It is win or go home. No questions. You have to bring your best or you will have to wait for next year. And of course the winner will remind you until then.
My love for this game was cemented last year when I watched the friendly competition between NetApp and EMC as the favored underdog storage vendor was down by one.There was very little time left.
Inbound play. Last second throw by the NetApp right wing. The release… A red blur over mid-court… direct hit as the stomach of the EMC player reverberates in a slow ripple effect from the shock… WIN!
If you read that sentence slowly you will get the feeling I felt as the ball bounced around on the floor. After finally knocking out the last EMC player, the audience and the NetApp team jumped up off the bench and with a vicious fist pump screamed,“V0dgeball Baby!” The commentators even shared in the jubilation:
Cotton McKnight 
o you believe in unlikelihoods? Netapp’s shocking the v0dgeball world and upsetting EMC in the championship match!
Pepper Brooks:Unbelievable!
Cotton McKnight:Ladies and gentlemen, I have been to the Great Wall of China, I have seen the Pyramids of Egypt, I’ve even witnessed a grown man [redacted] a camel. But never in all my years as a sports caster have I witness something as improbable,as impossible, as what I’ve witnessed here today!
This is oneof my favorite moments in v0dgeball, and I expect nothing less from the 2011v0dgeball tournament in Las Vegas, NV
. . .
Stories are an integral part of sports. There is no single competition that is not made more enjoyable and satisfying when the stories of the individuals and the program are known. If you’ve engaged in the story of an athlete or a team, you know the different forms that a story can take. The Star Athlete suffers from a triple-digit fever, but turns in the performance of his life. The Juggernaut v0dgeball program loses their right-winger; can they still dominate? The longest vOdgeball Series drought in v0dgeball history – will it end this year?
Perhaps the most compelling stories in sports, though, are those that center around the desire, determination, and faith of a group of individuals that by all accounts has no business succeeding in their chosen arena. Think Rocky. Think Hoosiers.Think Miracle. These Cinderella stories capture the hearts of anyone who listens, sports fan or not, because of the transcendent nature of the story they tell. This is not just about athletics, this is about being human. It’s about that indelible part of the human soul that burns to be part of something larger than itself. And the longer the odds are in the beginning, the more compelling the journey to glory becomes.
Enter NetApp’s Dominate v0dgeball Team:The Crazy Nasty-Ass Honey Badgers.
While NetApp may be known for it’s wildly successful storage and software products, there is perhaps no team in the IT industry more prepared to be the next great Cinderella sports story than the Honey Badgers. As for humble beginnings, this rag-tag collection of virtualization zealots has not played together before. Can their passion for virtualization transcend the v0dgeball courts and bring a blazing victory and all of its bragging rights home to NetApp? Time will only tell, but odds seem insurmountable and building a strong v0dgeballpedigree takes a determined team.
In v0dgeball,as in all sports, success breeds success. Talented players go to winning programs. Without a successful past, history-changing players rarely fall intoa team’s lap. Without wins, a program must be built from the ground up to be competitive, and that takes a special kind of leader. A program builder. A captain capable of creating a total far greater than the sum of its parts.
Enter Vaughn Stewart.
Vaughn came to NetApp in January of 2000, and in 2010 began building that program. In the last 2 years Vaughn has made an unbelievable run at recruiting the best players from NetApp throughout the continental united states. This,according to Vaughn is the first priority and key ingredient to creating a winning program. Vaughn’s grueling recruiting efforts took him to the back waters of Louisiana to capture the widling Cajun dodgeballer – Julian Cates; the barren north of Alaska for the “right-wing yeti” we know as Joel Kaufman; to Brownsville, TX to grab the panhandler-turned-guard Jim Weingarten; to Detroit, MI to convince 80′s hair-band lead Michael Slisinger to come out of retirement; knocking on the door of a secluded SoCal monastery to cash in on the favor owed to him by Adam Fore; to finally rescuing Set Forgosh from a collapsed table caused by the 5.4 earthquake that rocked the east coast.
Not all was success though, early in the recruiting process, the once famed Nick “that1guynick” Howell who dominated the dodgeball courts at South Charlotte Elementary (before Charlotte PD asked him to leave), that bad-boy from the south, suffered a broken nail and was red-shirted for the game. He’ll be there in body, but I worry that the break in that nail may have reached his spirit, and that my friends is the essence of a true player.
As captain of the Honey Badgers and NetApp’sv0dgeball program, Vaughn took even took his sister team, the vBallers, a struggling program in its own right, and built them into a powerful “B” team. He has earned captain of the year honors in 2010 and took his team to the v0dgeballfinals.
“Vaughn is a captain that has had success at every stop along his career path,” Arkansas Gazette Athletic Analyst Larry “Courtside” Williams has said. “His ability to develop and take multiple programs to unprecedented levels is no fluke. He is a program builder and his record speaks for itself. Vaughn values the importance of virtualization and applies it to his philosophy of teaching on the court,making him an excellent addition to NetApp’s v0dgeball program.”
The history of NetApp’s v0dgeball program is about to become just that: history.They’re finished taking abuse from the wicked stepsisters, nay-sayers and competitors, and they’re preparing to climb up out of the musty, dank cellar of the Las Vegas Sports Center. You can wait until they’ve become royalty to pay attention, but then you’ll miss entering into – and becoming part of – the story as it unfolds.
About Scott
