Another one bites the dust

After 6 days in paradise I can cross another tournament off my lifetime list of tournaments I have to go to at least once. Kaimana 2009 is in the books and what an experience it was. I'd heard from a lot of people that the tournament was comparable or better than Paganello and while I found that hard to believe I can now say they are equal but different. Paganello has a spirit and an aura about every game you play and every team you play that makes it completely unique. And its in Italy so the food and wine is incredible. However the city is only so-so as its a resort town. All of the teams at Kaimana are not as bought into the spirit that they preach at the opening ceremonies. However the environment of camping, the main tent with food, alcohol all day, and parties all night, and the backdrop of being in easily the most beautiful place I've ever been to make the two equal in my mind.

My Kaimana experience started on Thursday morning 2/12. I hopped on the first of my many flights. My itinerary was Philly to Atlanta, Atlanta to LA, LA to Honolulu. As someone who has only flown west coming back from Europe or going to the West Coast I didn't realize how much further Hawaii was and how the time difference really messes with you. Its an 1:30 flight to ATL. 4:30 to LAX plus you lose 3 hours in the time difference. And then another 5+ to Hawaii with another 2 lost in time difference. Needless to say...ouch. But when you walk out of the terminal and its 10pm at night at 70 degrees all your frustrations melt away instantly. My former co-worker recently moved to Honolulu with a new job and she picked me up from the airport and gave me a little tour of downtown and then we headed back to her apartment where we stayed up tile 12:30ish catching up.

Friday 2/13: My friend had to go to work in the morning so I got up, had coffee and breakfast on her 21st floor apartment balcony overlooking this view

I spent all morning there waiting to hear from Dusty and his crew of people who were flying back into Honolulu from Maui where they had spent the past few days. The Rhodes traveling circus consisting of Jamie, Dusty, Jamie's girlfriend Jess, Future Philthy teammate Jimmy, and two Phine ladies June and Lauren, picked me up around 11:30 and we set our straight for the Kona Brewing company to wait for the rest of our teammates to land around 4:30. The drive around the Island was absolutely breathtaking. Ocean on one side, varying beautiful lush landscapes on the other all with Dusty spinning tunes on his laptop, songs which have now forever been intertwined with my Kaimana experience.

We arrive at the Kona brewing company around 1pm? We order lunch and sampler's all around. Little did we know, happy hour started at 3pm and needless to say quite a few rounds were ordered at the reduced rate. Around 4:30 we start to get the texts and phone calls indicating the rest of our teammates have landed. We finish up and head off to the campsite to set up our tents. Lets just say that my engineering degree could not overcome the alcohol and I proceeded to have issues with my tent all weekend. This was partly due to the constant 15-20 mph winds on the beach where we were camping. We set up and head over to the opening night party. Much more beer is consumed. The night starts to get fuzzy. I ran into a few ex Upenn-ers who have relocated to the West Coast. Dusty and I got into a heated discussion about Pike 09 and beyond which I don't remember most of but we were both really fired up. At some point I walk back to the tents to go to bed. Needless to say I wake up still feeling intoxicated.

Sat 2/14: Happy Valentine's day! Our team basically won the schedule game all weekend. We roll over to the fields for breakfast at 7:30 and enjoy the opening ceremony at about 8am. We then have 2 hours until our first game for us to sober up, hydrate, and get ready to play. Our first game was against The Pulse led Stanford Bloodthirsty. The game started off with Stanford telling us they only had light jerseys because of 5ultimate and they made us change out of the best ultimate jersey I've ever owned.

This game was definitely a feeling out process for us. We had players from a lot of different teams all trying to mesh together. We played well despite our lack of intensity and cohesion and pulled out the game 11-8 (I think). Second game was against Skeletor the defending champions who are Stanford alums. Apparently they brought an army last year and had very low numbers this year. This didn't stop us from having a classic let-down game that we lost 8-7. Our last two were against local Hawaii teams where we pretty much coasted and started drinking.

