Aussies love their long weekends: Australians have long weekends every third weekend, or so it seems. (Maybe I’m just here at the right time of year. J) The Monday of my first full week here in Oz was Australia Day (similar in meaning to July 4th in the US). Over Easter, Good Friday and Easter Monday are public holidays, so everything is closed then. Additionally, the uni was off on that Tuesday. (I’m guessing that extra day is much like the random uni holiday at Boulder on the Friday of Spring Break, since it occurred during Fall Break for Newcastle Uni.) Monday is a public holiday for ANZAC Day, which is officially 25 April but is celebrated on the nearest Friday or Monday. The date was chosen specifically due to some battle in WWI (I think) in which the ANZAC (Australian and New Zealand Army Corps) got slaughtered on a beach landing in Turkey. More generally, ANZAC Day celebrates all Australians those who gave their lives in battle, much like Memorial Day in the US. I think that’s the last of the public holidays that occur while I’m here.
Road lines: The Aussies have their road lines all screwed up. To separate two directions of traffic, they use white lines, just like separating traffic lanes going to same direction! The only difference is that the lines separating counter-current traffic (did I use a good ChemE word in normal conversation or what?) are thicker than those separating co-current traffic. Yellow lines are used to mark areas where parking or stopping on the side of the road is against the rules. How weird is that?
Aussie seasons are backwards: The seasons affect so many things, like the time of year that the most weddings happen. Here it seems to be around November or December, since that’s the start of summer. A white Christmas is unheard of in most places. Anthony (group member here) had told me that one year, Mount Wellington in Tasmania had snow for Christmas. I didn’t think much of it until a couple minutes later, when it clicked in my brain that that’s the equivalent of snow around July 4th in the US. Right now, we’re in fall and on our way to winter. Weird. Starting last fall, I had a bit of winter, most of summer, a bit of fall, and then back into late spring/early summer.
A couple of Yankees in Queensland Ultimate: In case you were wondering, Yankee, or Yank, is the term used to describe Americans here in Oz. *ASIDE: Another less nice term is seppo. Many of the Aussie abbreviations come from the Cockney English habit of rhyming things. Seppo is short for “septic tank”, which rhymes with “Yank”.* The Queensland Ultimate reference is to the 2004 Australian Ultimate Championships, which start tomorrow.
2004 Australian Ultimate Championships (here’s the website)
DISCLAIMER: If you have absolutely no interest in ultimate—if your eyes glaze over and you start to lose consciousness when words like “huck” and “flick” are spoken/written for an unending time—then you might want to stop reading now and just skip this entire post. J I’m about to ramble on about ultimate for the rest of this post. I may have spent this past weekend in Brisbane, but I might as well have been in LA for as much of the town I saw. Typical ultimate weekend: fly in, play lots of disc, get lots of food and sleep, and fly out.
Five on the floor?: We’ve managed so far to only have automatics in the rental cars we’ve gotten. Since that’s pretty much all that are rented in the US, we hadn’t given it much of a second thought. Last night, though, when we got into our rental car, LJ couldn’t start it. Our first thought was that the battery was dead, but then he looked to his left and saw a gearshift with numbers on it, not letters (automatics on the floor have P, N, 1, 2, D). Then he found the extra pedal on the floor (the clutch) and was able to start the car. We were both really glad that if he was going to get stuck driving a manual, it was on the last trip, when we’d both gotten used to him driving on the wrong side of the road. I don’t think my nerves could have handled it on my first trip with him. J
A shout out to my team: Before I begin, I’d like to give heaps of thanks to the ladies who let me play and train with them this year (in alphabetical order, so as not to play favorites): Cindy, Caz, Eliza, Eva, Flis, Goatie, Heather, Katie, Kendall, Kristen, Luci, Margie, Penny, Sarah. They’re a great bunch of women and I’ve enjoyed training with all of them (or all of you, if you’re one of the team members and you’re reading this) and getting to know them. I also have to really thank Katie and Luci for running everything and handling the logistics of the team. From my experience as an assistant coach for Kali last fall, I know that organization of a team is not easy, and I’m glad that I wasn’t in charge of it.
