The time....is running...

Paganello 2009 in the books. Ended up finishing 3rd overall, sadly losing to Yellow Sub (who included Ross) twice. It did seem apparent when they kind of fell apart in the finals that they were clearly raising their game against us but I certainly won't take anything away from them as they cleanly beat us. Recap from the tournament is as follows.

Thursday: Met up with TC in Munich, flew to Bologna and then took the train to Rimini. Trains on Easter weekend in Europe are completely insane. TC and I ended up standing in the aisle in what ended up being a weird video game where more and more difficult things kept coming down the aisle starting with bags and escalating to people and eventually the final boss, which was a drink cart. Ridiculous. Got to the train station and who is the first American we run into? Chris Cline...awesome, never see enough of him.

We head to the hotel, check in, change and head to the beach where we expect to find out team getting ready to practice. We arrive and are the last people to get there and we say our hello's, get our hugs, and hit the field for practice. Trying to play beach ultimate in extremely deep sand on 4 hours of sleep is not easy but we make it through. We head to dinner, catch up with everyone and have a blast. We head briefly to gellato, go watch the opening fireworks, and then head home.

Friday: We liked our pool, last year we got stuck with the infamous "American team that Jumpi doesn't know how to seed but is actually really good." and ended up coming in 2nd. This year that was not the case. We had three games including one in the arena (much larger field with stands right in the center of the action). Ended up with a point diff of like 35+ (games are played to time not score). Started to get a feel for what my body felt like on the sand. It was clear morning games were going to be rough with afternoon games being where I felt the best. The other funky thing about this tournament is you have 2-3 hour byes which makes for lots of warming up and cooling down.

Anyway, we celebrate our victories with another great dinner. The downside was that the check took approximately forever to come. We took that out on the restaurant by stealing the bottle of limoncello and going to the arcade where 6 of us played arcade olympics. Apparently my stellar skiball skills were not enough to overcome our opponents. Got home fairly late and went to bed.

Saturday: Opened up with a game against the Yellow Subs. Sadly did not come away with the win. We had some trouble converting on O and didn't get the turns we needed. It helps when you make a clean D bid and have it called back on a contested foul. We finish up by playing a squeaker against a German team and then an Austrian team that was supposed to be much better but we kind of jumped all over them and hung a 13-7 ish score on them which came back to help later.

Went to dinner at a pizza place that was fun. Headed out to the main party dressed up. Started a conga line with two teammates and ended up on-stage with them. Went home fairly early focused on day 3.

Sunday: Opened up the day against Cota Tequilla who is the local Rimini team. They are very, very quick and have been playing on this deep ass sand forever and that helps. They also run really good beach ultimate and make some incredible plays. We ended up going to double game point and coming away with the win. While that's going on we learn that the third team in our Gold Pool lost to the Austrian team we beat the day before (which made no sense as they should have been much better). We move on to play this next team that has a guy who is like 6'5" and one really good lefty thrower. The rest of their team is pretty solid and more importantly manage to come up with a series of ridiculous bailout grabs. We end up losing by 1, but because of the 3 way tie that happens we end up in 1st thanks to the big win over the Austrians. This sets up a re-match with the Subs in the semifinals.

We're playing in the arena, and unfortunately the game before us runs long so we lose a lot of warm up time. We start flat and the subs take advantage getting a couple of breaks on us. We try to fight back and get a few breaks here and there. It was in this game that I think I really proved to myself that my knee is back to 100%. Off a pull I came down covering Schmucker. Right on his cut I jumped his move and his thrower, trusting Schmucker a bit too much, and I attacked the cut and got a beautiful layout D. We ended up getting the break but we just didn't have enough left and ended up losing again.

Sucktacular.

Went out to RIDICULOUSLY awesome dinner to make up for it but with me, I really can't take the bitter taste of losing out of my mouth.

Monday: Had the third place game against the team with the super tall guy. Its windy, we don't really play well, neither do they. The spirit gets kinda shitty. We gut it out at the end and take third. All in all a good weekend and still easily my favorite tournament in the world (with Nationals and Hawaii being close seconds).

Until next year...

For now going from the beaches of Italy to the beaches of Delaware. Fire it Up!

(212....yeah....lots of eating in Italy)