No trip to regionals this year. Very disappointing. We brought a strong team, but our weaknesses were too apparent and too easy to exploit. Turns out, high pressure zone-d is not something we were prepared to play against. Not that we should have been surprised.
Upshot, in a strong section which somehow only got 3 bids to regionals, we ended up fizzling out and finishing 5th.
Next year, BLU!
Metro NY Club sectionals is tomorrow in Middletown, NY... unless it rains all day today. Which, at this point, kinda looks likely. So it might be postponed to next weekend. I'll let you know.
You can follow along with BLU's (my team) progress here:
http://www4.upa.org/scores/tourn.cgi?div=127&id=6245
Edit: postponed until this coming weekend
It wasn't even a foul. Just a coincidental mid-air smushing of my head between three other players.
Didn't really hurt that much. Probably because I am so macho.
I haven't really felt like blogging in a while. But it's not like I've fallen off the face of the earth. Let's see, what's going on with me?
I went to a frisbee tournament this past weekend. Here are some pictures of the fiasco. Including some of yours truly.
I had a really good time. It was great to get out and play some solid ultimate again.
Nelly and I just got back from the Wildwood beach ultimate tournament (as we've done previously).
The weather was much more forgiving this time around. The sand wasn't too hut, there was a light breeze but nothing ridiculous. And even the thunderstorms stayed off in the distance.
We didn't do as well statistically this time around, going 2-4 over the weekend. But I think we all had a great time and I really enjoyed myself. It was great to get back to playing ultimate again, even if I'll be sore for the rest of the week.
The photos haven't come in yet, but when they do I will post them.
This past weekend I went down to Lewes, DE to play some fine ultimate in the beautiful weather. It was a really fantastic tournament, despite the fact that the team I was on was not really competitive. Great fields, good spirit (mostly), and the most gorgeous ultimate weather makes for a good tourney.
It could only have been better had Nelly been able to make it. Alas, she could not. She's in the midst of finals.
It turns out though, that the cold I thought I'd fought off the week before was returning with a vengeance. It seemed that a lot of people were sick at this tournament, so maybe I caught one of their contagions. But to be honest, I had my own. I've been out of it since I got back Sunday night.
Being sick is lame!
Spring is officially here and it's brought with it some very nice weather. Today, Nelly and I made our way down to Prospect Park in Brooklyn for the open tryout/practice/scrimmage of Crafty (the ultimate frisbee team we played on last year). It wasn't the most grueling practice, nor was it very practice-y. But we had really good turnout and it's exciting to know that there's so much interest in coed ultimate in the city.
It's also great to get out and play again. I had some good moments and some not so good moments. Overall, it was a really great day and I am really excited to play ultimate again.
This weekend was Sectionals, the first round of pre-qualifiers for the 2006 national club ultimate frisbee tournament (organized by the UPA). You can see a chart of the regions (and their sections) here. We're in the "Metro New York" section which is part of the "Northeast" region.
The team I am on is called Crafty, most of the players are based in Brooklyn (around Prospect Park). As you might be able to tell from the above link, we did pretty well last weekend. Here are the results for our section.
Taking second place behind Puppet Regime (a really powerful and well-put-together team that's bound for Nationals) is an impressive result for us. And I think everyone on the team is pretty elated to be heading into Regionals second in our section.
As of right now they haven't posted the seedings for Regionals; they just have a list of the teams that made it).
There's a ton of quality on that list, we've got a lot of work to do if we want to make an impression there.
But in the meantime, I think we'll bask in the glow of our performance this weekend. Second place is the first loser, indeed!
Yesterday, my new frisbee team (aka Crafty) had a practice out on Long Island. Somewhere on the island. Honestly, it was pretty far away. But Nelly and I are committed people and we got out on the road early, and despite getting lost for about an hour, we managed to make it to practice on time.
What a practice! Practice started at 11:30 and didn't end until 5pm. Plenty of stuff: running, stretching, drilling, practicing, and scrimaging. We crammed a good deal of practice into that one session.
