Nationals Results

Man, Nationals is a blast. It would have to be for me to remember it fondly despite losing all our games and badly spraining my ankle on the first point of Saturday play, prematurely ending my season (at least it didn't happen on the first point Thursday!). The fields, each one perfectly level and filled with fabulous Ultimate players, stretch a half-mile into the distance. The weather was heavenly, the on-site vendor makes a mean étouffée, and the beaches on Siesta Key are wonderful.

As for the games, of our seven losses I would say two teams were out of our league, two we should have beaten, and the rest we could have beaten. In all but the two blowouts, we were tied at nines or tens before our Nationals rookiedom took over, and we let the games get away from us (or had them taken away, depending on your point of view). Ah well, ya gotta start somewhere. Not bad for a bunch of small town players. Here was Salt's team bio:

Great Barrington, MA: population ~7,500
Brattleboro, VT: population: ~12,000

Spring, 2005. In a move that has all the makings of a bad bar bet, two guys—one from each "city"—get together and gamble that a Nationals-caliber team can be assembled from these two remote Ultimate scenes. Add a couple transients and precious few ringers to this briny mix of small town, home-grown players, and you end up with Salt!

I'm still impressed we could pull off such a season by combining these two small-town scenes. Everybody on our roster has played pickup in one of these two towns except for four players. Of those four, one missed pretty much all of the season (including Regionals) due to injuries, another was a Nationals rookie, the third had only made one late-career appearance on a mixed team, and the fourth was... well, he was a Masters National champ teammate of a brother-in-law of a Berkshire player, so I think I have to put him solidly in the "ringer" camp. The brother-in-law was on that same team, but he played pickup with us, so is not one of the four.

Anyway, never has the line between 0-7 and 5-2 felt so slim. Already looking forward to next year!