State Champions!!

This past weekend Raleighwood competed in Sectionals. Every season ends with a tournament series that includes Sectionals, Regionals, and ends with Nationals. You have to do well enough in the previous tournament to qualify for the next round. This past weekend was the first part of the series: Sectionals. Our section consists of all of the North Carolina teams. There were eight teams competing in Sectionals and it was thankfully close by in Chapel Hill. We were able to go home and sleep in our own beds on Saturday night and only have about a 20 minute drive to the fields.

Raleighwood was seeded 2nd overall and there were three bids to Regionals. We won all of our three games on Saturday by a pretty good margin. That landed us in Semis on Saturday morning against Boxcar, another local Raleigh team. We beat them 15-8 and headed to finals again Cahoots. They are a team from Asheville that we had traded games with up to this point. We lost to them during pool play in Axton, beat them in the finals at Axton, and lost to them in the finals at Glazed Daze. They are a very good team and were also undefeated coming into the finals on Sunday.

Raleighwood has a tendency to come out a little slow so we really focused on coming out strong in the first half. It paid off for us in the end! We took half 8-5. Cahoots went on a bit of a run and the hard cap went on. That is basically a cap on the amount of time the games can take. It was tied up at 13-13 and because the hard cap was on it became universe point. Since Cahoots had just won that last point to tie it at 13s we were coming out on offense. The team worked it down and Derrick ended up catching a game winning hammer!

I am so proud to be a part of this team. The goal of this team is to play competitively but have fun doing it. No one gets down on their teammates and everybody trusts the rest of the people on the team. It is a really awesome team to play on and I'm thrilled to be State Champions with them!

Now on to Regionals!!