2002 CLUB EASTERNS/ BOSTON INVITATIONAL

A brief little rundown for RSD fans.

1) I've never been to Easterns before

2) I played in the Open Division with a Benjy Usadi team (in case you were curious what city Ben was in this weekend) Thusly, however, I do not have much details on the Elite division.

3) A squall came on Sunday. 10 minutes prior, tournament director Henry Baker drove around on the golf cart and told all the teams to get ready because a storm was coming in 10 minutes. Nice work Henry, that was impressive prognostication. The rains and winds came quite furiously, but lasted no longer than it takes for Usadi to crank an upwind huck to gain a yardage advantage. Have you ever seen Benjy do this? Damn.

4) The competition in both levels was quite high. A lot of top teams were here. I saw almost none of them play however, so you'll have to figure it out for yourself. Chicago beat Electric Pig though, and Ring of Fire beat New York, and DoG 2 lost to someone, and Chicago lost to Dog 1 in semifinals (the Dog folks say, "the teams were split evenly"). Boss Hogg beat Twisted Metal in Elite consolation finals. Phoenix from Ottawa won the Open open division, defeating the surprise contenders Brooklyn Knights who erased a 1-4 Saturday with a upset Sunday wins in quarters and semis. I don't know who won the Women open. I don't even know who won the Women elite, but I am pretty sure it was Ozone versus Godiva. Godiva beat Backhoe in semis.

5) Gosh there were a lot of great Ultimate players here this weekend. Some real dope players from all over.

6) Oh, I guess there was some thing about teams going to Easterns having to be on some sort of UPA roster, and this had to be the roster that is/was/will be equivalent to a Worlds roster. Something like that, to prevent, er, some sort of Worlds pickup maneuvering maybe? All I know is that a player from Toronto who was considering moving to new York to play with Ambush couldn't play at Easterns at all, because if she did she couldn't play with Ambush at Worlds. Or her Toronto team, here at Easterns, and then go to Worlds and then not play with Ambush in the Fall. Or something like that. Some roster stuff.

7) Right, so Ambush defeated Urge (Toronto) in the Consolation finals. 0-4 on Saturday, 3-0 on Sunday. Urge came out of the Women open side (also known as Easterns, as opposed to the Boston invitational Elite Division). See, they did the thing, that thing, where the top teams from the Open side get to mix it up with the bottom teams on the Elite side. This led to Urge beating Bnogo in semis and Ambush over the Peppers.

8) Uh, oops, maybe Rare Air might have been in the finals instead of Ozone. I just realized that. Anyone? I'm going to receive death threats again via email, I know it. Anyone know what happened here?

9) really, there were some damn fine teams in attendance, and the great thing here is that it really is a great tournament for teams not in the top 8 of the nation. Because there's a good 10-12 women's teams out here all roughly on the same level at this time of the season (Ambush, Fuse, Bnogo, Rogue, Philly Peppers, Urge, Buttercup, others)

A lot of teams too! 10 womens in the Elite and 10 in the Easterns. That's a lot.

10) There were 14 High School teams on the fields on Sunday. They came from all over Massachusetts. They all seemed to have soccer jerseys with their school name and the words Ultimate. I talked to one team from Connecticut, Ridgefield, with dope Adidas duds and the swank pinstripes. They were a first-year team but had already one a few Connecticut tournaments (they told me there were approximately 12 high school teams in the state, but Ridgefield was one of the few public schools.) Anyway, they lost some game here, probably because some of these Massachusetts teams are real good.

11) There were 16 open Elite teams and 10 Open Open teams. All told on Sunday, that makes 50 full teams in attendance on Sunday in 6 or more divisions of play.

12) They didn't do the top Open versus Bottom elite in the Open division, which was probably a mistake, because some Open teams only got to play one game on Sunday. Then again the Open teams played FIVE STRAIGHT games on Saturday to nearly everyone's amazement. No one could figure out why there wasn't one more pool play game on Sunday and a bye on Saturday. In any case, the tournament started early Sunday 9am and ended in a timely fashion with all games ceasing around 4pm or so.

13) It was kind of humid out there.

14) Ring defeated Dog in the finals. They tell me that Rhett Nichols threw it to Pat Hard in the endzone but Ray Parrish caught it.

15) The entire weekend I only saw 2 disc spikes: one from some jerk on the pathetic Yeuth-And-Age-Sia team and another from Josh Ziperstein, playing with Dog, in the finals. Both were fairly mild. No real razzmatazz. Please don't read this the wrong way. I am sure the guy I called a jerk isn't really a jerk. Not any more that you or me, that's for sure.

16) There was a sign somewhere that said "Grand Masters: meet on field 2" and I am pretty sure I saw Bill Baer, Sas, Skip Kuhn, maybe Chaiken and those folks playing some team. So maybe that became another division? Grand Masters? anyone know what this was?

17) Lyn Debevoise. He said he was relieved that College Nationals came together well.

18) My lasting memory: Playing a rousing game of "Defend the Lamppost" at 1:00 am with Iain, Rob, Jeremy and Amanda from Tufts, in some rocky outcropping type of park near the school. The game consisted of scoring two points for hitting the opponents lamppost in the bulb, 5 points for breaking the bulb (it was well encased and protected), 1 point for hitting the post, and 1 point for mac'ing a missed throw to your teammate, who must catch it one-handed.

We never broke any bulbs but succeeded in knocking those Discrafts around pretty good. Final score was 16-15, sudden death win for Rob and myself.

Next report: Poultry Days

This was written for Rec.Sport.Disc.

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