Today was the summer league ultimate tournament. After a three-month season, we found ourselves securely in second place. The top team in the league hadn’t lost a game during the entire season, beating us by a single point in two different games. We’d more or less crushed every other team in the league. So we went into the tournament pretty confident we’d be seeing them in the finals.
Because our team color was black, we’d decided at the start of the season that we’d be the Dread Pirates (as in the Dread Pirate Roberts, of course!). It was a hoot, because there are so many cliches and sayings related to pirates. For the tournament we went all out.
Julie made skull-and-crossbones cupcakes:
Kate brought a sword:
Ethan had a jolly roger flag:
Joe put on a fake beard (well, sort of a beard):
I made black bandannas for everyone, which we wore during the games to strike fear into the hearts of our opponents. I even brought my captain’s hat, although it’s not really visible in our team photo:
Oh, and of course we had to give “the hook” sign:
Since we were in second place in the rankings and there weren’t sixteen teams for the tournament brackets, we started out the day with a first-round bye. That’s often a bad thing, because every team who has a bye ends up facing a team that’s just won a game and is warmed up. It’s well-known that in every ultimate tournament, one of the top teams with a bye ends up losing in an upset. Sure enough, one of them did (fortunately it wasn’t us). We traded points with our first opponent as we got into our groove, but then pulled away for a handy 13-6 victory.
I took about a hundred photos of the games, and handed my camera to a teammate for a few points. This is pretty much the only shot of me playing:
I particularly like the outhouses in the background… nice composition.
We headed into the semifinals and played the third-seeded team. Now that we were warm, we rolled over them and finished 13-5. Things were looking good.
As expected, we faced the undefeated team in the championship game. We went into the game with confidence, telling ourselves we’d come close to beating them twice, and this time it would happen. Alas, we were mistaken. They pushed out to a quick 5-0 lead, and at half we were down 7-1. We came out strong in the second half, but it’s always hard to recover from a point deficit like that. The game ended 13-5 in their favor. For some reason, we played particularly badly– several solid players made bad throws, and we just seemed to be dropping a lot of discs. I may not be the best thrower on the field, but my hands are steady and I’m generally able to catch anything in reach… but I dropped two easy passes. I could blame the wind, but honestly I think we simply weren’t mentally in the game.
In the end, it was okay because we all agreed this was one of the most fun teams ever. We sat on the field for half an hour talking and laughing, then went over to Ethan’s house for a post-season party. I really enjoyed the season, and although I would’ve loved to win my fourth championship of the year, I still had a great time. What’s more, most of the team will be playing in the fall league and I’ll be co-captain with my friend Jamie again, so we’ve decided to do our best to draft as many from this group as we can.
On to fall league!