See You in Sarasota!

I’m back from Regionals in Devens and I am happy to report that I need to book a trip to Florida! Goat qualified for UPAs quite easily and that makes me very happy. It was part of my goal for the fall and now I get to focus on my other fall goal, trying to post a good result at UPAs.

Regionals was good for the Goat. We cruised through our pool on Saturday. Montreal and Militia offered no resistance. Red Tide put up a bit of a fight but they were just not able to stick with us and we beat them quite handily. That setup a semi-final against Bodhi, an upstart team full of young, athletic players. It was a tight game for the first bit and I seem to recall that they even took a very early lead but we had a lot of time to go out and claw back at them. It took a lot of hard work but we ended up winning by at least 5 points.

There was a palpable sense of relief as, with this win, we had guaranteed ourselves a spot at the UPA Championships. I think a lot of the guys were unsure of where we stacked up in our region as there were a lot of unanswered questions both about Goat’s level of play and the level of the opposition. This win showed that the Goat was still a force to be reckoned with. Our 4-0 result on Saturday set us up for a match up against Boston’s Ironside in the Regional championship game midday on Sunday.

We ended up getting killed by Ironside in the final 15-8. There were a few factors that led to that result:
1) They are an awesome team. They have talent and athleticism to spare from top to bottom and they use it very well. In their five games on the weekend they gave up 3, 3, 5, 5, and 8 points respectively. Their bench is loaded with guys who could be starters on most other teams. We just couldn’t stop them at all. Their O line turned it over 3 times all game and the first turnover was after they scored their 11th or 12th point. They just did not give us many chances to beat them and the few chances we had they got the disc right back from us. I would expect them to challenge for the title in Florida.
2) Okay, so after the first reason the other reasons won’t really count for much but they didn’t help us. We were happy with qualifying. I think we were too happy with having qualified that there was no sense of urgency to try to accomplish anything against Boston. That led too…
3) A horrible pre-game routine. As a team we didn’t take the game seriously and most guys only showed up at 12:30pm for our 1:00pm start. We didn’t warm up properly and we weren’t ready to even give Boston a game. We had all morning to get ready for the game and we really didn’t.

Had we been at our best I’m not sure how well we would have been able to play against Ironside. I would say that we might have been able to score 12 on them but I don’t think we would have been able to beat them. Like I said before they are very impressive. I think they will surprise a lot of people in Florida.

Having lost that game it setup a game to hold onto second against the winner of Pony-Bodhi. Since Ironside beat us so quickly/badly we had ample time to watch the end of that game. Pony was up a few at half but Bodhi battled back and brought it to double game point. No one wanted to win or maybe they both wanted to win so badly that there were multiple turnovers, big layout d’s and other big plays. In the end Bodhi scored the last point and clinched at least third place while Pony had to go and play the 4-5 game.

We came into the 2-3 game with something to prove coming off of our poor performance and Bodhi was real flat coming off of the euphoria of having qualified. We rolled Bodhi quite easily (15-7) and clinched our #2 seed coming out of the Region. It’s a good thing we won that game because it gave us the #8 seed at UPAs while Bodhi is ranked #14.

So our next stop is Florida. The tournament starts on Oct 30 and ends Nov 2. For updates you can go to www.upa.org and they will have links to the Club Championship results page.

DF