A quick ultimate primer: I’m sure that I have a few friends and family members who have limited knowledge of ultimate (who may have decided to continue reading this ramble), so I’ll lay out the basics for you here. (You experienced people can skip to the next bit.) Ultimate is played with seven players from each team on a field that is as long as a football field (American football, for any Aussies reading this) and about two-thirds as wide. The defensive team throws (“pulls”) the disc to the offensive team, who try to advance the disc up the field by throwing only, i.e., you can’t run with the disc. A point is scored when the offensive team completes a pass across the goal line. (If any experienced people are reading this and are thinking, “But what about a Callaghan goal,” that question is irrelevant to this discussion since Nats wasn’t played with that type of goal. No Callaghan? Denied!) Then the offensive team stays at the endzone in which they scored and pull to the defensive team at the other end. The disc changes possession (offense and defense switch) whenever a pass is not successfully completed (called a turnover). Games are generally played to an odd score (17 or 15 being most common) with a time limit on the game, so that it’s not unending like baseball or cricket.
The brackets: Okay, so after getting a bit of explanation from Katie (one of our team’s captains), the brackets make a bit more sense, but they’re still pretty wack in my opinion. (Probably just my American cultural imperialism talking. J Fourteen women’s teams and 21 men’s teams went to Nationals. Here in Oz, Ultimate still has small enough numbers that any team that can pull together enough people to play (or think they can—see LJ’s post to see what I mean) is allowed to play in Nats (as they abbreviate it here). Of the twenty-one men’s teams, six of them were B teams for an associated A team, along with three different teams from Queensland, none of whom were associated with each other; of the twelve women’s teams, three were B teams. (A and B are the top and next level teams for an area.) Half of the teams were from the Sydney area (six women’s teams and ten men’s teams), which isn’t surprising since a quarter of Australia’s population lives there. Since there are distinct levels of ability among the men’s teams, twelve were pulled up into a Tier 1 draw, while the other nine were Tier 2. After pool play, the top two teams from the bottom tier go up to the top bracket. Somewhere in there, some teams play games called “repechages”, whatever the heck THAT means. All seems okay (other than that repechage bit) until it becomes apparent that the highest place that one of those two teams that get pulled up from Tier 2 can get is fifth. LJ figured out that it’s theoretically possible that one of those teams could go 13-0 and the national champion 12-1. Granted, it’s unlikely that any team that started down in Tier 2 based on their season record could beat the team that wins finals, but they should still have a chance at the champs.
On the women’s side, the fourteen teams were put into four pools for pool play on Friday (pretty standard). But then, instead of having a sixteen-team, single-elimination bracket, or even a top eight bracket and a bottom six, they have a weird, three-part bracket. The top six play out for the championship, the next four play what Aussies call a plate final (see my Terrigal towel post for more explanation of that), and the bottom six play out for seeding. (I’m sure that LJ will have something to say about the brackets, too, if you’re reading his posts. It affected the men more than the women.)
Friday pool play (at least for the women): We had one of the four-team pools (two pools had three and two had four), so we had three games on Friday. All our games for the tourney were 90-minute games to 17. We got to the fields much later than I would have wanted. *ASIDE: My years of playing for Colorado have left the indelible imprint upon my playing persona that I need to warm up for at least a half an hour before a game. That trait is good when I have the time, bad when I don’t.* Unfortunately, that meant that I played like crud in the first few points that I was in. We were playing the top seed in our pool, the Manly Rollers. (Manly is one of the suburbs of Sydney. They’re also one of the women’s teams with a B team, the Manly Skaters.) We finally managed to score one on them so it wasn’t a complete shutout. (You Colorado players out there will know why it’s important not to get bageled. Traditions in Oz relating to a shutout aren’t as harsh as in CO, but there are penalties.J) We were able to move the disc up the field pretty well even though we only scored the one point. We weren’t expecting to do very well against them anyways.
