With six months until Frost Heaves season, life is nuts

	The calm that accompanied laying the foundation of the Frost Heaves has been disturbed by the realities of running a team. Michael J. LeBrecht II/1Deuce3 Photography/SI

When we launched the Vermont Frost Heaves five months ago, life was fairly simple: a logo, a website and a spare bedroom where my wife, Vanessa, and I would repair on winter nights to stuff T-shirts into Tyvek envelopes. The full-blown cares of pro sports franchise ownership seemed months away.

Well, those months have passed, and the cares are front and center.

What do you mean we need Workmen's Comp?

A liability insurance policy for how much before we can even host a tryout camp?

But I thought they'd rent us the building for a third of that!

Indeed, we've reached the reality-sinks-in stage, where personnel issues and sponsorship issues and internship issues and uniform issues and broadcast-deal issues and ticketing issues and venue-date issues and office-rental issues aren't converging so much as colliding.

Where "six months to tip-off" seems like six too few.

Where what looks like a bionic to-do list can leave you feeling paralyzed. There's an ABA owner's meeting on June 10 in Chicago. That's also a critical day during the NBA pre-draft camp in Orlando, where agents shop not-quite-ready-for-the-NBA players to teams like ours during a series of side workouts. Oh, we'll manage; we'll send director of operations Michael Healey to Chi-town, and yours truly will head to Florida with our coach, Will Voigt, to suss out talent and schmooze with agents and NBA player personnel people.

But some days I'm tempted to try to clone myself. And while I haven't resorted to quite so drastic a step, I did feel a couple of weeks ago as though I were losing my mind. I'm a member of the board of our local hospital's auxiliary, and on a Tuesday showed up for what I thought was our monthly meeting. We had practically adjourned when, staring at the agenda I'd brought with me, I realized that I'd stumbled, a day early, into a meeting of a subcommittee of which I wasn't a member.

The assistant GM has had her moments too -- but given my own lapses, I won't make too much of how Vanessa left two deceptively light cardboard boxes, still full of red, white and blue basketballs, on the curb for recycling. Haven't seen 'em since.