This last week I spent every single day with SOL. It was an eat, sleep, breathe ultimate situation. We spent our spring break practicing in the morning, laying out at the beach, dancing, and hanging out with our awesome men’s team Eauzone. I truly appreciate the places ultimate has taken me. This time, it was the beautiful sunny coast on the Gulf of Mexico. Although it was littered with these creatures, beach time was wonderful. SOL, partly named after the sun, definitely took in as much of its namesake as possible.
The Friday of our spring break week, SOL piled into their respective cars and traveled to Austin, TX for Centex 2011. I could not have anticipated what took place there. Our team met every single one of our goals thanks to new plays learned that previous week and the flow our team finally achieved. Props to the great job done this year by Without Limits and the Texas ultimate crew.
Saturday we woke up and enjoyed the best continental breakfast I’ve ever seen. We arrived at the parking lot where I got to serenade our team with our favorite song 🙂 Violin is the love of my life (only because I’ve played since I was 9 and music is basically my life) and incorporating that into ultimate was the best feeling ever. After that we got to our fields to start playing. Our first game was against Pennsylvania’s Venus. This game was difficult, no lies. We didn’t do too hot or implement many of our new strategies but we did see the potential that SOL could have over the weekend. Venus got away with the game to win 14-4. In our next game against Washington University, we scored the same amount of points. It was another frustration for SOL but we took what we could and learned from our mistakes. WashU is a good team that we also saw at Midwest Throwdown.
After two losses, SOL refocused and decided to bring back our spirit of funtensity. Sometimes SOL forgets the fun part of ultimate and we don’t play as well. Something changed in our next two games because we were able to get two well-fought wins. Our third game for the day was against Dartmuth’s Princess Layout. This team brought some intensity, but we met and even exceeded it. This game was hard fought but our new zone strategies helped significantly. SOL won this game 12 – 10. We played a game against Connecticut’s UCONN that changed the course of our Centex experience. We realized that we could win this game and met that goal. Our mindset was different, we used the new plays we had and found our flow on the field. SOL won the game 13-11. At the end of the day, we broke seed and went into the Centex dance off satisfied and ready to kick some dancing booty.
The Centex dance off this year saw new, more coordinated dances from the competition. We saw fire twirling, backpack girl cameos and some underboob flashing….. SOL was the last team to dance and unfortunately had the lights turn off in the middle due to the automatic timers. However, this did not break our spirit. We found out the next day that we got first place for the second year in a row! As a person who is not coordinated and doesn’t have any dance training whatsoever, this is quite the feat. If you want to see our first place dance check it out here!
Sunday started off with a game against Texas A&M Stacked. SOL won with a 9-6 score. The next game we played Texas Melee. From the beginning, we could tell this was a better team. After our other Sol counterparts (California Santa Cruz – Sol) it was our turn to take on Melee. After a victory, SOL didn’t do as well with Melee. We definitely had some cleanup duty to do in the words of Coach Pat. In our third game, we played Colorado’s Kali. With a completely different team than the one at nationals last year, it was cool to see how they would play. SOL realized our mistakes from the Melee game and started changing the game. After winning the first half, we took it to a final score of 10-6 and won! Our final game of the weekend was against Dartmuth’s Princess Layout for the DII 5th place spot. This game went differently than on Saturday. Dartmuth won the game 13-7. Sol did not regret the loss though because we ended up breaking seed by ten spots and played the best ultimate as a team since the beginning of the season. Dartmuth even cheered us up by asking for an encore of our first place dance!
Something I got really excited about was meeting the other Sol team at Centex!! One of the team members approached us asking “Hey, so what’s the practice plan?” jokingly and I immediately started up a conversation with her. She asked what it was like in northern Wisconsin so I told her about our chilly conditions and in return I asked about Santa Cruz. It made me really happy to meet another team with the same name and find out how cool they were. They even bought some of our awesome purple hats (which, if you are interested in one, just contact me through my email).
Overall, this past week embodied why I love this sport so much. SOL performed well, won a dance contest, survived living together for a week and found out that through hard work we can achieve the goals we set at the beginning of the season.
Especially after this weekend, I see SOL going really far in the next few years…..