White Mountain Open

(You can safely skip this post if you [a] don't care about Ultimate, or [b] don't care how my team did at White Mountain Open.)

Not a bad first tourney of the season for Chop Shop (a.k.a. ~10 old men shaking off the winter, plus Young Matt on both days and Even Younger Evan on Sunday). Some random thoughts:

The weather sucked. Saturday was pretty chilly and varying degrees of very rainy all day. The fields held up okay for the first round or two, but then really turned mucky in significant parts. Almost had my cleats sucked off my feet on more than one occasion. It rained all night Sunday, but happily only drizzled on Sunday. Fields were still in sad shape though. Hard to imagine the field owners knew what they were getting into when they gave us the green light no matter the weather.

Interesting format this year, with the big guns (DoG, Twisted, NY) opting for the NJ Invite instead (sounds like they had great weather - damn A-listers have all the luck). 15 teams, 3 pools of five teams, with one elite pool (Red Tide, Bro White, New Noise, Firebird, and Q), and two pools for the rest of us. We are seeded third in our pool. Some results:

Saturday

• Round 1, East River Yacht Club, NY (2 seed): Rainy, cold. Not too mucky yet. Perhaps our age, seed, and generally bedraggled appearance puts them off guard. We win pretty handily. 13-5, or thereabouts.
• Round 2, bye: Man, when I looked at the weather I really thought the second round bye was going to suck, but we found The Nicest Laundromat on the Planet in Woodstock, where we could change, dry our clothes, hang out and watch TV, etc. Possibly the best bye I've ever had.
• Round 3, Magma (1 seed): Rainy, cold, starting to get quite mucky. I recall these guys being a Q-caliber team, but nicer. At least that's the way it was a couple years ago. We must harbor resentment over being taken out of our nice warm laundromat, as we jump them and never look back, winning 13-8 or so, I think.
• Round 4, Les Autres (sp?), (4 seed): More Canadians. Weather still sucks. We play our worst game of the day (or they make us play our worst game of the day) and win something like 13-7.
• Round 5, MUFF, (5 seed): WWI levels of muck on the field now. A Manchester team, many looking high school age or so, but really just seem like friends that got together to try this frisbee thing they've heard about, and are clearly having a ball despite the weather. Many of them throw that "thumb on the rim, disc resting on forearm throw" with reckless enthusiasm, catching Xav in the throat with one (I actually ducked-and-covered as I came in to mark one guy). Fun game. They get 1 on us. "Ruthless efficiency" was the watchword (watchphrase?) not to be mean, but because there's only so much cold and wet one can take in a day.

Sunday

Merely drizzling feels relatively nice, but the fields are still a mess from the all-day/all-night rain. A few open-div teams have gone home, all the elite teams stayed, and we've played up to the six-team championship bracket (we moved up with Dartmouth Alums, Q moved down). New Noise and Bro White get byes. Dartmouth Alums play Red Tide, we play Firebird (more Canadians! Jim O. said they looked like Wax), Much to both teams' surprise, we crush them, 13-4 or 5 (well, I was surprised, anyway; I expected a close game). They seemed a bit too slavishly devoted to their called plays, running them robotically rather than taking what was given. Mostly nice game, nice guys. First time I've ever played in a game where an altercation caused players to be removed from the field though. Nice work by the captains nipping that in the bud.

Anyway, the win got us a match against Bro White (the Slow White males) in the semis. Other semi was Red Tide/New Noise. We hang with Bro to 8-8, then completely fold losing 15-9 (damn damn damn). Not sure how it happened. Fatigue, perhaps. Our decision-making went to pot (since when do I throw hammers?) along with a few gaffes and we were done. Bro goes on to beat Red Tide in the finals 15-11, I believe.

Nice improvement from last year, when we were crushed by Q in the comparable Sunday match-up (they even played the same spread O with slavish comeback cuts, I believe). Lots to work on, but it feels like we're much closer to picking up where we left off last season rather than starting from scratch, and with a skeleton crew at that.