartment. I like these trophies because they are useful (I've used all of them for either liquids or solids) and attractive, while most trophies are gaudy and useless. I won the far left one in the double's division, the middle one in the single's division and the far right one in a raffle at the end.

This was my opponent in the finals match of singles. His name is Alan Cheng, and he was significantly better than me, as well as being friendly, a good sport, and probably like 14 years old.

I liked this idea for trophies or entry prizes - extremely useful.

This was the Men's "B" Doubles bracket....

... and the Men's "B" Singles bracket.

I recorded three or four videos of Michael Linley from Albuquerque, New Mexico versus Mike Morales from Durango, Colorado. While going over these videos, I realized it was annoying to have to switch to the next one, so I edited them together using the YouTube Video Editor.