New Venue

by Duf Anything and Everything

I hosted my fantasy football league draft once again last night for what seems like the 20th year in a row. Christine helped me do the reconfiguration of the living space to accommodate the 10-12 people that would be in attendance. My food prep was minor consisting of ordering 3 pizzas from Domino’s and picking up some snacks to be in bowls on the tables, a far cry from the extensive food prep I used to do. Even though the living space in my new house is appreciably smaller I came up with a layout that worked pretty well.

I got my laptop connected to the TV in the great room and was ready to go almost an hour in advance of anyone showing up. The pizza arrived just as the first set of cars pulled up. The only thing I had to change once we got rolling was bringing over some additional lighting for the wall where the draft board was located. We only had two owners connected in via Skype. In years past we had as many as 5 people remote but nowadays some of those people just do their picks through the website without being dialed in live.

As has been customary for most drafts, my preparation was bare bones. I simply printed out a draft cheat sheet that ranked players numerically and went from there, normally choosing the highest available player for whatever position I needed. I had the number one pick in the draft so that meant that most rounds I was drafting two players in a row which can be challenging. According to our league website I drafted pretty well as I got an A rating. We will see how that translates to success during the season.

The draft wrapped up right around 10PM. I went into whirlwind mode, cleaning up and reverting the house back to it’s normal state. I had everything back in place in a little less than an hour which I thought was a decent result. Even with it being late I had a rough time falling right asleep. I probably didn’t close my eyes for good until a little after midnight. I fell asleep content that the draft went well, despite the shift in venue along with all the other shifts in my life.