USA Ultimate

Open Division Atlantic Coast Regionals Preview

Virginia fifth-year handler Matt King is well aware that for most players in the Atlantic Coast, college ultimate will end this weekend in Wilmington, NC.

“I try not to let the magnitude of it affect me at practice,” King said. “But the fact that nothing is guaranteed beyond this weekend brings of a sense of urgency. There’s more pressure to perform at your best when it matters most.”

King and the ten other Night Train players that are graduating in less than a month are one of sixteen groups of outgoing players, and with just a single bid from Atlantic Coast Open Regionals to the College Championships, fifteen of them will have played their final games in school jerseys by Monday.

Fortunately for these players, the 2011 season has already forced them to start acclimating to Ultimate career changes. Due to USA Ultimate’s College Restructuring, the Atlantic Coast is much different from the one that they knew as rookies. When they began playing, the region stretched from Virginia to Florida. In the remodelling process, it dropped everything south of South Carolina and added the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Delaware.

More important than the geographic additions and subtractions themselves are the modifications to the Atlantic Coast’s power structure that came with them. Gone are perennial bid hogs Florida and Georgia, as well as the likelihood that multiple teams from North Carolina will be playing on Sunday. Instead, the region’s top team in the regular season was Virginia, and North Carolina-Wilmington is the only squad from North Carolina that is seeded in the top four.

So while this weekend will be the end for many, everyone’s focus is currently on what could begin. “For a lot of teams here, Regionals is more competitive now” said Virginia’s Nathan Schelble. “Without a traditionally dominant team, the door is open to step up and qualify for Nationals.”

Looking down the list of attendees, this weekend’s tournament is an opportunity for each of them to start something new.

For Virginia and North Carolina-Wilmington, two of the three teams in the field that have qualified for the College Championships in the last two years (the other being North Carolina State), it’s a chance to assert dominance over a pack of teams without an established frontrunner. For Virginia Tech, a team that has taken down both Virginia and Wilmington in recent games, an opportunity to add a gigantic leap to the considerable strides that the program has made over the past few seasons. Delaware, a team that had strong Championships performances in 2007 and 2008, could use the weekend to get back on track, and looking back to the early part of the decade, so could George Washington, William & Mary, or Maryland.

Others, such as Georgetown, James Madison, South Carolina, and Towson, get a breath of fresh air because they are immediately closer to the middle of the pack rather than the bottom, a position that any growing team would welcome. And for Liberty, Virginia Commonwealth, and Maryland-Baltimore County, teams that have never qualified for Regionals, the exposure to a new level of competition will certainly be a push in the right direction.

Regardless of skill level, King said that Regionals is an ideal setting for any player. “The competition at Regionals is fierce because nobody is taking anything for granted. As an individual, you want to prove to yourself that you can hang in that environment.”

Whether they are learning it for the first time or simply being served a reminder, Atlantic Coast teams will come away from the weekend knowing that they fought hard for more than just a bid to the College Championships.

“On our team, we have a lot of seniors,” King said. “We don’t want to stop playing together. We’ve played three, four, five years with each other, and the thought of not having that anymore has not sunk in yet. We’re not ready for it to."

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