St. Pat's Hat 2011

Yikes, I have several posts to do here, don't I?  Let's get started with talking about the majority of my weekend, the annual St. Pat's Hat ultimate Frisbee tournament.

I've actually been on the winning team the last two years.  In fact, there were four of us who had won both years.  So I was anxious to see who would be on my team and hoping for a threepeat.  Of course, some people I talked to were hoping I'd loose big.  In fact, one friend told me his biggest goal for the weekend was to finish above my team.

Because of the rain we were having last week, the tournament was moved to the beach in Santa Monica instead of the park where it was supposed to be.  That meant a longer drive and paying to park, but it wasn't the end of the world.

Believe it or not, I got there on time Saturday morning.  Yeah, I was shocked, too.  Found out that I had a couple of friends on my team (they are always random every year), so I was excited about that.

We got off to a great start with our first game.  It was 15-6, although we had lots of long posts, so it didn't feel like as big a blow away when we were actually playing it.

Second game of the day was 15-10.  This is the game where I felt I did my best all weekend.  I scored once and threw a score later as well.  And I got the disc several other times.  It helped that one of the women and I would often switch who we were guarding, giving me a woman who didn't really know the game.  It's much easier to get open against a beginner.

Final game of the day (my team was in the bracket with only four teams.  The others had five) found us with a 15-12 victory.  The wind game up in this game and make it much harder.  In fact, we were behind at half but overcame a 0-4 beginning to get a victory.

So Saturday we finished with a 3-0 record.

Of course, all Saturday counts for is positioning for Sunday.  We were ranked 3rd out of 14 teams, meaning we just missed a first round bye.

I wasn't able to show up until half time of our second game Sunday because choir was singing in church that morning.  We'd lost the first game of the day in universe point, meaning we were out of the running to win the tournament.  When I showed up, it was 7-4.  And we preceeded to lose that game in universe point as well.

At first, I thought that would mean we were done for the day, which I was not going to happy about considering gas and parking.  But we had one more game.  We were up at half, but again lost.  The wind was really bad this game.  It was thrown to me several times, but there was no way I could get it.  And the one time I got it, I had to throw it away at the last minute because no one was open for me to throw it to.

So we finished Sunday with a perfect mirror of 0-3.  Meaning that we finished the tournament in last place.  Quite a change from Saturday and the last two years.

I did stay for the finals and saw that Drea, one of the four from my teams the last two years, wound up winning.  I want to be back on her team next year.

What was nice about the weekend was the weather.  I guess I missed some rain Sunday morning.  Saturday was cool and cloudy, but Sunday the sun came out while I was there.  It did get cool when I was watching the finals with the wind blowing, but it was so much nicer than it would have been with wind.