So, I said I would stay on top of writing on this blog (FAIL!). My bad. But I actually have some time right now so I thought I'd write a little update about what we've been up to this past month!
PresDay Recap:
Last time, we said we were going to PresDay! Well, that was true. We arrived Friday night in our little off-the-road motel in San Bernardino ready to play in the morning. We woke up at 7 to find that our games got pushed up an hour to start at 8 rather than 9, so we speedily packed up and headed to the fields. We got in a short 20 minute warmup, which really didn't help us prepare for our first game against Sonoma State. Poop. Saturday was filled with patches of blue sky, but mainly overcast weather. We played Sonoma State, Florida, and Oregon in a row, then had a double bye, so we went to the closest supermarket to get some food while it started to rain (luckily we missed most of it). When we returned to the fields, it had gotten significantly colder, there was still some rain, and the wind picked up a bit. We started warming up, it started to hail, which was fun, so we put on more layers and began to sing "I'll Make a Man Out of You" at the top of our lungs to keep us going. In the patchy rain, we beat USC and quickly jammed 22 people into our 15 passenger van for our post-game meeting. Let's just say we had fun playing with the van's steamy windows....
Sunday we got our games moved back to San Diego, which was a relief. We beat both Western Washington and Texas before playing a Regional rival UCSB. Texas was one of the most fun I've had playing ultimate and I feel our team really came together. Then we faced Burning Skirts and had a very strong first half. After half-time, our defense somewhat fell apart, which made playing offense pretty difficult, as well. Finally Monday came and we faced Michigan first and Florida for a second time. Unfortunately, we just started to feel tired and couldn't keep up. Overall, PresDay was amazing and we had a ton of fun. We also came away from the tournament with a new slogan for this season: 26 Strong.
Stanford Open Recap:
The following weekend we went back to CA, but this time NorCal (Stevinson) which isn't exactly the most beautiful place on earth, but the fields can never get rained out! We went into the tourny ranked 1st, which was a major shock to us, but a great experience to be able to push ourselves to try and keep our seed. We were able to finish with a close to perfect record, but we lost to Humboldt in the finals 11-13, which was a total bummer.
March 19, 2011
This date was quite exciting in a variety of ways. For one, it was a day during Spring Break, which is something every college student looks forward to. It was also important to our team because it was the day our coaches, Jeff and Gretchen, got married! It was a beautiful wedding on a little organic farm south of Tucson. Congrats to Mr. and Mrs. Grobe!
CenTex
We arrived at CenTex with only part of our team because many girls had to miss due to school and two of our coaches were still on their honeymoon. However, we went in with a lot of spirit. After doing pretty well in our earlier tournaments, we also got moved up into the DII bracket, allowing us to possibly face some of our regionals rivals, so we were looking forward to a great weekend in Austin. But, having such high hopes and expectations can have it's downside, which we found out very quickly. We suffered some tough losses, but pulled out a universe point win on Sunday. After CenTex, we were looking forward to working on our mental game for the series and hoping we hadn't reached our peak yet.
PresDay Recap:
Last time, we said we were going to PresDay! Well, that was true. We arrived Friday night in our little off-the-road motel in San Bernardino ready to play in the morning. We woke up at 7 to find that our games got pushed up an hour to start at 8 rather than 9, so we speedily packed up and headed to the fields. We got in a short 20 minute warmup, which really didn't help us prepare for our first game against Sonoma State. Poop. Saturday was filled with patches of blue sky, but mainly overcast weather. We played Sonoma State, Florida, and Oregon in a row, then had a double bye, so we went to the closest supermarket to get some food while it started to rain (luckily we missed most of it). When we returned to the fields, it had gotten significantly colder, there was still some rain, and the wind picked up a bit. We started warming up, it started to hail, which was fun, so we put on more layers and began to sing "I'll Make a Man Out of You" at the top of our lungs to keep us going. In the patchy rain, we beat USC and quickly jammed 22 people into our 15 passenger van for our post-game meeting. Let's just say we had fun playing with the van's steamy windows....
Sunday we got our games moved back to San Diego, which was a relief. We beat both Western Washington and Texas before playing a Regional rival UCSB. Texas was one of the most fun I've had playing ultimate and I feel our team really came together. Then we faced Burning Skirts and had a very strong first half. After half-time, our defense somewhat fell apart, which made playing offense pretty difficult, as well. Finally Monday came and we faced Michigan first and Florida for a second time. Unfortunately, we just started to feel tired and couldn't keep up. Overall, PresDay was amazing and we had a ton of fun. We also came away from the tournament with a new slogan for this season: 26 Strong.
Stanford Open Recap:
The following weekend we went back to CA, but this time NorCal (Stevinson) which isn't exactly the most beautiful place on earth, but the fields can never get rained out! We went into the tourny ranked 1st, which was a major shock to us, but a great experience to be able to push ourselves to try and keep our seed. We were able to finish with a close to perfect record, but we lost to Humboldt in the finals 11-13, which was a total bummer.
March 19, 2011
This date was quite exciting in a variety of ways. For one, it was a day during Spring Break, which is something every college student looks forward to. It was also important to our team because it was the day our coaches, Jeff and Gretchen, got married! It was a beautiful wedding on a little organic farm south of Tucson. Congrats to Mr. and Mrs. Grobe!
CenTex
We arrived at CenTex with only part of our team because many girls had to miss due to school and two of our coaches were still on their honeymoon. However, we went in with a lot of spirit. After doing pretty well in our earlier tournaments, we also got moved up into the DII bracket, allowing us to possibly face some of our regionals rivals, so we were looking forward to a great weekend in Austin. But, having such high hopes and expectations can have it's downside, which we found out very quickly. We suffered some tough losses, but pulled out a universe point win on Sunday. After CenTex, we were looking forward to working on our mental game for the series and hoping we hadn't reached our peak yet.