Cobra Beginnings

It all began when Pick approached Hooters to sound her out about playing in a new team. Hooters was loyal enough to want to rope Pup and I in and the opportunity was one that had to be seriously considered.

We'd just completed our first year as the Cue-Tease team, playing out of the Carousel Inn (refer http://cue-tease.blogspot.com/ for more).

Pup and I had swapped the team lead status all year and Hooters had been consistent, but in truth it had been a challenging year with few wins as a team or opportunities to demonstrate our abilities.

Pick presented an opportunity to step up and solved our team selection issues nicely. We weren't going to go around again with Pinky following several outbursts and poor behaviour from Pink bits during the previous year. Our only reservation about proceeding was around Ozzie, who we would have loved to take with us. But the bottom line was if we were to seriously challenge for Las Vegas, we would need some solid experienced players to balance the relative inexperience of the team.

Before we finalised the roster, Pick, Hooters, Pup and I sat down together to talk through how it would work. It was a good chat and I immediately felt that we were a good fit. We would have fun as a team and we expected to be competitive. We would behave courteously and not tolerate poor sportsmanship from each other.

Pick would be the elder statesman, able to provide guidance that would help Hooters, Pup and I develop our games.

We discussed venues. We could still play out of the Carousel Inn (the Cue-Tease former pub) or the Vineyard (Pick's former pub), but both had older Amarda tables.

We were keen to play off Millenium or Valley tables as these were the tables used in the play offs and in Las Vegas, but there were a very limited number of venues who had them and some of those venues (e.g. the Plumpton Inn) had a reputation for not supporting a team in the league. So we agreed to keep trying to find a venue with these tables until we were forced to make a decision closer to the start of the season.

We debated names. Pick wasn't keen on Cue-Tease, it was a bit cute for him, and we agreed a new name would be better to define a new team. Names had to have some linkage to the venue, but we could still decide on one that we could start to identify with. We tossed a few ideas around and settled on Cobras. This worked for one potential home - the Carousel Inn - and we liked the cobra 8ball image.

We acknowledged that given Pick was the only player currently ranked over 2.5 we would need a couple more experienced players in our line up.

Pick wanted to bring TK on board, a Victorian with a steady hand and a good eye. He had not played in the NSW 8 Ball League, so would start off 10.

I wanted to bring the The Machine in, currently off 15, to complete the roster.

So the initial team roster for the Cobras was:
Pick - 20
Machine - 15
TK - 10
Diddy - 2.5
Pup - 2.5
Hooters - 10

Pick and I were clearly the key organisers in terms of getting things moving.

The Carousel Inn would not pay for shirts and we acknowledged that it was unlikely an alternative venue would either, so Pick went to work on the shirts and I went to work on the venue, badgering everyone from Dave Reljic to Jason Dimitrias and going in to a few venues to check out tables.

We were a team without a home, but at least we were a team.

The (insert venue here) Cobras were born.