Bad hair day or lightning strike?
Last night the weather at our Ultimate game was not the nicest. Overcast and cloudy. About halfway into the game, rain drops started to fall. Rain or shine, it’s game on. Only in the case of lightning are the games stopped. Sure enough, Lightning soon arrived with it’s louder, more obnixious brother - Thunder.
As we were walking the field between points, John said to me “look at your hair sticking up”, which didn’t seem strange to me because with all the product I put in my hair, it’s supposed to be sticking up. But other people were saying the same thing about other peoples hair, in particular the girls. I didn’t notice it, but some peoples hair was really sticking up. So what? Bad hair day? That happens when you’re running around outside. Not in this case.
Boom! Lightning flashed a few kilometers away from the field. And a certain member on the team - let’s call him Z (not revealing names to keep the possibly embarrased anonymous) started yelling. “Get down! Get down! We’re going to get hit! My hair is standing up and my scalp tightened up.” If you know Z, this is really funny because he’s a pretty calm guy but to see him start freaking out and diving (yes, he truely dove) onto the ground was pretty hilarious. Z looked at BP (another anonymous person) and yelled “Your hair is sticking up! Get down!” He grabbed her and pulled her down to the ground. Apparently her hair was sticking up like she was touching a VandeGraaff machine at the Ontario Science Centre. The rest of us, including the other team, laughed at them rolling around on the ground trying to get as low as possible. Z: “I watch enough Learning Channel to know about this stuff. Lightning is going to strike here”. It’s true, he does watch a lot of TLC.
Everyone on our field dropped to the ground looking at each other thinking i)am I going to get hit? ii)is laying on the ground really going to help me? iii)is that guy crazy? iv)I wish I’d worn my lightning-proof underwear today. We quickly grabbed all our gear and ran for the cars. We waited for about 10 minutes and the storm had passed. Game was back on. We lost 14-13, but waged a severe comeback for 6 points straight at the end and should have won, but the other team was really watching the clock (started late & didn’t include the storm delays) limiting the points we could get. No, seriously…we would have won. 
After we got home, Z checked the almighty source of all knowledge, the Internet, to confirm his lightning-avoiding techniques. Turns out we did the entirely wrong thing. Spreading out on a field is not so smart - actually it’s one of the worst things to do. It makes you a massive target. The real thing to do is to stand on the balls of your feet in your rubber shoes making the smallest contact patch with the ground possible and bend down.
Moral of the story: don’t always trust someone who watches TLC all day. But it’s alright to laugh at them when they dive around rolling and screaming.