Breaking the 4th Wall: Season 96 Reflective

[LucyXpher 1,575]

The past couple months have been a blur.  On a personal level, I've been busy wrapping up yet another semester of classes-- possibly my second to last ever!  It's also that pre-Christmas time that always tends to fill the schedule with dinner events, and parties, and relatives that need visiting, Christmas shopping, decorating, etc...  It's been a chaotic last couple of months of real life, but it's been generally great and I have very little to complain about.  This past week, I've been travelling away from Houston, mostly catching up with friends I haven't seen in years.  I never knew nostalgia could hit a person so hard, but it's real, and it's definitely got me feeling alot of different things this week-- lately, the feeling is a little more melancholy thinking of how long it might be until I have this opportunity again, and how much can change in a few years time.  C'est la vie...

 

This past season in the VHLM was my last as GM of Halifax-- though I didn't know that coming into the season.  At the start of S96, before the draft, my excellent AGM @Oddpurplefly and I had a great plan in place for the next few seasons and we were super excited to begin building under the new 400 TPE cap.  This past draft was one of the most fun experiences I've had yet in this VHL community.  Going into it, we made a bunch of trades (seven actually) to position ourselves well to pick the players we wanted.  Between the two of us, we chatted with every VHLM draft eligible player and knew that we had a good sense of who was available in every round.  When it came to picking, we could not have been more pleased with how the picks fell.  Our Halifax team this past season was one of the most active locker rooms I have ever been a part of and I could not have been more proud of how well our team performed this season, even though it was a very young team that was still a season or two away from competing with the VHLM's best.  To finish 5th in the league, and ahead of every western conference team, was much more than I could have hoped.  

In the offseason, following our playoff exit in the first round, I was ready to continue as GM of Halifax and keep moving forward with our plan.  Plans changed when I saw that the Malmo GM position was becoming available.  When I joined the VHL, I truthfully didn't really have much intention of becoming a GM-- nor did I really see it as something that I'd be doing as early as my second season.  When that first offseason came around, I put my name forward for some offseason tournaments just to get my feet wet, but didn't really anticipate anything more.  When the VHLM was looking for a handful of new GMs that offseason, I put my name forward and was honestly kind of surprised to be given the Halifax job.  I quickly came to love that team, however, and I really enjoyed everything that went into it-- the scouting, drafting, developing, trading, and especially chatting with all the amazing people that played on our team these past four seasons.  When I joined the VHL, my favorite team that I wanted my player to be on was Malmo, but it quickly became my goal for a team that I would want to GM someday.  Of course, when I was thinking about this, I didn't anticipate at all that it would be before S100.  Truthfully, I fully expected to be GMing Halifax for 10 seasons or more while waiting for that Malmo job to be open-- and I would have been perfectly content with that!  But when I saw it available this offseason, I had to apply, even if the timeline was pushed up much sooner than I would have expected.  

 

Long story short, I could not be more excited for this regular season in the VHL to begin, but I'm also a little sad about Halifax.  I left the team in a good place, but I'm going to miss the day to day with all the awesome players that are still there, and we definitely had unfinished business with the Founder's Cup still proving to be elusive to the Boat Gang.  Ideally, maybe another few seasons would have been perfect just to have another chance to put a bow on that chapter, but things didn't work out that way, and that's totally okay!  

 

Anyway, with Christmas around the corner and another full travel day tomorrow, I'll be back at this VHL thing again in a few days and I can't wait to see what comes next.  Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all who celebrate at this time of year!  

 

──•~❉᯽❉~•──

LucyXpher

12/22/2024 - 800 words

[Oddpurplefly 154]

Well on your way to becoming one of the greats when it comes to VHL GMs!

 

Hope you have a Merry Christmas and happy holidays as well!