Post UPA Report... or at least the story of day 1

My second trip to the UPA Championships has come and gone. How I miss the warm Florida air already. Since it’s only 4 degrees outside I think I’ll try to warm myself up some by writing about my few days in Florida.

I flew out of Montreal fairly late on the Wednesday night. The biggest surprise of the trip happened as I was checking in; US Airways now charges $15US to check your first bag and $25US to check a second. Of course I was nice enough to take Courtney’s bag (since she could only leave on Thursday morning) which meant that I was hit with a $40 surcharge. I should have left my bag with Courtney since it would have been free for her to take it along. Thanks for the warning US Airways; you can take my $40US and go F**k yourselves, let’s see if I ever make you my carrier of choice again!

I had one stop-over in Philadelphia before my 9:30pm arrival in Tampa. I was expecting to see ulti players from across the northeast getting ready to board the plane but it looked like I was the only one. Of course that made me start to wonder if I was flying down on the right night. Thankfully it wasn’t too long after my arrival in Tampa that I saw some loonies tossing a disc around the airport terminal confirming that I wasn’t in for a second, bigger surprise. I was nice enough to volunteer to pick up the late crowd so I had to stick around until Eric, Thomson and Sara arrived at 11:30pm. It wasn’t too bad, Tampa has a relatively nice airport.

Once Eric and the Toronto kids arrived we hit the road relatively quickly (thank you, Avis Preferred status). The late departure guaranteed that we didn’t have to deal with any traffic but it is still an hour drive around TB down to Sarasota. The one thing that we did notice is that the bay is a lot bigger then it looks on the map. It takes so long to drive across Old Tampa Bay (how can a bay be old?), through St. Petersburg and across the Sunshine Skyway. Once you cross the bridge it’s not too long before you get to Sarasota. At least the speed limit is 70mph. We rolled into the parking lot of our hotel just before 1:00am which, despite how late it sounds, wasn’t too bad since Shaggy only got there to check in 5 minutes before we did. I don’t know how he pulled that off since he landed in Tampa at 8:00pm.

We went to sleep fairly quickly but true to form, I did that thing that I sometimes do where I’m so excited that I don’t really sleep much. I also was awake quite early trying to figure out what time it was but had nothing to refer to, so I lay there wondering what time it was until the alarm went off. Brilliant move if I do say so myself.

There was still a pretty good chill in the air when we left the hotel Thursday morning. It hadn’t changed much by the time that we arrived at the fields although we did warm ourselves up pretty quickly running to the field when we saw that we were the last ones to arrive. It was 40 minutes before our first game and everyone else (most of whom have trouble spelling the word punctual) was already there going through their dynamic stretches. That was fine with me, I never do well when I have too much time to prepare and think about what I’m doing; just throw me straight into the fray.

Our schedule for the day pitted us against El Diablo (Charleston and area), Doublewide (Austin, TX) and then Sockeye (Seattle) to finish off the day. The first game against El Diablo was pretty uneventful. We started a bit slow but really put the screws to them and finished them off something like 15-8. We didn’t play great but they just made far too many mistakes to be successful at this level. It was the perfect team to play to start the tournament because it gave us the opportunity to start against a weak team and get our legs underneath us.

It’s the kind of game that Sockeye needed to start their tournament, instead they had to face Doublewide who shocked everyone and beat the defending champs 15-12. That really set the stage for an interesting rest of the day since all of a sudden all of the seedings were out the window and it was time for everyone to play for their tournament lives. We knew that we had to crush Doublewide to guarantee our path to the power-pool, Sockeye knew they had to beat us to have a chance at the power-pool and Doublewide had to beat us to guarantee them a spot in the power-pool. El Diablo knew they were going to be canon fodder for the rest of the pool and were just hoping for the best.

We were expecting a tough game against Doublewide and we must have been pretty amped for it because when the game started we came out on fire. Before DW knew what was going on we were up on them 5-1. We “brought our A game” against them and they were probably still savouring the high of upsetting Sockeye; that all meant that they never really had a chance. They started to claw back a bit at the end as we got a bit lazy but we still won 15-9. We thought that was a brilliant result and would set us up perfectly for making the power pool since it meant that we only had to score 6 on Sockeye to move on… but we were wrong (more on that later).

Thinking we were all a bunch of smart guys, we did tons of math before our game against Sockeye to figure out what we had to do to finish the day in first place. We realized that to move on to the power-pool we needed to score at least 6 points and to finish first we needed to score at least 11 (or better yet just win the game). Sockeye played like they had everything to lose and in a sense they did. It was a very tightly contested game and we were in it the whole way. I really did think that we were going to win but in the end it wasn’t to be and we ended up losing 15-13. Sockeye definitely used some cheap calls to win the game; I didn’t expect them to be a bunch of cheaters but surprisingly they are. We didn’t know this but apparently they have that reputation among some of the better teams.

A successful day all in all or so we thought. On point differential we finished in first place of our pool… but wait a second. We ended up pulling Sockeye with us and our head to head result. So we end up in first place but go into Friday with a 0-1 record. We didn’t really think about it but it turns out the best thing that we could have done is not blow out Doublewide. If we had only beat them by 2 points we would have still won the pool but Doublewide (and our win) would have come with us to the power-pool. I suppose there is not point in thinking about what ifs too much because if we had played that game we might have ended up going down instead of Double wide. So in the end, while the situation was not ideal, it was not the worst case scenario. At least we were still in the tournament, unlike a bunch of teams who could start drinking their “loser beer” right away.

This is getting pretty long so I think I need to break this into a few posts. I’ll write more about the rest of the tournament later (darn work cutting into my writing time).

DF