IT Consultancy and Adventure Racing

http://www.ultimate.org.nz/pages/tour/2006-7/WaM1.htm

Around the end of december Marc van der Poest asked around the Wellington Ultimate community to see if anyone was interested in forming a team that wanted to train for the 2007 tour events, so as it would involve a bit of structured group pain, of course i was eager.

Christmas and New Year obviously got in the way, so it wasn't the best time of year for a lot of people to commit, but for about 5 weeks we tended to get around 10 people at a time along to twice weekly sessions. Simon Cowie had to pull out at the last minute due to injury, but we were lucky to pick up Eliot to replace him and Andy Neal came down from Waihi beach, so we ended up with a respectable squad of 16 at the Hato Petera college in Akoranga at 0830 on the Saturday morning to find out who would be the first victims of this new force in NZ Ultimate.

Unfortunately only 4 teams had actually entered this event (the reasons for which of course being a great source of speculation), so it was us, credo from Christchurch and bluefish and the ginga ninjas from Auckland.

Unfortunately we were'nt afforded the luxury of a warm up game, and after a few throws and stretches we went up against the old guard in the form of bluefish.

After the shock (to both us and them) of us scoring the first point, the expected order of things was resumed and we were soon 5-1 down, though we managed to do some good work on shaking off the shell shock later on to lose 17-4.

Next up the 2 newcomer teams came together, and we continued to build on the work we had done at training, to beat the ninjas 17-5 and head in to the credo game feeling confident as the had had a much closer game with the ninjas.

Our 3rd game as a team started well, with us dicing well with an (admittedly under strength) Canterbury side to in into half time only 9-6 down. Scoring the next up and downwind points after the 'soft cap' hooter had gone (effectively making the hand to 10) we were right back in it, when credo, disk in hand near our end zone, heard the 'hard cap', scored the point, and went off to play bluefish in the final ;-(

We managed to make the first half of our 3rd/4th playoff pretty hard work, but managed to ease away in the 2nd half to win comfortably, and leave the ninjas to take the spirit award off to the party at Vans.

Due to the number of teams entered (the women did even worse than us with 3) the general consensus was that we would hold a mixed hat tournament on the Sunday to mix things up a bit.

My 'spin my feet' team was heavily stacked with long players, but unfortunately the wind had come up (though the sun was definitely still shining) and our first opposition, landfill, had all handlers (penny, will, eliot, van, rob...), and not suprisingly taught us a 10-2 lesson!

Next up we played paper who we managed to take about 10-6 to put us into a semi final against several of the Wellington team in banana.

We lost Tom at lunch time so convinced Gareth to play a few points, but he couldn't save us, and the 2 teams we lost to met in the final.

After banana took penny out in the first 30 seconds with a thumb damaging collision, they played cat and mouse through to the soft cap at 5 all, before banana showed the benefits of being a more rounded team (and having more Wellington players ;-) ) to score the next 3 points and take the game.

Thanks to Sherif for the organisation, and to the weather for indicating that summer may finally be starting!