It's a good thing we did too as Sectionals is coming up this weekend (Sept 16-17). Hopefully, we'll play up to our ability and get a bid into Regionals. At which point, I expect, we'll all be pretty satisfied.
I am officially a big fan of the long practice. I'm definately hoping that in the layover between Sectionals and Regionals, maybe we can get another one in.
Last weekend (that would be July 29-30th) Nelly and I went down to Wildwood, NJ for the 14th annual Wildwood Beach Ultimate tournament. Apparently, the largest ultimate tournament in the world!
Our team was called "I Lost My Pickle". Mainly a collection of friends and people we know. We did okay, going 3-3 over the weekend and winning whatever pool we ended up in. It was rediculously hot over the weekend, with some scorching sands. Playing right on the beach, just a short walk from the ocean, certainly helped mitigate the staggering weather.
Nelly and I both had a wonderful time. Special thanks to Su May who took care of the organizational details (tourney bid, hotel, rides, etc...). And thanks to [Top Row] Meghan, (Me), Nelly, Seth, Chris, Java, Ken, [Bottom Row] Sue, Jen, and (again) Su May for playing great ultimate and being generally fun people!
Hey! I lost my pickle!
The NYC NBC affiliate broadcast the first three names for the NYC Marathon lottery. There are 37,000 spots and over 90,000 people applied.
You can watch the video (skip ahead to about 3:20 to see the part of importance).
Christopher Bracconeri == Java. His brush with fame. Of course, the dude mangled his name. But still, I'm sure all the ladies will be impressed.
It's spring-time once again. The birds are signing, the trees are blooming, and the children are behaving like animals. Also, ultimate season has officially started for Nelly and I.
This weekend, we went down to Delaware to play in the Beth Coltman Memorial tournament in Lewes, DE. We went down with my old team "Your Mom" because they were going and they promised that no one on our team would really try that hard.
Now, one might argue that half of the team drinking heavily on the sideline is not a recipe for success. In this case, that argument would have been the correct one. We lost all our games, getting blown out in most of them. Our last two games we made close, so it wasn't a complete travesty (except if you were to look at just the win-loss column).
Cape Henlopen State Park is right at the horn of Delaware's northern coast. It's pretty, um, windy there. Which makes for some ugly ugly ultimate. Mostly involving trying to throw the disk as far downfield as possible and then setting up what basically amounts to a wall of people to stand in front of the throwers. Nobody was winning any pretty points. But it was good cover for the fact that everyone on our team was out of shape and hadn't practiced in months.
So, now it's monday morning. I am exhausted, my face is sunburned, my hands are sunburned, my back is sore, my neck is sore, my legs are sore and my entire right arm is sore. And I feel great!
Here's a little snippet of the sport I play. Now, I'm not saying that I do all the things on the video, but I have at one time or another, done all those things. Except that weird sit-up thing those two girls do. I've never done that.
Ultimate girls are weird. Who am I kidding? Ultimate players are weird.
One more tournament in the books. The last tournament before Sectionals (September 17-18). Chowdafest takes place in Seekonk, MA (right next to Providence, RI -- or, as I like to call it, Ass Town) at these beautifully maintained fields for the Wheeler School.
I took a couple pictures of the aftermath (and the beforemath).
How'd my team (Redrum) do? Well... not so well. You can see the results for yourself. We wont only one game, but we managed to maintain the #3 seed in the pool because we lost so many tight games. We went up with, comparatively, a very small number of players. And that may have been the biggest factor in our performance. You can be assured that we'll be coming out all guns blazing at Sectionals.
An interesting thing the UPA has been doing just in the couple years is keeping track of the performances of the various teams throughout the season. They call their system score-reporter. It contains information about tournaments as well as individual teams. And, by the time the Fall Series rolls around, it can give you a pretty good idea of the relative strength of each team.
As for Redrum: you can see our brief history in UPA sanctioned events. Eventually, Sectionals and Regionals will fill in and be lit up with little Green boxes. Redrum! Redrum!
A friend of mine pointed me recently to this blog. It's all about ultimate: strategies, culture, life.
