Leicester 2nd annual ultimate tournament April 1996 An on-the-spot report by Luke, Mindy and David. Saturday: Strange Blue was seeded at the bottom of Shotgun's group; the rest of the group were Chevron, Playthings and Tribal Desire. Our first game was a rude wake-up call for Alice, just flown in from Portugal: Shotgun Wedding, a 50 minute game, no jacket required. The weather was weirdly warm, it was difficult to run at full speed, we played much of the game without subs for most people (because we still waking up and trickling in), and... we took three points! A good start. ---- score 13-(or possibly more) : 3 A lovely 2 hour rest later... Our second game was against Chevron Action Flash (ex-Fingers). We played well -- they played better. We gave them a really tight game and began to wake up to our full potential but lost -- score 8 to 5? something like that. Against tribal desire we managed to pull away by a couple of points at the beginning of what proved to be a close and excellent game, finally winning by 2 (10:8?). Tej and Natalie, in particular, made crucial plays (flowing right into the zone for a score at one point). And Dora nailed a stunning grab at the sideline. We worked really hard, they worked really hard, we won the game largely on spirited, all out defense. Big fun. Playthings: at the start it felt like a really even game, and we went down by a point. Then (with the help of the wind) we pulled away and got up to about 8-4 ahead. Then Playthings realized they could use the wind against us too and they put a strong zone on us repeatedly and came back to 8-8. At that point we heard that time was up long before, so we agreed to play on to 10. Playthings got 9-8; then we got our offense sorted out against a zone, came back and scored two,, to win 10-9. We thus ended the day third in our pool, having started out at five. Duncan put us up at his (Dad's) house along with Village people, a total of 23! Sunday: Lurkers stomped on us in our windy opening game, but it was such sunny Sunday slumber, we weren't too bothered. Verity surprised herself and her marker by scoring two of our few points in the zone (after not having touched the disk all weekend [Actually, I think "all of the Playthings game" would be more accurate - Ed.]). Hurrah!!! score was about 11-3. After a two hour beach break on the grass watching the Shotgun-Violently match and UTI-Stan, we turned out a big effort in our match with Red, who beat us by one NARROW point, 5-4 with long points. Great spirit in that game, highlighted with Alice's tip top grab in the endzone (roughly: dropped catch, fall and twist left, catching it on her fingertips--- Luke can reenact). Our final game was against Fingeees or Sneeekers and was another fine-spirited game. We traded points to 4-4 in a very strong wind and then we pulled away to 8-4. Then the points dragged out with many agonising turnovers, especially in the final point. We won about 12-7 or 12-8 in the end. We sat back in the sun and watched the Shotgun - Stan final. Other results at the tournie: Chevron (ex Fingers) and Catch 22 displaced Headrush and Druids to 7th and 8th. Shotgun beat Stan, and Violently Happy beat UTI for 3rd place. All the games among the top 8 seem to have been quite close exept Shotgun's. Good news for British Ultimate, that there are so many strong teams now! Even better news was the performance of GB Juniors: 14th, ahead of SB, Fingeees and others. - Well done James! And finally Spirit: shared by Strange Blue and "Stroll in the village". Well done team! I think our team's number of ladies - five - was more than any other team's, and I think we can be proud of how well integrated our team was, with everyone taking turns in most positions. Let's build on this now! Big Fun! -------------------------------------------------------------------- Subject: Violently Happy Results from Leicester. From: Chris Mills Mainly for the sake of completeness I now shall reveal the (approximate!) results obtained by Violently Happy during the Leicester tourny: Sat VH 13 - Lurkers 2 (Our zone worked beautifully!) VH 12 - Uriel 3 (I'm not even sure I've got the right team!?) VH 11 - Headrush 5 (A BIG one for us. Psyched them out of the game really) VH 13 - Red 5 (Some ex-VH players in here so we *had* to beat them!) Sun VH 10 - Chevron Action Flash 6 (They almost murdered our zone...) VH 5 - Shotgun 13 (Sheer Shotgun class) VH 7 - UTI 6 (A young, quick team and very tough.) So, we ended up third (but, of course, we didn't win Spirit!) Congrats to Strange Blue - well played. And as people have said, don't let it slip. Keep up the hard work... Cheers, Chris. P.S. I'm glad we didn't have to play you again!