College Tournament 4 - Observation 1 - Class

I'm a little hazy from this past weekend in Vancouver at Canadian Uni Nationals with lots of Ultimate, partying, and the red eye flight home. The weekend was a spectacular event with more laughs than one can imagine. This was all made a little easier since we took the title for the second year in a row, but I felt, for the most part that this tournament was special for a lot of people. The weather and tournament were spectacular, and other than a poor choice in hotel rooms (that's the last one Ben) the weekend had it all.

Pictured Above: Not a Nationals shot, but TUBA (Torontula B) down in Cleveland preparing for the future (photo courtesy of Sticks).

Normally, I'm of the opinion that Canadian teams should completely convert to joining the UPA season and forget about CUPA and the like. This weekend I started to see some of the value of our own national series. The value is these tournaments are competitive and challenging with all the excitement that sports has, but at the same time the games (even with their brief tense moments) were classy and felt like a reunion.

The guys from "The red university that shall not be named" captured it best when they came and congratulated us on our final win, and then joked about razing us all game about the Leafs. It was all good fun and good entertainment. The finals had good booing like any non-partisan crowd should provide with two of the boos being from calls I made; we countered with more cowbell, some parents, and a group of loved ladies, which make any game a pleasure. I've actually never been booed before or called a female body part by a fan in the crowd, but I enjoyed it. The booing was good too, because it really made me question if I believed in the calls I had made.

The classiness went beyond the finals. In each of our games, each team we played was fun to compete against. We traded jersey color with some guys from Quebec (who still can't be named) over a phone call back to Toronto to a mutual friend. We had a spirited finish to our quarters against Saskatchewan in a game of face and battling over who had the better back flipper. Alberta, Mac, and the C-birds played good games with what I feel only had one bad call over all 5 games - very classy. The observers, for the most part, were simply observing our games.

Overall the two words of the weekend were "Epic" and "Legendary". Those two words go beyond our own team. I'm not sold on living in the city of Vancouver with it's lack of snow and abundance of Police who caught us red handed a number of times, but the Ultimate players and their hospitality make it an easy decision to visit the city again for more Ultimate.

In the end, I left/lost my GT #12 hat in the city. Let's hope the next owner of that hat experiences classy Ultimate like I just did. Also, I hope people enjoyed meeting Jeters on Sunday night. That guy rarely makes appearances these days, and some day I hope to meet him. The stories sounded interesting.

PJ