The next game we played the Leafy Sea Dragons (LSD) of Adelaide (South Australia), a team that didn’t exist a year ago. (Just for the record, last year was the first year that my team, Newcastle Sugar Mags, played at Nats. They came 12th, aka last when there are only twelve teams.) Our first game was a good warm-up for us, so we started the game like gangbusters. We had a really tight game, trading points back and forth the whole time. LSD is a really athletic but not particularly skilled team, since they’re so new to the sport. I had heaps of fun in this game, since they were really good-spirited and eager to play. I find it strange to be the person on the field who knows the most about the game, but I think it happened in this game. When the time cap went, we were up 10-9. [Editor’s note: In this tournament, most games were to 17 by a margin of 2. When the timecap went on, we added one point to the highest current score to determine the final score that was needed.] In this game, the score to get was 11, which meant we just needed to score the next point to win. We called a string on the line and were able to score that point for our first win at Nats this year. The team was happy enough about it that we had to take a picture with the scoreboard. J
Lunch break: We were given an hour lunch break. As is customary for most Aussie tourneys, we were served breakfast and lunch each day. Breakfast was cereal and milk, fruit, fruit juice, and bread with peanut butter and/or Nutella and/or Vegemite. Lunch was salad rolls, some of which had meat or cheese on them. Personally, I don’t consider a roll that’s stuffed full of veggies and has a single slice of meat on it a “meat roll”, but that’s the most carnivore-friendly sandwich they had. (LJ got screwed out of a meat roll and got stuck with a salad roll on the first day, off which he picked some carrots and lettuce for lunch.)
Player packs: Another custom for Aussie Nats is the player pack. Often the pack is a bag that includes a disc, a shirt, and various sundry items that you’re likely to forget or lose at a tourney, like sunblock (or suncream, as the locals call it). This year’s pack was a captain’s chair with the tourney logo on it and a disc. LJ lost his chair and I gave mine to Flis for her fiancé, Paul, who wasn’t playing in Nats. I thought about carrying it home to the US, but I’m sure it would cost five times as much in shipping costs as the chair is worth. Besides, the logo is way too small for me to use the chair as a way to brag about playing in Aussie Nats. J I’ll use my disc and shirt for that.
Bagel anyone?: Unfortunately, I’m not talking about the kind of bagel that you eat. Our last game of the day was right after lunch against Sultry Gold, the A team for Brisbane. I think that we were a bit sluggish from lunch. We actually did get bageled in that game, with the final score 17-0. They were really strong and we just couldn’t score, even though we had many chances. We had the typical problem of throwing the disc away when we got to the endzone. After our game, we watched the Newcastle boys play on our field (that was the only time that I got to see them play, since I went to watch LJ’s game during most of our byes).
Real pizza, woohoo!: Since it was the first day of the tourney, dinner was provided—pizza, yay! We managed to get a meat lovers’ pizza, which made me very happy. LJ got screwed with more veggie food—they only got one supreme pizza and the rest were veggie. Bleck. These were good American-style pizzas, with enough tomato sauce and cheese.
We were both so exhausted that night that we went to bed at 8:30 pm and got 10 hours of sleep. Boy did I need it.
Two games today: Game 1: We played the Manly Skaters (B team for Manly) and Sultry Gold (B team for Brisbane). I think at this point we were in some sort of pool play again, but I can’t really tell from the schedule. I just listened to where Katie told me to go. J We played REALLY well against the Skaters this morning. I had a stellar game, the kind of game that reminds me that I’m in tourney mode and my second day is better than the first. We won this game rather handily 16-2, which is why I had time to take some pix (see the pix website).