Now if you're not that into ultimate, you can be excused for not being very much interested in some random dudes mullings on the sport. But, for those of us embroiled in the thing, it's kinda interesting. This Zaz dude is fairly insightful.
It's a little taste of what ultimate players experience every weekend. And what we talk about over dinner/beers.
Yeah.
We're kinda lame like that.
To celebrate our country's birth, Nelly and I went to Mars this weekend. It's an ultimate tournament in Pittsburgh. Oddly enough, even though it's in Pittsburgh, it's rather well attended by a wide cross-section of people. We picked up with some ultimate friends from around the area.
The drive out there was horrendous. Someone please remind me that Route 80 is not a good way to get out to Pittsburgh. It looks good on a map, but it's a tangle of construction and delays. If you're going from northern new jersey, take 287 to 78 to 81 to the Penn Tpk. It's so much better.
Things other than ultimate went on. Two nights of partying. One of the women on our team had relatives in the Pittsburgh area, so we were able to crash at their place. And use their pool! which was very refreshing and invigorating.
The team we played on was pretty strong. We struggled early, each of us learning the other team members styles on the fly. But by Sunday we'd pretty much gotten the hang of it. And after the end of the day we were ranked 10th out of 30 teams.
We lost a couple players between Sunday and Monday (the final day of the tournament). So of course, when Monday rolled around it was the hottest of the three days. We started ranked 2nd in the B-Pool. By the second game we were completely fried and our opponents (Tea and Strumpetts) had six extra subs. Not to make excuses. We gave them a good run, taking the lead at half, and then pushing them all the way, losing 15-13.
So while we didn't win the B-Pool, we did do pretty well. I was happy with my team and my own performance. And I had a great time.
Go me...
But, sports-fans, it was not a disaster. It was a rowsing success. I had a fantastic time.
Images and short writeup below:
The weather was beautiful. The sun was shining, and the temperature got above 70 on both days. The fields were soft and covered in green grass. We played on Saturday at Forsythe Park and then on Sunday, the co-ed teams joined everyone else to play in Dafin Park.
There were no public restrooms at Forsythe and that was a problem. But otherwise, the tournament was a rousing success.
It took us a while to shake off the rust from several months without competitive ultimate. We were the only team from up-north, so most of the teams we played had been practicing and competing throughout the winter. Predictably, we came out flat and tanked all our games on Saturday.
Sunday, however was another matter altogether. We came out stiff and tight, despite the efforts of the fantastic hot-tub and heated pool at the Doubletree. Once we'd loosened up, we were able to wrestle the chumpionship trophy all for ourselves, an official 5th place finish. But that number can't capture the quality of our Sunday play.
Walking to the fields
Hutch & Sweaty (me) posing for the camera
Trying to play some defense in the 2nd game
Courtney leading a rousing game of Cowboy/Stripper-Pole/Spoon
The Cowboy/Stripper-Pole/Spoon Movie
Lee's Pictures on iPhoto
Daniel's Pictures on iPhoto
Not too many photos (currently) of the drinking and whatnot that went on off the fields. A good time was had by all, and Savannah is a very gracious host.
I am now very sore and stiff, especially my legs. The lesson being that there's no amount of off-season training you can do to prepare yourself for the stresses and strains of actual ultimate.
And I can't wait to do it again.
Well, it's officially Friday which means I can say that this very afternoon I am headed to Savannah, GA. The beautiful flower of the south. But I am not going for any stupid touristy reason. No sir! I'm going to play the greatest sport ever created.
Ultimate frisbee.
And if you didn't know I was going to say that, who are you and how did you find this page?
The tournament is called Spring Fever. I'm playing with a team traveling under the name "Traffic". Traffic is a local NY co-ed team, but their members actually comprise only a small fraction of the people who I'm playing with. I'm not in charge of naming the team, or running this show in any way. My major responsibility is getting my butt down to Georgia.
Which, hopefully, I can handle. The weather, by the way, is supposed to be beautiful.
See y'all on the other side of President's Day! I should have some pictures, and hopefully a nice tan.
