this weekend i was at an ultimate frisbee tournament. specifically, my team was at d1 regionals. i'm on a b team so it's awesome that we can even make it this far, and especially that we can actually compete once we're there. it was a really great weekend, and i'm going to talk about it a bit before i share some photos.
we drove down friday and i didn't do my homework and we had a campfire and s'mores and i went to bed very early. saturday we had breakfast and went to the fields and it was wet and raining on and off all day so my cleats got so thoroughly soaked and my feet still don't feel quite normal after 2 days of playing with wet socks + cleats.
the tournament was weird format with this thing called "clipped pools" where its not round robin in a pool your second match in your pool is determined by your first one. anyway, we won our first game pretty easily (14-3) and thus had a harder matchup for our second game. this one we lost 13-5, which feels like a more extreme difference than i remember the game being, but i'm not sure. one thing that's odd about frisbee it that i'm often not exactly sure what the score is while playing. or maybe that's just a me thing. anyway, i met a cute girl that game and told her she looked like adrianne lenker so it really wasn't that bad of a loss.
our third game saturday was the first game in the bracket section of the tournament. we won 14-7 and i don't really remember that much about it. before the game, we got a beautiful lunch at the dining hall of the host school and it was so so good and i'm not just saying that because i was hungry from playing. i had some indian curry and dumplings and a red bean paste bun and a little coffee drink thing and some grapes with really good surface tension.
saturday night we had a big team pasta dinner and i drank a single angry orchard and yet again went to bed very early.
sunday was properly the bracket play, and while we were guaranteed 3 games saturday the amount of games we played sunday depended on if we won. essentially, if we lost a game we would be kicked into a losers bracket, play one more game, and then be done. sadly, that's exactly what happened.
our first game was really intense and competitive. the opposing team had a player who was a lot better than all the others and we ended up running what's called a box against her. this is a type of zone defense and we affectionately call it a "fuck meribel" zone after a former teammate we ran it against. in this zone, it was my job to just cover the player 1-1 while everyone else played a normal zone defense. i fairly successfully took her out of the game, although she did end up scoring the winning point and we lost 8-6. i'm not too mad about it though, i played really well, just disappointed that we couldn't make it work.
our second game sunday a lot of the team was kind of demoralized from the first game and we definitely weren't playing our best. also, it was the last game of the season and the last game of college for the seniors on the team. we lost 9-8 on what's called "universe point" which was difficult. i think if we played them in most other circumstances we'd win, but i was just happy to be with my team. also, my mother and partner drove down to watch and while i didn't get played a lot the second game, it meant i got to spend more time with them on the sidelines.
we finished sunday watching our a team lose their game. it's ok though, they were kind of expected to lose because the other team is undefeated. they placed 2nd and secured a bid to nationals, and we placed 8th out of 14 teams. then we went and got lunch at the dining hall again and drove home.
one of these days i'll write about playing sports as a trans woman but i'm not there yet. enjoy the photos!
