Water balloon warfare in the 21st century

I coach girls softball. I have done it for 9 years. Growing up as a jock, I always envisioned having the superstar son, and all that. Cut ahead, and two daughters later, that obviously didn't happen. However, I still have a huge love of sports, and both of my daughters enjoyed softball. So here I am.

As Tom Hanks can testify, coaching girls is quite a bit different than boys. For example, screaming "Grow a set of balls!" doesn't work as well. But I am getting off topic.

It has been really hot here, and we are at about the mid-season point, so I decided to shake things up at practice last night. I decided to make a bunch of water balloons, and have a giant water balloon fight. I figured it would be fun, and loosely could justify it by saying it was a throwing/running drill. On paper, it was a great idea.

I ended up leaving work early yesterday to go home and make the balloons. I haven't done this since I was a kid. Either my technique sucks now, or the balloons have gotten worse. After a half hour, I had a total of two balloons, and was completely soaked. I guess I was overfilling them, because they were exploding all over the place.

Being a reasonably intelligent person, I decided not to fill them as much. This seemed to work. After about an hour and a half or so, I had a couple of coolers filled with water balloons. At least 300 balloons, I am guessing. I was ready to rock.

What I hadn't counted on is how heavy a cooler full of water balloons is. I am not a weak man, but damn if those didn't weigh a ton! So I am grunting and groaning trying to carry them from the back yard out to the van. Then, when I got to the practice field, it was even a longer haul. By the time I carried both coolers out there, I was half dead.

The girls show up, and see the two coolers and are intrigued. Me, being the sneaky and somewhat evil type that I am, invited them to come over and see what was inside. When they came over, I completely ambushed them by firing about three balloons in rapid succession. However, in my attempts to not have the balloons explode while filling, I erred too far in the other direction, and didn't fill them enough.

Unfortunately, my accuracy is still pretty good, and all three balloons hit their intended targets. None of them exploded on impact though, and so I had knocked three girls over. One had the wind knocked out of her, and the other two were rubbing their heads. The initial excited looks on the girls were quickly replaced by a "This guy is fucking crazy" look. I decided I had better not throw any more balloons, and just let them have their fun.

For the record, between bending over for two hours filling balloons, and lugging those damn coolers around, my back has decided to check out for the day. I can barely move. Getting old really sucks.