Tales from the Chumpionship Bracket, Part I: The Fall Tournament

I started writing this about halfway through our fall season, finished it up tonight, and I hope it’s a nice change from the more “academic” posts I have been offering on this blog. I would like to tell a story of sorts, a story for a cold winter’s night, going back to when the Midwest was still relatively warm and snow free, a story I hope is true for others, the story of an ultimate team at a college tournament in the fall, and not a top team, either, but the Everyman team, the Bagel Fodder team…

The cell phone alarm goes off sometime between 6:30 and 7:00 AM. I clamber out of bed, avoiding the five people sleeping on the floor, wrapped up in sleeping bags, fitfully trying to savor a few last moments of shuteye. Slowly, with bleary eyes and doleful looks, people get up, get dressed, and make their way down to the continental breakfast, if we're lucky enough to have a hotel with such amenities. I eat half a waffle, fill up the water bottles, and carry my bags down to the car. Barring any major map-reading mishaps, my co-captain and I make it to the fields in time to sit through the captain’s meeting. Together we decipher the field map as the dew soaks through our shoes and herd our teammates to the correct field as they come in to the parking lot after us.

Everyone is there with 25 minutes until game time. I encourage people to put on their cleats and take a warm up lap. Five people join me as I circle the field. I always wonder why it takes so long for people to get their cleats on in the morning. The other team is probably in the same shape as we are, but if not, if they’ve been throwing and drilling since we first staggered on to the field, it will make the first game that much harder. "Let’s do an endzone drill," I suggest, grab a disc, and make my way to our endzone. “That should be a forehand!” and “Sprint on your cuts, guys!” are familiar phrases. After five minutes or so the other captains come over. We toss, win, and decide to pull. I always feel starting on defense is a good way to get people's heads in the game, especially if our warm up is going poorly. Everything seems slow in the early morning, and the horn inevitably sounds before I feel anyone is warmed up enough.

“Bring it in!” Most people come running. I try to keep track of who was warming up the earliest and who was running the hardest in the drill and call them on in the first line. A brief pep talk, a quick cheer, and we’re on the line. I usually pull the first disc if I am on the field. Pulling is one of my favorite parts of ultimate, stepping back from the line, looking down the field at the opposing team, and shouting, “three, two, one, ultimate!” in the clear morning air as a long, crisp backhand sails out of my hands. That first throw and that first sprint will never get old, and I still get nervous before each game.

This season, our first games have always been the most heartbreaking. Often they are against higher seeds in our pool, but usually not so high that they seem unbeatable. We have come so close many times to beating those teams— sometimes all the way to universe, almost always to the last time cap, and usually they never win by more than two or three points. I can’t decide why we can’t pull it off, exactly. We are usually ahead by one around point eight or nine, and then a few breaks by the other team, the horn blows, and it’s over. A little more intensity on defense, a few better dump passes, a bit more luck in catching, a few better throwing decisions, and the game could have gone the other way. Sometimes that first game is the difference between playing for 13th place or playing for 1st place on Sunday.

With the first game over, we shake hands with the opposing team and make up a cheer. We cheer at the end of every game. Cheering was one of the first things I remembered and loved about ultimate, and I hope that as the sport grows, the cheers and zany games remain. In the post-game huddle, my co-captain and I try to sum up the game, focus on what went wrong, what went right, and try to keep people excited and motivated for the next two or three games.

Often victories are hard-fought, coming down to the last few points, each team grinding it out until the end. My favorite memories are from these difficult games— trying to catch my breath and calm down my breathing to give a steady stall count on the mark, seeing a teammate streaking deep and winding up for the long huck, standing on the line before the pull on a crucial, tense break point, a layout catch to save a misplaced dump pass, fighting to shut down a cutter, wrenching your ankles and feet with the sharp turns, the feeling of relief after a brutal, long point in the wind comes to an end.

