Chowdafest Tournament

Two weekends after I returned home from travels, after only one Ultimate practice, I went to the Chowdafest Tournament in Massachussetts. It is one of the more important tournaments as it is the last tournament before all the teams in the NorthEast Region compete to qualify to attend Nationals. The rankings assigned to the teams based on how they play there, affects their rankings at Sectionals which occurs a few weeks later.

After basically 2 months of not playing Ultimate, I was exceedingly nervous that I would play one game be completely out of shape and be dead for the rest of the tournament. What happenned was not far off, but willpower carried me much further. Even in the warmups I was nervous that my teammates would realise how out of shape I was and really worked hard to appear fit.

First game, I went all out and managed to have some nice catches, throws and even a couple goals scored! We won our first game against a relatively easy team. Second game was also against a relatively easy team and we won that also. Third game was against one of the top ranked teams in the country and while we expected to lose we did put up quite a bit of a fight, scoring the most points against them of any team they had played until then. Fourth game was against a team which went on to beat that team for first place in the tournament. We lost by one point and while we were happy to have played a good game, all felt that with a little more time we could have potentially beat them.

Saturday evening I was dead. My calves were sore, my abs hurt, my back hurt, I didn't think I'd be able to play at all on Sunday. Thankfully after a little swim, some beer, and a couple go-kart races I felt much better :)

Sunday we had a relatively easy team for our first game and won. It was a great game for me to warm up my muscles little by little. Second game was against our NY rival team. Most of the time they're seeded higher than we are, but we had already beat them once this summer and were determined to again, and did. Third game was again against the Nationals level team, this time they absolutely destroyed us and we didn't even put up a fight. Our goal had been to beat Crafty, our rival team, and we had spent all our energy in doing so. Final game of the day, for third place at the tournament was a hard-fought game. By that point many of our guys were injured or too sore to continue playing. I had only enough endurance to play one point at a time and don't think I contributed too much... we lost by two points in the end, but it was a close game point for point.

Sunday evening I could not walk at all, I was so sore for a few days and basically just lazed around doing nothing. I decided on Thursday to do sprints and warm up my muscles again. I did sprints with Ben and by the time we'd warmed up, completed our 40m sprints and gone on to the 100m sprints, my left quad was already hurting. I kept on and tried not to push it too hard. After doing a couple 200m sprints, I stopped by the bleachers where my backpack was, or should have been. It had been there less than 60seconds before as we went around the track. I quickly checked the garbage cans, then ran to check all the exits. I couldn't find it anywhere. We didn't do anymore sprints after that. We checked the whole track, the bleachers, all the garbage cans, my backpack was definitely stolen. The saddest part is that in there were my jerseys from the Dominican Republic team at World's and also my New Zealand jersey, along with my water bottle from World's and my favourite skirt which I'd been planning to go out in afterwards.

So, if anyone sees my jerseys, get them back! It's so sad being robbed, someone stole my cellphone, driver's license, bank card, backpack, flipflops, $$, etc. They didn't even get that much money and nothing in there was of any use to anyone but me. Even my driver's license won't do anyone any good since no bouncers in NYC believe that New Brunswick even exists, they all think it's a fake! When it actually is a fake, they won't even have the indignation of nobody believing the province the card is from actually exists.