MVP prizes: Some of my teammates took it upon themselves to decorate shotglasses as MVP prizes, one for each game we played. After a game, each team voted on a player from the other team who played well and showed good spirit. Then two shotglasses were filled with Kahlua and the MVPs took a shot together. Eliza was often chosen the MVP by the other teams, and with good reason. She’s really athletic, has good throws, and is a really nice person on and off the field. But a number of our players got chosen as MVP, which shows how well-rounded the team was this year. Kristen, Penny and Eliza were chosen as MVPs, as was I. Yes, for the first time ever (and maybe the last, unless I move somewhere other than the US), I was chosen an MVP in an ultimate game, specifically the game against Manly Skaters, a Sydney B team. I’m sure that part of it was my somewhat excessive talking—since I was the person on the team with the most years of experience at organized ultimate, I was given the freedom to speak up quite a bit during the game—but I know that I played really well in that game. After the game, in the circle, the Skaters said that they chose number 17 as MVP. I could almost feel the gears in my brain turning as I thought, “Number 17? Wait, I’m number 17.” Eliza had been chosen MVP for all the games up until that one, so I was a bit stunned to be chosen. That moment just made my tournament. For myself, I really didn’t care how I played after that, although for my team’s sake, I was hoping to continue playing well.
Watching LJ: I had the good fortune of having a bye round when LJ’s team had their best shot of winning a game. They were in the big Tier 2 seed 8 and 9 match-up (the last teams in the tourney). When I walked over, he had just gone up for a great D and thrown the score to take them ahead 3-2. Unfortunately, that was the last lead they held in the game, as the other team realized that they were being beaten by a team full of out-of-shape men and two women. I’m sure I can’t do justice to just how… um… inexperienced (wow, that has GOT to be the most tactful I’ve ever been)… some of his teammates were. They had really good spirit, and it’s a good thing. I couldn’t imagine playing a real tourney with as few experienced players as they had.
Game 2 (much later): With the rather strange schedule, we had two byes, putting our second game of the day at 3:20 pm. We played Sultry Gold, the Brisbane B team. Again, we had a very convincing win—16-2—although it was rather windy and our throws got more than a bit sloppy. I made it my job to keep their one tall girl, Leana, from ever getting the disc. It was blatantly obvious from the way the team stacked and the cheering from the sidelines that she WAS the team. Once I started subbing with her, she had no chance. J At one point late in the game, she had marked up on someone else when we got a D. I switched to cover her and she said to me, “I was trying to get away from you.” I replied, “I know—that’s why I’m covering you.” (See next blurb for more thoughts on this topic.)
I probably should have pulled out my camera and taken pix again, seeing how far ahead we were, but the lighting wasn’t so good. (That’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.) Since we zoned quite a bit, I was needed help talk on the sideline. My high release was on in this game, as it had been all weekend long. (Glad that I got that worked out before I got here. Thanks, Dave and Neil, for the throwing practice.) I was able to keep breaking zone cups with it left and right. I’m so glad that I’ve got the throws now to be a handler. I’m not sure I could have made it through the entire tournament if I had to cut as much as a mid or a long. I almost didn’t make it as a handler. (There’s a bit of foreshadowing for ya.)
