story Aved Chellapp
The Yale-NUS College floorball team has become left-handed after the bulk purchase of left-handed floorball sticks by Athletics Director Bill Cartwright. While the purchase was initially met with disbelief by players, it seems to have been a blessing in disguise.
Team captain Omar Gosh ’18 first noticed this phenomenon at the team’s weekly training session on Thursday, March 19, days after Mr. Cartwright had purchased the sticks. When training began at 8:30 pm he was shocked to discover that the entire team was solely using their left hands during the game. The surprises did not stop there.
Even more extraordinary was Gosh’s realization that the entire team was now using their left hands for everyday tasks as well. He said, “not only were they playing floorball with their left hands, but they were high fiving, texting and shaking hands with their left hands as well, without any prior agreement.” Gosh added that he had never expected this sort of result from the purchase of the sticks and had actually been irritated with Mr. Cartwright for what Gosh viewed as “a monumental blunder.”
While this may have come as a surprise to Gosh and his teammates, Mr. Cartwright maintains it was always his intention. “Having the ability to play with the alternative hand gives Yale-NUS players the edge. It makes them unpredictable and capable of switching up the play much easier than before”, he said. Mr. Cartwright added that the switch in dominant hands was inevitable and was surprised that it had taken so long to occur.
Many members of the team agreed with Mr. Cartwright’s sentiments. One of the players, Sarah Tonin ’17 said that her ball control had notably improved. “It now feels like the floorball stick is an extension of my arm. It’s a miracle,” she said.
But other members expressed irritation at the hand switch, saying that they were no longer able to use their right hand. Member Sue Denim ’18 said that while she was happy with the improvement to her floorball technique, she was “now incapable of using [her] right hand” and that “writing with [her] left is causing [her] to smudge [her] words”.
Mr. Cartwright said that the switch in hand dominance should not have made using their right hands any more difficult than it already was. He said he did not understand why becoming proficient at using the left hand had not resulted in ambidexterity, a sentiment that Gosh agreed with.
The team captain added that while many of Mr. Cartwright’s decisions were questionable, such as the decision to not purchase floorballs for three months, they had a tendency to “work out in the end.” Only last week, Mr. Cartwright had presented Gosh with brand new team shirts, without waiting for a request from Gosh or the correct measurements. “I was presented with an invoice for a number of shirts and asked if I could figure out what was going on, despite not having being told to do the sizing first,” he said. Yet upon further inspection, Gosh discovered that the shirts fit the team perfectly.
The floorball team is not the only athletics team that has benefited from Mr. Cartwright’s unconventional, and perhaps unintentional, genius. After training with golf balls that Mr. Cartwright claims were “a strategic and deliberate purchase”, the soccer team’s goal-scoring precision and frequency has increased markedly, said captain Hugh Mungus ’17. This training strategy is said to have helped the team go on to win 17-2 in their last match of the Inter Faculty-College-School-University-Polytechnic-Institution-Entity Games (IDGAF), against the Natural Universality of Singapore’s Liberal Arts Faculty.
Mr. Cartwright said that he never doubted the players’ ability to adapt to the difficult situations presented to them. “Being conventional is too overrated,” he said. “Students come to Yale-NUS to be challenged.”
This article was part of our April 1st, 2015, satire issue. Individuals, statements and opinions in this issue are purely fictional and not representative of any real-world entities.