Psycho Recruitment

All week we've been hunting down freshmen and trying to get them to come out to our first practice on Thursday and I'm already stoked about some of the girls. Even though I've spoken with only a small fraction of the total number of girls that expressed interest in coming out to play this year, I've heard from two high school players. What a leap forward it'll be for our program to bring in players that already know how to throw a flick and understand the fundamentals of the game. A few girls are taller than me, including one former basketball player that must be sit feet tall. A ton of girls seemed really enthusiastic about playing ultimate and more girls than I expected stopped to let me try to sell them on ultimate even though they hadn't considered playing for us. As expected, most of our recruits are freshmen, but there are also some older girls looking for a change in pace. Quite a few guys came up to us for information about playing for the Squids, including a guy that declared himself to be "the best Frisbee player in the world". I didn't let him go with a proclamation like that, so we gave him some challenges to prove that he's actually the best in the world. Have fun with that one, Squiddies.

Our theme song for recruitment is "Paparazzi" because we follow potential rookies until they love us. Hopefully they'll all c-come out and see that we'd be so fantastical and that the disc is plastic but we still have fun.

Labor Day Championships

Can anyone tell me why this is a called a championship tournament? Would Pres Day be more legitimate sounding if I changed the name to "Presidents' Day Championships"? It was a fun semi-spontaneous road trip up to Santa Cruz with Monstro, Dada, and Nagana. What was originally thought up to be a camping trip turned into a weekend of sleeping in a castle of a house and being ultimate superfans.

Watching high level ultimate was great, but a couple big names I hoped to see were either missing or inactive and I've still never seen Fury play Riot because Riot lost in the semifinals. Usually I cheer for the underdog, but a Fury-Riot match up could have been so epic, especially since this is a championship tournament and all. The wind picked up by the time the semifinals rolled around and gave Riot more trouble than Traffic, contributing to their loss. Fury then beat Traffic in a mundane finals game even without Georgia Bosscher and Alicia White. Underground had stronger results than I expected and it looks like Rare Air had a tough tournament, going 1-4 in pool play, but other than that, the games went mostly as expected on the women's side.

There were a couple of upsets in the Open Division, but I missed most of that action. Since Revolver took second in their pool, the Sockeye-Revolver semifinal was the big game of the tournament. I didn't watch it because I was standing on the sideline between the two women's semi's, but the perimeter of that field was packed and I hear there were spectacular plays on top of spectacular plays. Sockeye won that game and the finals game against Doublewide.

Without a doubt, Streetgang was the sharpest looking team out there, especially with those new hats. However, they didn't have as much success as I thought they would. They have a ridiculous pool of talent but a tournament like this gave me some perspective on all the elements a team needs to succeed against top teams. In some games against strong teams, they had solid first halves but then would have a couple miscommunications and slide out of the lead. Their chemistry wasn't always strong, but I anticipate that down the line they'll be rocking some of the teams that beat them in Santa Cruz. As a newly formed team, they're only going to get better as they play more with each other.

Safari took seventh and held seed. They came close to taking down Zeitgeist in their first game on Saturday morning, but lost in hard cap. Freshly back from Africa, Brenda had some good D's in that game and set a killer mark the rest of the weekend. Tai had at least a couple impressive layouts dispite a dislocated rib in her back that she could feel move around when she hit the ground. They beat Box, the only Southwest team they played, and took out a Chelsea Putnam-less Schwa in the 7th place game.

Southwest Region Tune-Up

This was my first tournament with The LAW, the newly formed women's club team from LA. I expected the level of play to be a huge step up from college, but it felt a lot like what I was used to. On the other hand, I know teams were trying new stuff out, and this "tune-up" tournament is probably a poor indicator of what I should expect for the Series. My recaps would definitely be more accurate if I wrote them right after the tournaments, but there's no going back to the past, so here's the best I can do from memory:

Before our games, we were throwing around in all different colored t-shirts and shorts while other teams were doing plyos and end zone drills in their uniforms. I felt like we were the Little Giants about to take on the Pee-Wee Cowboys. The feeling was short-lived because Michelle arrived with our uniforms, and just like that, we looked like a legitimate team. The first few points in our first game against Safari were messy and we went up 3-1. They were running a vertical stack on offense and turning the disc over on miscommunications. A couple players were clearly frustrated with it, but I heard later that they were running that offense for the first time. They got in their groove and beat us 13-5 with a clam that we couldn't break. We played Mucho Gusto next, who was down players. Their best player was Tonya, who they picked up for the tournament, and there weren't any other standouts. I thought we could have beat them, but I think they beat us by a sizable margin. The thing that stuck out to me the most when we played the Lady Condors was how different the UCSB players looked. We played UCSB four times this year and I watched them play a few times on top of that, so I generally know who's who, but they threw me all off. First of all, they were wearing shorts instead of skirts. Andrea Romano wasn't wearing a hat, but another player that looked a lot like her from across the field was, which tricked me when we were matching up across and I was all excited about guarding Andrea Romano. They played a lot like UCSB on offense the way they would have a handler push up and go cut. Despite some uncharacteristic drops that caused a few long points, they looked like a really strong team . I also don't have the final score for this game but the Lady Condors definitely won by a lot. We had a chance to watch the Safari-Rare Air game during our bye and then played our last game against Rare Air. The game was short and there wasn't much that stood out to me. Rare Air beat us 13-2 and is obviously a solid team.

I'm heading up to the Labor Day Tourament in Santa Cruz this weekend and am curious to see if Safari and Rare Air can challenge the top teams in the nation. It'll also be interesting to watch how the inevitable Fury-Riot match up plays out. Can Fury can top Riot on more or less their own turf after losing to them twice in Washington or does Gwen Ambler just hold the key to winning? I'll be able to tell you in a few days (but I'll probably wait a month and forget everything).

Good luck to Safari, Streetgang, and Meeko's team!