Nation,
The World Games ultimate tournament took place July 19 - July 21.
I want to let people know that Ultimate at World Games sold 39,500 tickets to the games. This surpassed Rugby 7s, which had only 35000. This is a great step forward for the game.
Team USA beat Japan 13-6 in the finals. Canada lost it's bronze medal match to Australia 13-8.
Overall, this has to be a very frustrating performance for Canada. When one watches the coverage of the USA-Canada matchup, the team seems to be struggling to gel, struggling to execute, and the "willingness to compete"was lacking.
Everyone is entitled to an off day and the players picked are still excellent players. But the overall results of the team, the fact that our team got the lowest spirit score of the tournament (Not even close, one particular game did not help), and the disturbing growing distance between Canada and the US at the junior levels is of great concern to me.
Luckily, CUPA has already had a competition committee that is focusing on monitoring these trends and make systemic changes to help curb population and other challenges we will face as the game becomes more sophisticated.
With limited rosters, World Games is not as great an indicator as Worlds about who is the greatest nation in the game. Our 2005 World Games performance was dissapointing as well and yet we won lotsof medals in 2004/2008 Worlds. However, losing to teams outside of the USA is a big concern. It means the world is getting better and we must get better as well.
How do you see the World Games results? Is it time to press a panic button, take note, or simply shrug it off.