Random ultimate thought: I’ve decided that there are too many women’s teams out there that are fully intimidated by a tall, athletic woman. No, I’m not talking about myself—I mean that in many games, the woman that a team feels is their best player is the best only because other teams are afraid to mark her tightly (e.g., Leana on Sultry, or the girl on LSD that was chosen MVP of the tourney, both of whom I was able to shut down). In many games this weekend, I was able to prevent the tallest woman on the field from having an impact just by making her team think that she wasn’t open. Coaches’ soapbox: Any CU players out there reading this—just remember what I’ve said here when you’re at Regionals and Nationals. Just because someone is tall and fast doesn’t mean that she’s that good at ultimate. Cover her as well as you can, put a hard mark on her and just watch her crumble. J *steps down from soapbox*
My kingdom for a burger: After we drove back to the hostel (Somewhere to Stay, pretty nice place), LJ and I got showers and started talking about dinner. We really wanted a nice, juicy burger and fries. We drove over to a hotel restaurant, but burgers were only on their lunch menu. We came back to a Milk Bar (what the Ozzies call a convenience store) that advertised burgers and got a couple burgers and double order of fries take-away (take-out) and headed up the hill to the hostel. What a great meal after a long day of playing ultimate. We were so tired that we went to bed at 8:30 pm again. Boy, are we old. J
A sad injury note: In the big Wollongong/Newcastle rivalry match-up, Tats (Jonathan Tatham) broke both bones in the lower portion of one of his legs. He’s rather accident-prone and unlucky—the week before, he got a concussion when a car door hit him while he was on his bike—and really throws himself into the game—he busted up his shoulder weeks before making a layout to try to stop a score in league. I wasn’t there for the game, but I was told that Tats caught the disc for the score, got hit by a defender and went down. He held onto the disc for long enough to show he had possession (a couple seconds) when the pain hit him and he screamed in agony and threw the disc down. Send happy vibes to Tats so that he’ll heal up well.
Three games today: Our first game this morning was against Pepper, the Melbourne B team. We came into this game knowing that it would be a tough one to win. The B team trains with the A team and has all the plays and defenses of the A team. They scored quickly, but we answered back. It didn’t take long for me to get the hang of the different defenses they kept calling (e.g., D2 was their man). In most points, they started in some sort of zone and switched to a man D when the zone broke down. We were able to destroy the zone many times (my high release to Eliza was money), but they were just too fit (Aussie for “in shape”) for us to keep up. Early in the game, we had a very dodgy pick situation that was resolved incorrectly (the disc should have come back to me, instead of staying with Eliza for the score), but in the end, that one point didn’t matter. Vic B pulled out the win 10-8.
Game 2 was right after that against Wildside, the Sydney Central team. They scored on the first point rather quickly—I had marked up incorrectly, leaving my woman open to throw the score, for which I benched myself—but we scored back quickly. The game was tight in the beginning, but we managed to pull away and win with a score of something like 13-8.
Lunch break and then I was off to watch LJ play (at this point in the tournament, he had just about given up playing) before our game the last round. Our game 3 was against Womac, the combined Wollongoing and Macquarie Uni team. Wollongong is the big Newcastle rival—they’re in the Sydney area, but both their men’s and women’s teams are on the same ability level as Newcastle—so this was an important game to win. In the round before, Womac was getting soundly thumped, leading both sides agreed to call off the game at half to allow Womac to save energy for Newcastle. In hindsight, I think that this agreement was highly unfair to us, since it’s not our fault that they had a game right before this one. The game was rather tight early on, but Womac pulled away and won it something like 9-6. By losing the game, we fell from the 7/8 game to the 9/10 game.
Throughout the game, the Wollongong boys were being total jerks, throwing discs across the field between points and just being generally rude. I felt like it was really getting to me, at least, so I finally decided to do something about it. As I was walking to the line for one of the last points, I yelled something along the lines of, “Would you please get the h--- of our field?!? We’re playing a real f***ing game here!!” (Sorry for using such harsh language, but it’s the only way to get through to morons like that.) LJ says that I came off a bit whingy—I think it’s something about the tone of my voice when I yell—but I still got a huge cheer from the Newcastle guys, who were watching, and from my teammates.
Dinner and dancing: For dinner, LJ, Margie, Flis, Penny and I went to a great restaurant called Satchmo’s for dinner. All five of us ended up with meals we really liked, which doesn’t happen often at a restaurant. When the bill came, LJ looked at it and said he’d cover it. The girls were a bit astonished and tried to talk him out of it, but I reminded them that he has a job and they’re still in school. With that bit of persuasion, they stopped arguing. I also pointed out that they’re going to be doctors someday, so they can buy him dinner then. (Don’t forget, Margie, Penny and Flis! J You owe us dinner.)
