Hi Everyone,

As I wallow here in my catch-up homework like a hippopotamus in the mud (I’ve always wanted to write that!) I think I’ll take a break and give a brief summary of Centex 2005 in balmy Austin, TX…

B-Mo flew down to Austin early Friday morning and spent the day eating, doing schoolwork, laying around in the sun, and then scampering back inside as 70° felt far warmer then that to our Providence/cold-hardened bodies. We also watched a lot of college basketball. Throughout the day, we got more and more excited for the most competitive ultimate tournament of the spring season outside of Nationals.

On Saturday morning it began. We started off against Illinois, and although we were a bit sloppy and inconsistent we pulled out a solid 13-8 victory. Next we faced UC Santa Barbara, a team notorious for being emotional and very good. We started off strong as our offense was executing and our defense was hassling their offensive players and making things difficult. After building a big lead we seemed to almost assume that we were going to win; the UCSB ‘Black Tide’ then came back strong and caught up. Consistent offense play ultimately pulled us through to an 13-11 victory but it was a wake-up call for B-Mo – we had to play good whole games, not just good halves, because all these teams were too good to coast against. Our third game of the day was against Michigan. We played an efficient (and more consistent) game against them and came away with a 13-8 victory. 3-0 so far – things looked good. Uh oh… Our next opponent was Virginia and we came out flat. Despite making many Ds our defense team kept on turning the disc back over and thus the game was tied at 6-6 when…thunder and lightening! We were forced off the fields and spent an hour and a half or so wandering the eclectic ultimate-player filled parking lot (people were playing games, talking, dancing, who knows what else but it was all quite silly) while a storm raged off in the distance. After the siesta of sorts we returned and quickly finished a modified game against Virginia by scoring the next two points (both defense breaks) as the game was shorted to a first-team-to-eight-points-wins match. Final score = 8-6 B-Mo. That was made us feel a bit better about playing terribly before the storm. Finally, we played Oregon, and our defense just couldn’t stop their offense and they got a couple breaks and won on the final point 15-14.

On Sunday, thanks to our tight double-game-point (when the winner of the final point wins the game) loss to Oregon we played rival and fellow tournament favorite Wisconsin in the quarterfinals. The game was full of energy and athletic plays and was very, very intense. The UW Hodags would catch a big goal only for our O-team of the Vandenberg brothers, Zip, Alex Bowman, Jarrod Lynn and others to strike back. Our D-team of, as Will likes to say, ‘Mahoney Mahoney [Colin and Neale],’ Dan Macarthur, Ben Sprung, Will Arnold and co. would get a break or two – but then so would Wisconsin. Despite an awesome poach layout D by Ben (Raff) Wiseman B-Mo couldn’t pull out the victory despite having the disc at 12-11 (our lead) and 12-12 and lost on double-game-point 13-12. It was a heartbreaker but that’s the way it goes sometimes. We then proceeded to handily defeat Kansas 15-9 before succumbing to NC State 15-14 in another heartbreaker where we were up 14-12 (we’d scored four points in a row) and got broken twice for the loss. In summary, we lost three tough games on double-game-point and came in sixth place at a tournament with arguably the top 24 teams in the country. Not bad because we put ourselves in a position to win all our games – frustrating because we couldn’t make the big plays and lost three squeakers.

So now we have to dig down and work harder to get better. We’ll finally be able to practice outside (we hope) and this will hopefully allow us to hone our skills and prevent the many sloppy mistakes we made at Centex. We head to Ultimax this weekend in North Carolina and we need – and will – make strides and improve. We also get to then spend a week on the beach for Spring Break (all of us from Brown Men's Ultimate, B-Mo, P-Funk, and C-Funk (as well as the women's teams -yahoo!), where we’ll have way too much fun and perhaps never return. P-Funk and C-Funk will also be playing in a tournament this weekend and we wish them the best knowing that they won't need it as they'll go out and dominate.

Best wishes to all.
Colin