USA Ultimate

2010 USA Ultimate Club Championships
Masters Division - Day 2

 
By: Tony Leonardo, special to usaultimate.org
 
The semis are set and the new has bested the old in the old man’s division. All four semis teams are the kind that could tangle with at least second-tier Open teams here at the Championships (if you think I’m kidding, remember the age and depth of JAM when they won in Open in 2008).
 
The teams remaining are young, deep in numbers and deep in talent, focused, hungry and prepared.
 
Led by defense, a fast Raleigh-Durham Boneyard team physically took out Calgary’s Fig Jam 15-7. Fig Jam had five players go out with injuries, several caused by collisions with Boneyard’s D. With a vibrant offense and speedy defenders Boneyard continues to dominate and push for a legitimate claim to be the best team of the field.
 
For Boneyard to prove they are deserving they must go through Ottawa’s GLUM on Saturday. Odds would go with Boneyard but the teams should match up well.
 
To get to semis GLUM did what they’ve now come to expect: beat Boston’s Death or Glory. Before the game, DoG’s Jim Parinella told me that GLUM has won four straight against them, but that none of the wins had been in an elimination game. "I guess we’re due," was Parinella’s outlook.
 
Unfortunately what DoG couldn’t do was stop GLUM from scoring up-wind in their tight quarterfinal. Behind crisp handling and perfectly placed upwind hucks, GLUM’s Dan Fassina, Dave Janssen and tall Montreal pickup Mark "Shaggy" Zimmerl thoroughly dismantled the tricky clam-like DoG zone defense repeatedly.
 
The wind was a factor in all games today but at one point DoG and GLUM, locked-in, had registered seven straight upwinders with neither side able to break. For DoG, however, they were down two breaks and needed more than trading. Buoyed by hucks of their own from Marshall Goff they kept the pressure on but GLUM responded every time with their handling and won 15-11.
 
After the game the question was posed, as it has been many times in the past, would the core of the team who has followed the Alex DeFrondeville and Parinella package for 22 years return for another go-around?
 
For Jim and the team, the question didn’t resonate. It was clear they still enjoyed the game, still found success and were keeping their options open. Did they know if they would be back to compete next year? "We don’t even know where we’re going for dinner," cracked Michael Cooper.
 
"This is my seventh ‘final year,’" said Parinella. For now, death for Death or Glory will be put on hold. It’s must be a sweet feeling.
 
The other team vying to defy the limits of the human body were the Beyondors, featuring a group of guys with resumes from past Nationals champions like the 1984 St Louis Tunas (Randy Ricks), 1985 Bay Area Flying Circus (Jeff Landesman) and, yes, the Santa Barbara Condors in 1981 (Buzz Ellsworth), 2000 and 2001 (Steve Dugan and JD Lobue). Basically this team was a collection of guys who have represented some of the best of the West Coast for thirty-some odd years, give or take a decade.
 
So what they lacked in legs they made up for with guile and guts. To get to quarters they had to defeat a team from the Northeast and their first chance at 9:30am Friday was, appropriately, against the ageless wonders on DoG. DoG had an advantage by having recruited some younger and quicker guys for defense. Boston held on to win going away which left the Beyondors with a last-ditch shot against the collective Rumble to at least prove that their overall 2 seed wasn’t a total disaster for USA-Ultimate, which had based their seeding on last year’s Beyondors roster lineup.
 
Rumble knew this was their "game-to-go" and that the Beyondors were vulnerable. With several huge catches from Jed Geary in the end zone, the unproven and oft-sloppy Northeasterners matched the Beyondors chilly offense point-for-point to 11s. At that point the west coaster’s prowess and past success found them with four sneaky D blocks, two by Jeremy Brown and two by Steve Dugan to lead them to victory.
 
Unfortunately that win got them a match with Surly, title winners in 2008, finalists last year and at Worlds 2010. To put it in context two Beyondors players when asked about their prospects against Surly said, "they have a lot of guys under the age of 35," to which the other responded, dejectedly and with a sense of impending finality, "they have a lot of guys, period."
 
Which may accurately have summed up their quarterfinal match. Surly, named and sponsored by the rather excellent Surly Brewing Company in Minneapolis, won 15-7. Watching the match you couldn’t help but notice how big Surly looked. Not tall necessarily, but just a bunch of broad-shouldered guys, all 29 of them. The 2010 title is theirs if they stay on course.
 
And finally the last quarterfinal featured the two upstarts in Chicago’s fifth-year team Real Huck and the Washington DC team Chesapeaked. Interestingly, the winner of this game would secure a strength bid for their region (either Central or Mid-Atlantic) should lightning strike twice and the anti-wildcard for Masters re-occur next year.
 
Chesapeaked, truth be told, had probably peaked before the game had even been scheduled. They started Friday at 9:30am by spotting Atlanta’s Ball & Chain an 8-3 halftime lead before battling upwinders at the end to take an upwind advantage at 13-12, then to give up the upwinder to make it DGP at 13s and then to answer back upwind to win 14-13, their third straight double-game point victory, the two prior having come on Thursday, 17-16 over Fig Jam and 13-12 over Le Tigre. In other words, a DC team having played, as they note in the program "a blistering schedule of seven tourneys in three years," had just played two tournaments worth of ultimate in three games.
 
Real Huck was the opposite. They basically cruised at the end of Thursday and first two games of Friday in taking 2nd place in Pool B with a 4-1 record (loss to Boneyard). Captain Johnny Hock told me, "if we play well, it’s easy. We’ll keep our lines fresh and everyone’s tuned in. We’re excited to be here."
 
Real Huck took an early 5-1 advantage and with a well-rounded and seemingly effortless, ego-less team, held the edge to the end in winning 15-9. Their price? A regional rematch with heavyweights Surly.
 
And finally the error must be corrected in regards to the Santa Fe team Le Tigre, those of the illin’ 3D jerseys. On Thursday I speculated, with no concrete information, that the team was craftily sandbagging games in order to save their best for the games that counted. Curiously, in this morning’s first game against GLUM which they absolutely had no business tangling with if they wanted to preserve fresh legs, tangle they did. Battling throughout they had the disc down 11-10 five yards from an upwind goal and the cap looming and… floated the goal shot. GLUM scored on a quick huck and basically rattled off a few to close out the game. The odds were extremely improbable that even if Le Tigre defeated the favored Ottawans they could advance if they failed to win their final game against Fig Jam. So why did they bother to contend?
 
Captain Mike Garvey told me, "Everyone thinks we’ve been sandbagging but we wanted to win all of our games so far. We were trying really hard but sort of realized after getting blow-out Saturday at Regionals that we needed to find the rotations that would work. We have 28 guys so the solution was just to throw guys out there and see what worked."
 
And, he added with earnestness and laughter, "we’ve lost enough times it doesn’t seem to bother us." On Saturday they face Charleston’s Slow Country Boil feature longtime UPA board member fixture Pete Giusti.