Just a quick review of the weekend games. I have to enjoy the rest of my holiday with the Pride of Praha aka The Fiance.
Congrats to Goat and Capitals for getting into the UPA championship round.
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Northeast Regional Update
Open
-Goat finishes 2nd in Open, losing a close game to Boston Ultimate and then squeaking out a one point win over Pony in the game to go.
-Grand Trunk wins the division II crown. I'm not surprised. Even in beating them at sectionals with Firebird, you could tell that despite some key missing people, the team still had a core of talent and some key ROY pickups that could do some damage with the right focus.
Lowdown via Jamie Noonan on ocua.ca
"I'm sure people have read the accounts of the Open Sunday on rec.sport disc, but holy crap -- GOAT had two of the toughest finishes to their 2 games-to-go I've ever seen; simply amazing ultimate both ways. Boston's comeback win against them in the 1-2 game was ridiculous, and PoNY hanging with them right to universe point in the backdoor equally crazy. Fortunat Mueller of Boston made at least 2 sick plays to win his team the #1 NE seed -- one of them on a huge huck to two 6-2+ GOAT strikers, who he split at the last second and simply out-wanted the disc for a d-grab (he's 5-10, tops) and another monster layout for the game winner. But GOAT is soooo deep with tall, athletic, skilled players, and their confidence level and calmness seems so high after their stellar summer. They've got a real chance to make some waves at UPAs."
Women's
-Capitals and Storm go undefeated on day one pool play
-Capitals drop their semi final to Lady Godiva 14-11
-Storm is crushed by Brute Squad (15-1) in the other semi. Brute Squad takes 1st over Lady Godiva
-Capitals climb back and Sugar Shack, Ambush, and Lady Godiva to take 2nd and secure a spot in Florida
-Storm loses to Ambush, then beats Rouge and Chikitas before bowing out to Ambush in the final game to go (15-4).
: Capitals advance, Storm finishes one place out of qualification.
Mixed
-Bytown Flatball Club opens the tourney with wins over 7Express and Denoiret. Unfortunetly, like the CUPA regionals and the nationals final, the wheels then fell off for this squad who has no shortage of talent for the coed level. BFC loses to eventual champ Slow White, then to the Bashing Pinatas, and then to Puppet Regime. Their final placement is 6th.
-Montreal's Denoiret (A coed team based on open and women's players) crush their seed and finish 5th, up from their pre tourney ranking of 11th.
-Qualifiers are Slow White, Tandem and Bashing Pinatas. The Bashing P's take a spot and beat BFC during the tournament, despite losing to BFC twice in sectionals.
Masters
-Team Chemistry and the lack of practice time does not appear to be a factor for Tombstone as they go 3-1 in Saturday pool play.
-However, Tombstone runs in Sunday difficulty. They lose 15-7 to DOG, and then lose 15-11 to Above and Beyond. They fail to qualify.
- Jaime Noonan of Tombstone writes on the ocua.ca forum about the Tombstone roster makeup and their performance on the weekend:
"Everyone contributed all weekend. It was absolutely not a TO-centric effort. I still think we had the deepest team at Regionals, and had we had more time to play together -- it was the first time for many of us even meeting each other, let alone playing ultimate -- we would have pulled out one of the two games to go. A&B played the 3-4 game against Not Dead Yet, a much, MUCH weaker team, while we were fighting DoG. They ended up finishing 15-2 and waiting for the loser of our game. It started out very even; DoG is, as you would expect, extremely efficient with the disc, and turnovers were hard to come by. Our chemistry issues showed, as we worked it down to the red zone time after time and couldn't punch it in. Every point was hard-fought, but by half, the score was 8-4. It felt much closer, but a team decision was made to shut it down in the second half to rest the starters for the game-to-go. I think the final might have been 15-6 or 7?
The A&B game-to-go was another typical NY vs. 'NE Cdn Masters Team X' scrap. Lots of calls and "discussions", a few of which ended up going to observers. Pitched battles on every point. Arnie Sanchez was a machine, outrunning and hauling down hucks over and past our defenders. We had a better time getting turns than we had against DoG, but also had the same problems punching it in. They went up a couple breaks early and took half 8-5. Another break early in the 2nd had us down 4. We laid it all out right until the end, and had a better second half, but couldn't close the gap and lost 15-12 or 11, can't remember.
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-General Strike is a factor in the 3rd place bracket, but loses 15-5 to The Van Buren boys
-They fail to qualify, and all we can say at this point via the upa site is that General Strike finished somewhere in the 5-14 range.
-Qualifiers for this region include Sub Zero of the Tri Cites, Machine of Chicago, and The Van Buren Boys of Ames. That's Ames, Iowa. This might be the cinderella team of the UPA championships folks, as they moved from a 6th seed to upset 2nd seed BAT and 4th seed Madcow in taking the last qualifier spot.
-Hopefully Pegger can update us on the tournament..
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1 comment:
I'm not on Strike and haven't heard anything from them so can't tell you much more than what's up on the score reporter. I don't think placement games were played out unless they had a bearing on qualification. Based on games played I would say Strike's final placement would be tied for 7th. Strike was missing a few top line players for the weekend, which hurt their chances to move up in the final placement. That said, the top 6 seeds in the region were all quite strong teams, with Sub Zero the top team by a fair margin.
As for Van Buren Boys, they are a bunch of guys out of Iowa, largely made up of the male contingent of the now-defunct mixed team, Chad Larson Experience (CLX). Incidentally, CLX was the cinderella team of the 2004 UPA Championships, where they came out of nowhere (10th seed) to make it to the final and missed winning by just two points.
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