Brown Huck-A-Hunk-'O-Burning-Pumpkin

This was some tournament. By god, it was some tournament.

We left campus at around 6 AM, which all things considered is not as early as it could have been. Thanks to Brown for the first round bye, which got us an extra hour and a half of sleep. Bmac, wonderful president that he is, made everyone homemade breakfast sandwiches and cereal bars to go with our directions. Some guy, that guy...

Our first game was against Brown's alumni (aka Hellfish). It was an interesting game, as they were all flaired out in clothes that would have made Dartmouth, the home of flair, proud. Some of the best players in the country played for them, although they were obviously difficult to distinguish, what with their wigs and dresses and all. Colin Mahoney, Josh Ziperstein, and Mike Vandenberg were some of the big names/faces I recognized, and although they obviously didn't play as hard as they could have, it was still pretty cool seeing some of the biggest stars in the game. Relative celebrities in our little isolated community, if you will. The game wasn't particularly close, they obviously played a little lazy, and although from what I vaguely remember, we didn't play all that badly either, we still lost 13-7.

Our second and third games were against Boston University and Brandeis, respectively. I also don't remember too much about these games... We won them 13-5 and 12-10 respectively, although I feel like we should also have won the second one by a larger margin. I think we just let Tron crawl back into it in the middle of the game.

These first three games had some pretty grim weather. As previously stated, the forecast didn't look promising at all, to say the least. The first game against Hellfish was actually decent. There was no rain, a comfortable temperature, not too much wind (compared to the other games this weekend). However, conditions got pretty shitty for the second and third. Much more windy, sporadic rain that came down pretty strong, all that nonsense.

The last game of the day was against Brown as the showcase game of the tournament. We had to drive to Brown's campus from the fields at Colt State Park in Bristol, RI during the round before the game, as we would be playing on a turf field at Brown under the lights. Getting some food along the way, we got there and warmed up, during which it began to pour. It rained like I'd never seen before. Ever. It came down in sheets, almost as if my frustration from the day materialized into the form of furious, angry rain. The wind also picked up to the 35 mph wind (or possibly more, I didn't know exactly at that point) previously promised. It was truly an experience in my ultimate career that I'll never forget. It really looked like something straight out of a movie (or an episode of Friday Night Lights), and we all felt the electricity and the excitement of the moment. I really thought that the conditions were absolutely unplayable, and that if it were almost any other sport played outdoors, the game would have been called. Even though the weather was that bad, and that we play a sport that involves throwing a thin, 175-gram piece of plastic through the air, the show went on.

The game was insane. It was pretty much impossible to throw upwind and precision ultimate was made pretty difficult, so we punted a bunch of times downwind to try to force a turn closer to the endzone. There were also more than a few plays where Ds would float back right into the cutter's outstretched hands, and one where a mac'd disc actually carried back about 45 yards back downfield. On defense, we blue-crushed too many discs, and although it was nobody's fault, it was shitty as hell.

We lost the game 11-6. Most of Brown Ultimate assembled for the game, and the sidelines had the whole extended family of Brownian Motion/Disco Inferno to cheer them on. They simply played better, moved the disc down the field effortlessly, threw I-O flick breaks at will, and we couldn't get many Ds.

Next day:

We left, got some breakfast, and got to the fields an hour early. Games started at 10:30 after the Brown guys decided to green light games after the beating that the fields took yesterday. In the parking lot, there were almost a dozen or more cars full of tired, sleepy ultimate players waiting, passed out just like we were. A pretty funny sight.

We played our games in a field in the outfield of a baseball field. The field wasn't actually too bad, but was pretty short. In addition, Mother Nature just wouldn't quit. New surprises of the day were a ten degree temperature drop from the day before and a consistent 30 mph crosswind.

Our games were against UMass and Northeastern. The game against UMass was the first round of bracket play for the championship. All UMass wanted to do all day was huck it deep, and judging by their team, you can't blame them. They definitely play to their strengths, and had the throwers and cutters to make it happen. We tried to take it away as well as we could, but they knocked us out in a heated game 15-8.

Our next (and very last game for the Pain Train until the spring) was against Northeastern, a small 13-player team that the Discomfort Trolley faced the weekend before at Yale Cup. The captains/coaches (by the way, Coaches Nate Raines '07 and Dan Yi '06 graced us with their presence this weekend) competitively subbed for the most part for the UMass game, most likely in an attempt to advance to the next round, but kept the rotation more open for the game against NUGC.

We won the game 14-11. The score looks a lot closer than it could have been, but all the tryouts played very well, and we won. Good note to finish the fall season on.