Yale Coffee Cup 2008: Sunday

(Also excerpted)

After a great night's sleep, breakfast, and a Dartmouth Ultimate a cappella rendition of 'You Are My Sunshine' to the Routhiers, we left for Yale. We got there a few minutes before 9, which was when we thought our first game would be.

There was a lot of confusion late yesterday and early this morning about our schedule, and to be frank, I don't think the TDs communicated very well with the teams (one of the TDs played with his team all day?). Apparently, yesterday afternoon was supposed to be the first round of bracket play, but we thought it was only pool play and went to watch the women for the rest of the day. The TDs changed the format late on Friday afternoon, and although we should have realized we had another game yesterday, the other team (Rutgers) took the forfeit only 5 minutes after we failed to show, although we easily could have been found. However, after some confusion, it apparently went the other way around, as they forfeited instead (our first win of the year!), and we played Northeastern in the semifinals of the chumpionship bracket at around 10 AM this morning in an abbreviated game. It's true that a decent amount of blame for what happened was confusion and lack of knowledge on our part, but a lack of communication is never a good thing.

EDIT: So it turns out that the TDs did send information about all this by email, but seeing as how it was all sent to the official account and no admins checked it Saturday night (they were all at CCC), we never got the memo. Ouch.

The weather was much better today (sunny and warmer) than yesterday (wet, raining and cold), but of course, a tournament can never have beautiful weather, it's just not possible. As a result, Murphy's Law brought us a strong 15 mph up/downwind to our fields all day, and Northeastern capitalized by using a zone defense on us for every point. To our credit, we only had 11 players (several of our players left Saturday afternoon). We came out strong to start, but still lost 8-0. We definitely had our chances to score a few points, but some late impatience after working the zone O efficiently cost us.

Apparently, after that game, we were scheduled to play Brown. Yep, you heard me. Brownian Motion, B-Mo, the team of the worst Raines brother itself (kidding. maybe least hairiest?). I guess it makes sense logistically according to the schedule and everything else, but the fact that B-Mo fell to the 11th place game, same as Dartmouth's B team, was pretty surprising to say the least. After some discussion and mutual agreement, we decided to scrimmage Brown-B instead, which was finally our first game against a fellow B team all weekend.

And boy oh boy, was it a good game. We traded points all game, a new feeling for the weekend (scoring points!). The game was marked by the intensity and momentum that we carried over from our game against Northeastern (perhaps the only time in history that a team has used momentum from an 0-8 shutout into their next game). There was great cutting, man and zone defense on our part, bids everywhere ('12s can layout already!).

The game ended in a 12-9 loss, although we decided to continue to play for fun afterwards because we just didn't want the fun to stop. Some of the highlights from that mini game were a beautiful full-field huck from Mothra to Enzyte, a really convincing tiger trap by Jam (I still can't help laughing thinking about it now), an upside-down point, etc.

After the game, we hit the road, got some lunch at Friendly's on the way, then got home to Hanover at around 5 PM. Overall, a great tournament experience.

CCC: A phone call to Bmac himself (hi Bmac!) revealed that the CCC guys beat both Alabama and UCF in bracket play of the C bracket, but lost a 'squeaker' to Texas in the finals. I'll learn more when I talk to the guys at practice today, I think they got in sometime this morning.