We were pretty sure we ended up in second and had a game at 10:15 the next day (winning the schedule game again). Dinner was mexican. There was a lot of throwing tin foil balls into people's beers at the dinner table. We went back and took cold showers at the campsite in the dark (not fun) and headed back for the party. There was a pretty good live band, some hula dancers, and then lots of flip cup. We introduced some Aussie's to the game and some old guy who was terrible but comical. We ended up voting him out in the first round of survivor even though that round he hit it on the first flip. The tournament was trying to be more "green" so we all only had one cup. This made survivor interesting as people were moving around on the table to go more than once in a round. Went to bed much more sober and was awoken by the wind again and had to fix my tent at like 4:30am.


Sunday 2/15: Woke up and headed to breakfast. On the way there ran into Dusty who informed us that we had actually won our pool and had a bye until 11:30 against Sanban who was easily the most fun team at the tournament. They were recent college grads from Japan who had tons of energy, great cheers, awesome spirit and a great attitude. The game ended up being a bit of a dogfight early. They loved risky throws, specifically inside out breaks to get the disc moving. When they worked they were great, however it was windy enough that they were very risky at points. We had a ton of fun playing against them and they learned what it was like to play against the Trey last back defense where he had numerous D's just boxing out the smaller Japanese players.

We then played Ono, a Jam/West Coast team that is typically one of the best teams at the tournament. We knew we had secured our spot in the A bracket and our fire was lacking for this game and it seriously hurt us. We also knew in the back of our minds that we were playing with 12 guys and this game really didn't matter for us. We ended up getting blown out pretty badly, something like 15-6? We got over it pretty quickly with a bunch of beer, showers, and watching the women's game.

Sunday night was the spirit ceremony where they gave out a shot of tequila and a disc to a spirit player from each team. For some reason Eugene decided this was me which was kind of flattering but I think the main reason I was picked was because it was my first Kaimana. And because Trey wasn't at the party. The ceremony dragged on way too long and we all started getting bored. Eventually the DJ got going and we all got dancing. The downside was the DJ wasn't really all that good so the music left something to be desired. Had a blast dancing with some of the Phine ladies and then went back to the tent to get some sleep for our early game.

Monday 2/16: We had our first early game of the tournament. And it showed by our complete lack of effort to make it to the fields on-time. About 20 minutes before game time we had Trey, Butter and I at the field. About 5 minutes before game time we had maybe 6 with 3-4 on their way. Very little throwing occurred before the game, almost no running. It didn't look good. We were playing the Southern Dandies. A team with the Kid, The Count, Jim Paranella, Asa Wilson, Hensley, and others. We throw our 7 on the line to receive. We proceed to throw about 30 passes but we score. We then force a turn and I hit Trey on a bendy flick when his guy poached and suddenly we're up 2-0. Then we decided to give up 3-4 in a row to go down. And we proceeded to start chipping away, working our asses off, and earning our way back in. We ended up winning something like 15-11 in a truly awesome win.

We then got a bye and then played Voltron (and I'll form the head) who is a combo Seattle team. We finally started to really run out of gas in this game. It didn't stop us from fighting extremely hard for every point we lost which was something to be proud of but it was frustrating to not represent as well as we wanted to. We ended up losing something like 15-6. There were some flashes of good and some prolonged periods of bad but all in all, it was pretty hard for any of us to be upset about it. Hell, we were in Hawaii.

We re-filled our beers and headed over to watch the finals, ate some poki, and headed to take down our tents and go to the house we'd rented for the next 3 days.

Tues 2/17 - Awesome, awesome 6+ mile hike to a waterfall.

Wed 2/18 - 2 hours of body surfing in ridiculous currents/breaks and then some jumping from rocks at Waimea bay.

What a trip...I'm ready to go back.

Case Rase 2010, That's what she said, I'll form the head, BUTTER! sha-shu shu shu sha-shu BUTTER! sha-shu shu shu sha-shu