National Ultimate Championships 1996 - Priory school, Hitchin Tournament report by Luke Walden and David MacKay (feel free to edit this and use it in Varsity) Pool play, Saturday 26th October Ultimate is a game about flying a small plastic, disc-shaped wing in an extremely controlled manner (what does extremely controlled mean? - Ed). On a windless day good players can make the disc swoop and curve, sail and drop, flying as if by remote control to meet their teammates as they cut into open space. The disc is light and wind can render it almost impossible to control. On a windy day, when your team is trying to score upwind, you can only throw about ten yards without having the disc flop over dead onto the ground or catch a puff of wind and blow up into the sky to land who-knows-where. Gone are the glorious long arcing passes soaring down the line to a sprinting receiver. Gone are the 30 yard bullets into the endzone for a score. Instead we slog slowly upfield against the gale, hampered by the "cup" of defenders clustered around the player with the disc, unable to throw past them to the free players they are no longer marking...because the wind swats those throws aside like the feeble gestures that they are. We make dozens of short passes, back and forth across the pitch, working far too hard for every bit of yardage gained. We slog endlessly upwind...only to pointlessly lose it to a gust of wind just on the verge of scoring a point. So we run back downfield, hoping to force a turnover and give ourselves the chance to slog back up again. Ultimate in the wind can feel as endless and as pointless as war. It was very windy this weekend in Hitchin. Blue Arse Flies SB had an unpleasantly early wake-up call against Blue Arse Flies (an all-male midlands team), and had difficulty making complete passes in a strong wind. B.A.F. took the first four points. Gradually SB pulled it together and late players arrived. The second half went better but SB couldn't score enough up-wind points in their comeback to prevent B.A.F. taking the game 17-11. Thus, Cambridge pissed away its chance to get in the top twelve teams. Funky Monks (an all-male team from near Oxford) The game against Funky Monks was much more impressive. F.M. are ranked about 8th in the country and are a fast-paced, skilful and intense team with no reservations about 'going horizontal'. We matched them point for point up to 4-4, managing to score an upwind point. Then Monks broke ahead with two up-wind points pushed through by three fast-moving handlers. SB continued to play impressively with Adrian Lane 'popping' through the Monks zone defence and James Keyworth making huge offensive and defensive plays. Natalie ran her buns off. The final score was 17-6. Tribal desire: TD had beaten BAF earlier on so they were expecting to be the number 2 in our pool. This game thus gave us the chance to restore our position and show that we should have beaten Blue Arse Flies. We made a bad start, going down 3 points, but pulled it together with outstanding play by Phil and Natalie. The come back point from 7-5 down to 7-6 lasted a huge time and Tribal used two timeouts to try to get it together. We kept it up in a sequence of very long points and took the first half 9-8 in a blazing sequence of passes Mike to Natalie Adrian Mindy Adrian Phil. There were then an increasing number of discussions and tight calls with some disagreement over rules. SB maintained the intensity, Luke and Adrian doing fine handling, and ended up winning 12-9. This win was excellent but not good enough [other scores: Tribal:BAF 17-9] to take Tribal Desire's 2nd place in the pool, so we ended up on Sunday in the knockout for places 13-16. Sunday On Sunday the weather got worse. Gale with drizzle. The train from Cambridge crawled at 2mph from Royston to Letchworth because it couldn't get traction on the rails. It was hard to know whether this was because of water or leaves on the line or because of the huge headwind. Our first game should have been against First Touch but this team pulled out, so we arranged to play a three-way pool with Skunks (Southampton) and BAF. We watched the two exceptional semi-finals -- Druids beating Stan by only two and Shotgun beating UTI by only two or three (UTI and Stan both made impressive comebacks). Then when the time came to play the skunks they pulled out too with injuries. So we played Twin Peaks and the rest of the world in a friendly. Peaks/Rest of World won in a great game. Finally we played B.A.F. for 13th/14th, expecting to reverse Saturday's loss. We played much better, but so did BAF. Lost 10-5. Strange Blue's team was Alice, Adrian L, jimmer, andy plater, Gen (mainly playing for Bliss in the simultaneous women's tournament), phil, luke, mike, natalie, mindy, david, graham, dora, ian, Sander (Sat), Ico and Chris Mosier(that's new Chris with baseball cap)(Sat). 1 shotgun wedding 2 fluid druids 3 U.T.I. 4 stan (spirit) ------- 5 catch 22 6 funky monks 7 violently happy 8 tribal desire 9 headfrush 10 chevron 11 red 12 mythago ------------- 13 blue arse flies 14 sb 15 skunks 16 first touch ================================================================== There was also a women's tournament which sucked away several of the women from mixed teams playing in the nationals: 1 twin peaks 2 bliss 3 funky nuns 4 dolly mixtures (spirit) 5 hint of lime 6 diva