USA Ultimate

Anthony Gossard, Team USA U-20 Open		Tuesday August 7, 2012 6:05pm Well the tournament is over, and everyone has gone their separate ways. Most of us back to the United States having to get ready for school, while others stayed in Ireland for some vacation time. After two weeks straight of Ultimate it is nice to have some time to let the aches and pains heal up. The whole WJUC Tournament was hands down the most amazing experience I have ever had.

Competing against international play was something entirely new and intriguing to see how each country approached the sport of Ultimate in strategy and spirit. Also, meeting everyone from different countries and talking to them about how the sport has grown in their country was one of the coolest things to hear about, realizing that the sport we all know and love has spread throughout the world. 

The tournament was full of a lot of amazing plays and tough opponents. As the weather was less than cooperative in the middles of the week, games were postponed and cancelled on Wednesday, making the tournament director have the extremely hard job of finding new fields and figuring out a way to fit all of the cancelled games within the time slot. Sadly, the quarterfinals were cancelled so the top four teams of the power pool went straight into semi-finals. This meant one less game for everyone and I was disappointed because I wanted to play as many games as we could. 

Going into the finals I could tell that we were ready for it. During the bus ride to the stadium everyone was focused and getting in the right mentality. All of the nerves that people were feeling at the beginning seemed to be left outside of the stadium. As the game began it seemed like no one had nerves, and we just played the game that we knew so well. It was still an extremely good game; Colombia played hard and gave us the best game we had that tournament. All of the high play was extremely spirited which made the game so much fun. In the end pulled out the victory 15-10. There was no greater feeling than getting awarded that gold medal, knowing that all of our hard work that we all put in from tryouts to the tournament paid off. 

Thanks for supporting us and following our progress,

Anthony Gossard 

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For more information on these teams, visit USA Ultimate's 2012 WJUC page.  The list of diary entries is available at the bottom of the page.