USA Ultimate

Eva Petzinger, Team USA U-20 Girls		Friday August 10, 2012 09:30AM Hey, everyone who feels like reading this! Eva Petzinger here, representing the U-20 girls’ team. So, right now it’s about 9:30 am on our last day of training camp. All the girls are pretty up and hyperactive right now (some interpretive dancing might have occurred). It feels much later than it is because Jamie has been getting us to wake up progressively earlier every day to get us closer to Dublin time.

For that reason, we were up at five am and practicing at 5:30, which was pretty awesome. It was pleasantly cool, so that was nice. Although apparently before six is primary mosquito party time, so some of us are sporting pretty sweet bug bites.  

Did I mention that we’re leaving for Dublin today?! That’s the real reason everyone’s so excited. Our flight leaves at… nine pm? I think? And it gets in at seven am Dublin time, so hopefully we’ll get some sleep on the plane.

I can’t wait to see Dublin. At the moment, I’m kind of just picturing rolling green pastures, so I don’t really know what to expect. Other than getting to spend another week playing with this team, which I feel so lucky about that I can’t even talk about it. Before training camp, and even earlier this week, I was really nervous about the competition. But after spending these five days practicing together, I’m mostly just excited. Everyone is working so hard and the skill level is astonishing. Seriously, every time Nhi skies some girl way taller than her (e.g. me), or Marisa shuts down the top player on the other line, or Nina bids for the third time in the end zone and gets line paint all over herself, I get goosebumps just from being around such a high level of play. We’ve also been working on our sidelines a lot—starting yesterday at five-thirty in the morning—and we’ve developed a pretty cool system for keeping players on the field informed and for keeping players off the field engaged.

Also, our uniforms are really sweet. Thanks, Five. We’ll be rocking the yellow warm-ups in the airport, so I guess we’ll stand out. We’ll be like an army of highlighters who love Ultimate.

Okay, I should probably give Tiff her computer back now. Thanks for reading. Go USA! 

Eva

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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.