Oh, the wind, inevitable in the Midwest in autumn, and often causing lot of turnovers on both teams, since throwing and catching are more difficult. Low scoring games are common, as is zone. I usually play hatchet in zone defense, giving the cup encouragement and advice, trying for the layout Ds, keeping one eye on the poppers and the other on the handlers. There’s a special type of tiredness and endurance that comes with zone defense, and it toys with your emotions. Shutting down a team with zone is one of the best feelings in the game, redemption for the exhaustion, but the feeling of a zone defense slipping out of position as the opposing team breaks your cup is one of the worst. Then there’s zone offense. There’s a slow patience in zone offense I enjoy—when everyone else has the patience—gaining a few yards with a quick pass to a popper, losing a few with a dump, the slow, steady motion of handlers swinging the disc, the tense fun that comes from breaking a cup, and, if the patience holds and our hands are good, the man call and hopefully the sense of accomplishment that comes from breaking a zone defense.

Like I said, victories have not been easy recently. I think schools everywhere are getting better, and teams we used to beat with ease a year or two ago now offer consistent challenges. Still, even if we have to work harder for victories, the feeling of beating a larger school never gets old, and we manage to do that at least once at every tournament.

After play ends on Saturday, we crowds back into the cars and drive to the hotel. If we’re lucky, the men are still playing, so we get first dibs on showers. Sometimes all of us decide to descend on some poor restaurant without showering first. After eating a hotel breakfast and maybe an energy bar or bagel and running around outside for six hours, everyone is hungry enough so that our bill hopefully offsets any offense given by all twenty of us traipsing into the place at once, dirty and sweaty and generally loud and rambunctious.

In the evening, back at the hotel, some people drink, some watch TV, some try and fail to do homework, and others pass out early. I am amazed that we have not yet been kicked out of a hotel for crowding ten people to a room and, at some tournaments, like Halloween, staying up late playing drinking games. Halloween tournaments aside, generally everyone is in bed by midnight, which is good because Sunday dawns bright and early again— another cell phone alarm, hurriedly packing the cars, and driving through sleepy Midwestern towns back to the fields.

I am always amazed at how sore I am on Sundays. No other sport or activity matches the full-body soreness that comes after a long day of good ultimate. There is some sort of strange joy in working out the pain during the first warm up on Sunday. The first cheer of the day invigorates everyone, and soreness and fogginess are gone after the first few points; the edge comes back as the dew on the grass dries when the full morning sun hits the field. Sundays have run the gamut in emotions and experiences this fall. We’ve gone from losing all our Sunday games to winning them all, from placing near the bottom of the chumpionship bracket to going to the finals of one small tournament. Whichever way it goes, win or lose, Sundays are always exhausting, the kind of exhaustion that creeps up on you when you take a break on the sidelines. Despite the exhaustion and potential frustration, I have fun at every tournament we go to because of my teammates, new and old. The fall in particular is a time for getting to know new players, and they quickly become part of the fold with the laughing, joking, and camaraderie that comes from spending an entire weekend in close quarters with people. After one away tournament, they become part of the special type of community college teams foster. Combine that with the camaraderie and respect between teams that the ultimate community as a whole builds, and I don't think there is any other sport I would rather play.

Every tournament ends with taking our cleats off for the last time. Untying your cleats, peeling off your socks, and reflecting on the weekend sitting in the grass among teammates, sometimes in the bitter cold, sometimes in the rain, sometimes in the glorious pale sunlight that the Midwest offers up in the fall, but sitting down after running around for an entire weekend, after diving to the ground, after wrenching your shoulder from throwing and your legs from cutting, sitting down after all that, win or lose, is immensely satisfying. Then comes the slow walk back to the car, organizing everyone back with their stuff, and the long, warm drive back, sometimes six hours cramped in the car— a fast food dinner, attempts at homework that always end in naps, every stop and every time you get out of the car your body reminding you through cramps and aches that you need to eat more salt and cool down after those games. Then you come back to campus and it's dark, back to usually an entire night’s worth of homework and people who don’t understand why we do it, weekend after weekend, year after year. But we know why we do it, you know why you do it, right?

We do it because we love our teammates, we love ultimate, and even if the victories are few and far between and some tournaments are frustrating, when things didn’t seem to go right the whole weekend long, we will be back two weekends from now, in the outskirts of some town at some soccer complex or polo field, ready to put our cleats on and do it all again. We go to these fall tournaments for the small victories— the rookie player having the confidence to look upfield and get a good continue throw. A burgeoning handler breaking her mark. A perfect dump, swing, swing, score sequence. An awesome D, a sweet layout grab. Ultimate on bagel fodder teams sometimes doesn’t look pretty, but at every level, ours included, people play with heart, and we all love this game fiercely.