A Shout Out for Team Orange!

Hello all! This is Jamie hacking again!

It's been a pretty busy week with camping and work and the Olympics and all, but I'm pretty excited right now about something that happened today!

For the past five years, my brother, two sisters and an assortment of friends have been competing in a Ultimate Frisbee tournament at a church in our (sort of) area.

The first year, we had a put-together-while-we-were-there team, called Roberts (the company that provided the custard we all ate at the end) and got second. The second year, as Team Orange we got third. Then the next year, still Team Orange we got second again. The fourth year (Orange again!) we dropped again to third. But this year (keeping our ambiguous name), we scrapped it out and got first!!!

It's weird, because we seem to carry around this curse where we carefully put a team together a month before the tournament and then generally have some of our best players drop out at the last second for various reasons, leaving us scrambling for anyone we can get. This was the first year we actually had the full eight person team the rules allow.

This year's Team Orange consisted of 4 boys and 4 girls (which is rather unusual, since the few teams with girls generally have one, two, or in some cases three). It's tough because when you're playing a team with all guys, you have to start a girl against them. Most of the time, this works out, but for some teams it would be nice to be able to put out the all-male front.

Basically the tournament has a seeding round where every team plays seven fifteen minute games with a bye for the eighth, then we break out for lunch and a devotion and come back for the round robin tournament.
This year we went 6 and 1, losing only to the team that had won last year. We knew they'd be tough because most of them are actually our friends, some of whom we play with on a regular basis.

It was about 90 degrees, extremely humid, and we were playing in full sun. So we went in to lunch, exhausted and very drained.

The long lunch break and devotion rested us a bit, but most of us had stayed up the night before watching the Olympics until 11:00 and got up early with adrenaline already rushing. I, for one, had to go to my caregiver job at 6:45 and stay until 8:30. I literally could have fallen asleep on the sidelines at any given time. :P

We had to wait for the 8th and 9th seed to play each other and then we played the 7th seed and beat them to advance to the next round.

Playing the third seed was tough. My legs were about giving out underneath me, but we couldn't let up or we'd give up the second place finish and the chance at playing for first against the last top team and would have to battle it out with another team for third. We weren't going to settle for third again.

We managed to pull off a pretty good win over the three seed (I was dying by that time) and, with second firmly ours if we lost, we headed back to the field to play the team we had lost to last year. Last year's champions - and our very competitive friends with a 7 male/1 female team who all happened to be quite good.

I elected to stay on the sidelines for a rest and my younger sister joined the exhausted guys for a face off. (I will insert here that the team we were about to play had just come off from a come-behind victory with a very scrappy, four seed team who had worn them out quite a bit) All in all, we were both not very impressive in energy totals. I figured we'd get crushed and that would be the end of it.

Well, as I sat on the sidelines with the other two girls from our team and cheered my head off, our worn-out team swung out in front with a 6-1 lead. I figured we had a chance by then, but there were still seven minutes left in the game and they were still fighting to defend their title. (I've been steeped in Olympic broadcaster speak for the past week; it's rubbing off, if you couldn't tell. :D )

Somewhere in the scoring of the six points I went back in. The other team posted a slight comeback and scored three to our one in the next few minutes. At the two minute warning, I was back on the sidelines, the score was 7-4 and I was cheering and hoping that we could, after five years of going strong and fading at the end (sometimes because of injury, sometimes because we just don't have enough people to sub out to keep the energy levels up, or sometimes because the teams we play are just too stacked for anyone to beat), we might actually win this year and finally get those commemorative t-shirts that every winning team receives and also to beat the team that handed us second last year.

The fact that we would win wasn't accepted in my mind until there were twenty seconds left in the game and our team scored their eighth point, sealing the victory. No one can score four points in five seconds.

We actually won the t-shirts!

And a year's worth of bragging rights and a gift card and vengeance for the four seed team that had almost beaten them.

It was pretty awesome. After watching tons of Olympic champions, it was nice to win a sort of championship of our own. And I got a pretty sweet sunburn on my face. Hopefully it won't peel... :-\

I was pretty tired. And I wanted a shower. And a nap.

I got one of them, but I intend to sleep very well tonight. =D

Till next time!