Monday, August 3, 2009

Winston Cup (Charlotte, NC)

I was really bitter/disappointed for a while about sMITe not making regionals so I didn't trust myself to blog, but it has been a few months now so I feel like I can look back and say that we really did our best, we fought our hardest, and we had a lot of great new recruits that will continue to build up our team in the upcoming year. The competition was much tougher in our section than in the past, and I'm really proud of how we did. Every player on the team stepped it up so much this year and I'm really looking forward to what this next year on sMITe will bring :) And yep, it will be my last year of eligibility this coming year. (As is Smeri's!)

In the last couple months, I've been playing summer league with Wuwu and also club with Hatch. This past weekend we went to North Carolina to play in Winston Cup, a small tournament with 10 women's teams. It was kind of a last minute decision to play in this tournament because we didn't get into Chesapeake, there was no Log Jam, and Chicago Heavyweights is the same weekend as sectionals and those were the three tournaments we went to last year. Luckily we got into Winston Cup or else we might've had to play each other for the rest of the summer.

There were two pools of five and we were third seed in a pool with (1) Ozone, (2) Wildcard, (4) Missconnduct and (5) Wahine. As usual, I don't really remember anything specific for any of the games. But I think we did get better throughout the day and throughout the tournament. The weather in NC was disgusting. In the afternoon it felt like it was 90 degrees with 90% humidity. We had a styrofoam cooler with ice and towels in it that people were using to cool themselves off, which worked really well, until LFein decided to use the cooler as a chair and broke it.

There was this girl on Ozone who, when marking, would start screaming her stall count after five: "FIVE!!! SIX!!! SEVEN!!!" It wasn't your normal "project-from-your-diaphragm-because-it's-fun-to-be-loud" kind of scream; it was more like "I'm-dying-and-I-need-immediate-medical-attention" kind of scream. The first time it happened to me she scared the crap out of me, and I gave her this bewildered look, like, "You've got to be kidding me" and threw the disc. And then I learned that she did it every time she marked. She did it once to Bernie and Bernie couldn't take it and said, "OMG stop stop stop stop, you have to stop, I can't hear anymore, there's buzzing in my ears" (which was totally true, I could identify, my ears were ringing on the sideline after she screamed in my ear too). So the screammer stopped stalling but her teammate was like, "that's not a legit call, you can keep stalling." I don't know, that's got to be a spirit foul or something. Or else I could just hit her over the head as she's marking me and get her to shut up. Other than that our Ozone game wasn't bad. We won the first point of the first half but then lost 8-1 at half. The second half we traded points and the final score was 15-7 Ozone. We score a lot on desparation hucks from Shira/Michelle to Doris/Jenny. =P

First game on Sunday was against Godiva. The pull goes off and everyone runs down the field. The pull goes to about 3/4 of the field and hits one of Godiva's players and everyone just stops on the field, not knowing what to do. The sideline says that the pull should be a re-do. So we all go back to our respective end zones and Tracy is about to pull again but then the sideline is looking up the rulebook and declares that the disc should start where it hit the person. So everyone goes back again and we play on. Weirdest thing ever... never saw that happen before. =P

Hatch is a really fun team :) Pics from the weekend:
http://picasaweb.google.com/karenshu/2009_08_01WinstonCup?authkey=Gv1sRgCP_ui9ncj-e-lgE#