Sectionals

Today our Frisbee Team wHagonweel competed in the first tournament of the series. Derrick and I play for an awesome Ultimate Frisbee team called wHagonweel. We commit to about 3 practices a week and several tournaments up and down the east coast. The season runs from June to October and it keeps us very busy! The entire season comes down to the series. This is the most important group of tournaments. They are elimination tournaments and you have to do well enough at each one to advance to the next one.

The first tournament of the series is called Sectionals.  Our Section consists of North Carolina and we play all of the other mixed teams in North Carolina. There were only 4 mixed teams in North Carolina and we got 3 bids so it was a fairly easy road to Regionals (the next tournament of the series). We are a very competitive team and we have a lot of talent.  We also have high expectations.  Our first game was against a Triangle team called Boxcar. We were able to beat them 15-7 and end the game fairly quickly.  Our second game was against the local High Schoolers. This is always a fun game because it's nice to see Ultimate spreading to the younger generations.  It's still a pretty new sport and pretty recently has gotten into the high school level.  We shut them out 15-0.  Our final game was against Cahoots. This is an Asheville team and they were the number 2 seed in the tournament. We knew coming into today that Cahoots would give us the most competition out of the teams there. We beat them in finals of the last tournament we saw them so they came seeking revenge.  We traded points for the first 3-4 points but then Cahoots broke us 3 times and ended up taking half 8-5. They then started on offense and were able to put that in for another point. Even though our offense line didn't get broken again, we weren't able to recover from the 3 breaks in the first half and ended up losing 15-11.  It was not fun.

Our goal is go to Nationals. Nationals is the most elite club tournament and you have to qualify as one of the top 16 teams in the nation.  Our Region consists of 10 teams from North Carolina down to Florida and over to Louisiana.  Regionals will be in Orlando, FL on Sept. 29 and Sept. 30.  Our region only gets 1 bid to Nationals and it is anyone's for the taking. The two most competitive sections (Our and the Atlanta teams) both had 1 seed upsets.  With only 1 bid we are going to have to buckle down and work really hard in these next 2 weeks. We've been to Nationals on our first year with wHw 2 years ago but missed out last year. We all want to get back there but we're going to have to fight for it.  Hopefully a disappointing finish as Sectionals will light the fire and we'll be ready to fight down in Orlando!

Here's a picture of our team from our last tournament when we won the Championship! Hopefully I can post a similarly happy picture after Regionals in 3 weeks!