This last weekend was the annual St. Pat's Hat Ultimate Frisbee tournament hosted by LAOUT. Last year, I was on the winning team, and I was thrilled to see that four of my 18 or so teammates were from that team last year.
While in year's past, they have tried to stick wtih green team names (while throwing in one or two non-green), this year they completely threw that out the window, using the colors from the Lucky Charms cereal to name the teams. As a result, i was on one of the Blue Teams, nick named Magic Mirrors. (Blue Magic Mirrors? Don't know where that came from, but we'll go with it.)
Saturday is always a fun day. It's all about rankings. We played four games with one bye round. Unfortunately, our bye was the second round. I always prefer third or fourth over first or second.
And Saturday was when I felt I made my best contributions. I threw two scores, although I didn't catch the disc in the end zone for any scores this year. I was getting open quite a bit and completing most of the discs I threw.
We had a complete rookie on our team, and she did well as well, scoring a couple of times. AJ and Rod were our superstars, and plenty of plays came through them. But, as AJ pointed out before our first game, you need to use every player to win a tournament, and I truly felt like we did.
We won all four of our games on Saturday. Unfortunately, only one team got a first round bye on Sunday, and we weren't the only team with a perfect record. The other team had a better point differencial, so we had to show back up at 9:30 Sunday morning.
That first Sunday game was about our only blow out. From there on, the games got tougher. And everyone takes Sunday games more seriously because you keep advancing if you win. As soon as you loose, you start in the consiliation rounds. Both the quarter final and semi-final rounds were very close. In fact, we came back from a 4 point deficet to win the semi-final round.
And then we hit the finals. That turned out to be a pretty big blow out. We traded points for the first few points, then started pulling ahead. We took half 8-4 and the final score was 14-8.
That's, right! I am now a two time St. Pat's Hat Champion!!!!!!
This year, the prize for the winners was some sweet shorts, too. I'm really happy with them.
Unfortunately, I didn't feel like I played my best on Sunday. I only got the disc once that I remember, and wound up throwing it away.
And overall, I wasn't as fast as I had hoped I would be. I ran hard, but I could rarely keep up with my guy. What happened to all that speed I thought I had last weekend?
Still, it was a very fun tournament. I felt like the team gelled. While we certainly had our superstars, we didn't have any egos. It was always make the smartest throw not force it to one person in particular.
It also helped that we had a very large squad. We had two full squads plus one. Many of the other teams seemed to have about four subs total. Even so, most of the games were close, like within 4 points when it ended.
I even went to the party this year. Okay, so I mainly wanted to find out if we had that first round bye or not, but I'm glad I went. The food was good and plentiful, although there were longs lines to get it and it wasn't coming fast enough at first. When I left, there was plenty of food sitting out there waiting to be eaten, so it was just a matter of timing.
The weather was perfect this year, too. Granted, it had been nice all week. Saturday was sunny with temps in the low 80s, I'm sure. Sunday was overcast most of the day, but a this overcast. There was more of a cooling breeze, but it was still very pleasant to be outside both days. We had two people on our team who had come down from Canada, and they thought the weather was perfect. Frankly, so did I.
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