Posts from 2009
Portland Pub Crawl
My niece Meaghan and her husband Nick are in town for the weekend, up from Monterey CA where they are both attending the Defense Language Institute for a ser...
Professional Update
I’ve been busy lately. About one month ago I joined WebMD Health Services as their new VP of Technology. I’m responsible for product development, customer in...
Down 6 Players, Heavy Rains Expected
Today we play a tough Liberty team at Sherwood High School at 5pm. It has been raining hard all day and we are down to just 19 players due to illness that is...
Game 5 result: Sherwood 58, Aloha 28
We continued our unbeaten streak last Saturday vs Aloha Gold in a game that felt much closer than the final score. Aloha brought a very strong passing attack...
Game 4 result: Sherwood 32, SEI 0
We kept our season perfect with a resounding 32-0 win on Saturday. Execution was strong but far from perfect, but we were up by 32 by half time and had to ke...
Game 3 Result - Sherwood 45, Beaverton 18
I missed a football game as coach for the first time in two years so that I could attend and host a fundraising dinner for the TechStart Education Foundation...
Teaching Descent, Converting New Gamers
My good friend Brian emailed me about a month ago asking about Dungeons and Dragons. His son John started expressing interest in learning the game and Brian ...
Game 2 Highlights
I promised to post some highlights from our second game against St Helens. We had some great things happen, but if you watch closely you'll see how a great r...
Game 2 result: Sherwood 33, St Helens 7
We had a much better showing on offense this week, gaining over 300 yards with a decent mix of passing and running. It was nice having our starting fullback ...
Game 1 result: Sherwood 16, Aloha Blue 12
Our first game was a grinding victory that found us needing a sustained drive to score with only 6 minutes left in the game. The defense was extremely solid,...
Combat Commander: Stalingrad, Scenario 37
Ken and I resumed what will hopefully be weekly Wednesday wargaming sessions. We’ve been playing through the Stalingrad scenarios for Combat Commander and lo...
Our Defensive Scheme
We've nearly installed our defense for the year as of this week. I'll work on a few minor additions over the next 2 weeks, and we will always make small adju...
Jamboree - first scrimmage
We participated in the Tigard jamboree this weekend with mostly positive results. Our defense was stellar and is ahead of where I hoped to be by now - we've ...
Seeing Doubles Tour: OregonLive and Coach Lawrence
Check it out.
Roads and Boats Again
Jacob and I were eager to play Roads and Boats again, so persuaded Matthew to join us for a Sunday afternoon game. I was a bit hesitant, not knowing if Matth...
First two practices complete - what did we accomplish?
We had our first two team practices last week (technically only about 1.5 practices as we did warmups as a big group then announced teams on Thursday night)....
New Blog: A Football Coach in Sherwood
I started a new blog relaying my football coaching experiences. Enjoy.
Recent Gaming: War of the Ring, Roads and Boats, Attack!
While I haven’t had much time for gaming lately, the time I have made has been very good. Some meaty games and old gems that don’t hit the table very often. ...
Draft Night
Tonight is our draft, and it is coming none too soon. Usually after a single day of contact we have a pretty good idea of our desired picks, and through a nu...
Transition to Full Contact
This morning (Saturday) Jim and I will be running our makeup practice for kids who missed one or more conditioning workouts during the week. Players are limi...
Our Draft Process - Impact Player Selection
Our team draft strategy is to ensure that we balance all of the teams at each level as much as possible while taking into consideration each coach's personal...
Sherwood Bowmen Football Camp
A week ago my 7th grade son Matthew participated in the annual Sherwood Bowmen football camp, organized by the high school coaches and largely led by team m...
Preparing for the 2009 Season
Here's my action plan for getting ready for the 2009 football season: Meet with Jacob's defensive coach from last year (he helped lead their 8th grade vars...
Vancouver Island
For over a year Julie and I discussed various ideas for a special trip to celebrate her 40th birthday (coming up in early August). Our original plan was Ital...
About Me
My name is Chris Brooks and I coach youth football in Sherwood, Oregon. I have another blog where I talk about boardgames, travel, and family stuff. As of 20...
Extreme Cash Budgeting with Wesabe
I’ve long been a personal finance geek, starting as an early user of Quicken and CheckFree in the early 90s, and culminating in my role as CTO at Corillian w...
Hey, Blue!
Jacob got trained up and has started umpiring baseball games. Work has been slow so he’s done some free games for the youth recreational league here in Sherw...
Baseball Season
The baseball seasons starts with a bang this weekend with the Sherwood Federal JBO tournament. Jacob is playing in the senior fed tournament, Matthew the jun...
Small World and the Stone Age
Snuck in some boardgaming over the past week, including a much anticipated first play of Days of Wonder’s new release Small World (not to be confused with It...
Tangent - First Live Performance
The boys had their first live performance a couple of weeks ago - here’s the (extremely poor quality) video of the performance, plus a couple of bonuses for ...
Computational Thinking in the High School
I spent most of Saturday attending a very inspirational working session at Washington State University - Vancouver. The working group is the Northwest Distri...
Teaching College Computer Science
Starting last summer I began exploring ways to get back into teaching. Other than corporate training it has been over 15 years since I last taught a formal c...
Jacob’s 2008 Football Highlights
This is very late in coming, but I just got my hands on a highlight movie made by one of the parents from Jacob’s team. Enjoy! Jacob 2008 Footba...
Steam Over Holland
I’m three plays into the wonderful introductory 18xx game Steam Over Holland and I’m confident in saying that while it stands up perfectly for beginner playe...
GameStorm 2009
I was able to return to GameStorm this year after sadly missing the 2008 event (read my past reports: 2003, 2004 Day 1, 2004 Day 2, 2004 Day 3, 2004 - Uberpl...
GTD for teenage boys
I’ve Twittered a bit recently about the productivity coaching I’ve been giving to Matthew and a few folks asked me to expand on how I’ve introduced Getting T...
Fields of Fire
I’m obsessed with Fields of Fire, and I’ve only played 1/5 of a full scenario. When I say obsessed, I mean I keep thinking about how much I want to play this...
Enter Sandman, Take 1
The boys are working hard preparing for a talent show at school later this spring. I convinced them to allow me to record an early take before they became pr...
18AL, or “The One We May Have Played Correctly”
JD, Jacob and I played 18AL yesterday morning and had a fantastic time of it. This is my 3rd play in about 3 months and we seem to have managed the game well...
Recent Gaming: 1850, Volldampf, Vinci
Time to catch up on some recent gaming. As you may have read in Mike’s blog, we had a very wacky game of 1850 a few weeks ago. Not knowing the exact number o...
Chess Success
Last weekend I helped host a regional Chess for Success tournament at Sherwood Middle School. With a very strong 6th grade class joining our club of about 40...
Recent Gaming: Verrater, Battlestar Galactica, Warriors of God, and more
Despite the lack of blogging on my part, games have been played and enjoyed recently. Let’s start with the winter holidays. We spent the holidays around Chri...