For dancing, we all headed to the big tourney party. Every year the party has a theme. This year’s theme was Old School, as in the old school uniforms that all Aussies wear, along with 80’s music. *DIGRESSION: I can’t remember if I talked about this before, but all schools here have uniforms. Aussies think it’s weird that we didn’t have them, since all the public schools here did. The uniforms look just like what we would think of as Catholic school uniforms: knee-length skirts, white shirts and sweaters for the girls, and white shirts, ties and slacks for the boys.* My teammates made some cool skirts out of matching plaid material. I had no time to do that, so I just pleaded American and wore normal clothes. I did put my hair in pigtails with the plaid material to be a part of the team.
The party started off reasonably tame, but it got wilder as the night wore on, as parties are wont to do. I would just like to state, for the record, that I now have a perfect record in boat racing. For those of you who didn’t play college ultimate, a boat race is a drinking relay race. You line up a number of people into two teams and hand each person a beer. The first person on each team starts at the same time and when that person finishes his/her beer, the next person on that team starts drinking. The first team to finish all their beers wins. When we put up our first team, we got slaughtered, in large part due to the inexperience of the men. (You’re killing us, guys!) Important tactical note: you just can’t afford to have newbie men in a boat race. Our next team had three women and two men. I went first and even though I was inexperienced, I had enough hashing experience (thanks, BFHHH folks) to hold my own in the race. We slowly got behind on our middle people, but luckily we had Goatie anchoring our team. She started her beer when the last girl on the other team was halfway done but Goatie still finished first. Yeah, Newcastle! [Editor’s note: In case you’re related to me and you’re afraid I’m an alcoholic, that one beer was half the total amount of alcohol I had that entire evening. I can drink reasonably fast, even though I can’t drink much.]
I really love 80s parties. I had so much fun dancing to the music that
first came out when I was a kid, stuff like “Mickey” and “Like a Prayer”. LJ and I ended up leaving about midnight,
but the party was still in full swing when we left. I never found out how late it ended, but my teammates who stayed
later than we did looked pretty tired in the morning.
Speaking of swing: Our last game of the tourney was at 10:50 this morning against the Swingers of Perth. By this point in the tournament, I was dead tired. I really didn’t want to play this game, and probably shouldn’t have, seeing as how I played. I managed to really scrape up my knee to the point that it wouldn’t stop oozing (lovely thought, huh?). We came out a bit flat against them and just couldn’t get going. At 3-4, we had a monster point that must have lasted 15 minutes or more, including two timeouts (one of which I called and then promptly wasted on a turnover). Perth came out with that point to go up 5-3, which was a real turning point for the game. I should have really stopped playing, since I was at the point that I was too mentally exhausted to be of much use, but I didn’t. When I really jacked a forehand that could have scored, after my teammates had worked it up the field, I decided I was done. (It’s becoming a pattern for me to throw away a forehand as my last play in a Nats tourney. Oh well.) We ended up losing by three or four points to end up 10th overall. Since we came in seeded 11th, the team was pretty happy with where we ended up.
Finals, awards, etc.: Southside A teams, men’s and women’s, ended up winning both the Men’s Tier 1 and the Women’s titles. Our team tied for 1st in Spirit, which is pretty cool since we weren’t the last place team. *ASIDE: Spirit of the Game is the concept in ultimate that playing with ethics is more important than winning. At many tournaments, a team is chosen that played with the best spirit, e.g., the team that played very fairly and was polite to the other teams.* I was especially happy that we got it this year because I was afraid that my nit-picky attitude towards rules could come across as unspirited, when I just really want for everyone to understand the game and play it right.
Tourney organization: Overall the tournament was very well run. We had some minor problems with a lack of toilets at the fields—no portaloos (portajohns for all you Americans) were available, so we had to walk quite a ways to the toilets from some of the fields—and water not being put out in time for the first couple games on Friday, but otherwise I had no other real complaints. Even though they won’t see it, I was to thank everyone who made the tourney run smoothly.