Solstice Recap

Dateline Eugene.
First, a little explanation for why this post took so long. I had been job hunting in the days leading up to Solstice, and got hired Friday afternoon right before I left to ride up to Eugene. Work started Monday, so since then I have been so busy that I haven’t had time to update the ol’ blog. Now for the good news; the place hired two of us to tackle this big project, and we were so good at it that we finished in one week, so they fired us on Tuesday (or “let us go” because they didn’t need us anymore). So now I have plenty of time to get back in touch with the internet.

Anyway, Solstice. Solstice was fuckin awesome. Yeager laid out the Jaeger Bombs team goals for the weekend before our first game: have fun, stay up on your teammates, and don’t go o-fer on the weekend. Check, check, and check.
In my biased opinion, I’d say we had the most fun of everyone in the open division. The sideline banter was hilarious, and we didn’t have any lame ‘sack up’ inspirational timeout speeches when we were doing poorly.
I couldn’t have been happier with my new teammates. Most of them are straight clownin, and the ones that aren’t are quiet and not at all annoying. I’ve played with a ton of different teams over the past few years and this group of guys seemed to be the most entertaining of all. That gets me reeeeal pumped for the season and glad that I am playing with the Bombs.

The playing itself was real sweet as well. We went 7-1, winning the open division and avenging our only loss to the UW team in semis. You better hope we don’t match up at Potlatch Sean, there’s no way I’m losing to you twice! Pretty much of all our games were close and saw lots of comebacks, but we pulled out the ones that mattered. Also, our team was in terrible shape and I think I was probably the worst offender. I hadn’t played ultimate since college regionals, and hadn’t done much exercise during that time either. Literally only a few points into our very first game, my legs were shot for the entire weekend. I’ve realized that when I get really out of shape, my hamstrings are the second thing to go (besides my lungs), so the rest of the weekend saw me shuffling around and only actually running when I absolutely had to. That meant some heinous defense where I would guard people by backing them by 5 yards because I couldn’t really change directions if someone put a real cut on me. It also meant that my deep runs were a lot more rare than usual, and less productive too. At work on Monday I was walking like I was constipated because my legs were so sore. Anyway, I managed to play the whole weekend in that condition never playing more than one point in a row until finals. By then our numbers of healthy players had really dwindled so I ended up having to play the majority of the points. I somehow managed to pull out my only layout D of the tournament in the finals despite being totally dead. It felt pretty sweet to layout a little upwards instead of straight horizontal, but the downside was that after I got the D I faceplanted and THEN the guy I d’d landed on the back of my head, smashing my nose into the ground. I took an injury sub, and my nose still hurts (according to a co-worker who used to be a trainer I bruised the cartilage). The good news is that I got to sit out the rest of that point which probably lasted around 15 (!) minutes. As our victory prize we won a cooler full of Full Sail IPA; pretty sweet.

I watched the elite showcase game which was Rhino vs Revolver. I have to say, if that team plays in the series as Rhino (and for that matter this year’s Monster team does the same), they better change their name. I heard there were only 3 returners, but I didn’t recognize a single player. Incredible. To be fair, the new rhinos looked pretty scrappy.

It was great to see a lot of people I haven’t seen much of recently due to geographic constraints: Alex Wells, Sean Rohan, Joaq,etc. The party was a great place to catch up with some delicious microbrews (whatever it was was better than Red Hook). Lowlights of the party included a super long bathroom line (Shy and I ended up crossing swords to save our linemates time) and YR’s super creepy dim room. Maybe they all had migraines. Bob did bring the clownin with his introductory question though: “So how was the open division?”

Team Summary

I think the Jaeger Bombs are going to be pretty sick this season. We did extremely well at this tournament despite being unconditioned and missing some of our top future contributors (the UC Santa Cruz studs, maybe some guy from CUT, etc.). It’s a blast to keep playing with Shy and reunite with Joaquin, and I can’t overstate how much fun all my new teammates are. Plus, Yeager is totally sick on the field, coming through with some impressive handler magic and huge D bids. It just sucks that practices are so damn far away from Oakland. But worth it.