Someday I’ll fly, someday I’ll soar. Someday I’ll be something much more.
Just so you know, doing a tournament write up in children’s storybook format is much more difficult than it seems. “Suddenly, WUWU heard the squeaky air-horn blow. They were in soft cap! This meant that they took the current highest score, added two, and then continued playing to that number of points…” It just doesn’t work.
We went into sectionals seeded first, and our first game of the day was against SLU. Though they lost many of their big players from last year, this was still a huge one for us. In typical WUWU fashion, we get somewhat lost, go on a wild goose chase to our fields, and still end up one of the first teams to start warmup. (As much as we moaned and complained when Chung started hour-long warmups last spring, it’s really helped us.)
So the fields: Buder park is legit a floodplane of some tributary of the Mississippi river. The grass was cut nice and level, but underneath, the ground was a sprained ankle waiting to happen. Also, instead of upwind-downwind, there were uphill downhill points.
The SLU game. We did a pretty good job of coming into this game with energy, but it dropped off for a while in the middle. We were down by 2 at half. SLU was playing in a way that it’s easiest to describe as “like SLU.” Very aware downfield, running through everything both on O and D, and calling stuff. (Note: We generally don’t call stuff as much as we should.) Points in this game went very quickly, and we encountered for the first time the “win by two” thing. Cap did come on, so we won by two, at 12-10. (We turned it back on for the end of this game. Whoo us!)
Next we played Oklahoma State. If anyone remembers anything from this game, feel free to jump in here.
Third game, after half an hour more than we usually have between games, (as in, half an hour) we played John Brown University. The biggest challenge in this game was to play to our potential, and not to freak out when we “should” be winning points but weren’t. But actually, we freaked out. This is where Halfmann’s presence and maturity on the field would have helped us. We fought for this game (I think this is when DIP D was first brought up) but lost pretty decisively at 11-8. Reality check time.
(Incase some non Wash U person is reading this, Halfbeast is out of eligibility because she went to a clinic her freshman year. (It did not help that she found out/told us all this on April Fools day. I was waiting for a “just kidding guys! I’m so psyched for the series” email the next day, but there wasn’t one.))
We had a super long by after this game. We watched the guys team play, and ate, drank, sunscreened, and changed socks. (I’m officially a multiple socks per day convert.) Phillip turned into was replaced by Julia (their kid is sick, so they took turns), and we went into the last game with a new perspective and some new ideas.
Oklahoma. We were short handles for this game, and the wind was picking up for the first time that day, (still pretty low on the portapottie danger scale, though). We played a lot of this game with two legit handles and two pseudo-handles (plus three cutters, duh.) The thing is, everyone on the team can throw, so we really didn’t have a huge problem. And it is good to not kill yourselves, you hear that handles? Won this one 11-5.
End of day one. We contemplated a sleepover at Halfmann’s because she lives about 7 minutes from the fields, but chose our own beds instead. Yay home-ish tournament.
There was a little bit of worrying, as the pool had some three-way nonsense going on. We beat SLU, SLU beat JBU, and JBU beat us, but we came second in point diff by 1, so squeaked into the championship bracket.
Day two.
SLU rematch for first place. This is the same, and 100% different from last year. Sectionals last year was miserable. We beat the Bettys in semis, then every team that still had a game left squeezed into one bathroom to be out of the wind. “Whatever you do, don’t change out of your uniforms.” Even though they’re soaking, and you’re freezing, and there’s so much water in the bathroom now that you’re afraid it might start raining indoors, too. SLU decided to change, so when things started up again, they pretty much threw the game just so that they could leave.
Anyways, this game was intense throughout. We started on O, but SLU broke for the first score. We traded points until we broke to make it 3-2 us. SLU was playing an H stack, feeding it up the middle to in-cuts, dump-swinging, then hucking it from both sides of the field. And they were coming down with stuff when it mattered. We were sorta just scooting down the field in an everyone-can-throw sort of way. (Everyone else calls this “calmly working it down the field.”) We squeezed a lot of things cutter to cutter in the force-side corner of the endzone, though. Simultaneously, a couple of our handles were delivering the occasional superawesome deep throw. Anyways, half was 8-6 them, same as Saturday morning.
In the second half, we broke twice to tie it at 8s. Game keeps going. Cap comes on at 10-10. Game to 12 again. SLU breaks to score. 11-10 them. The next point seemed so long. (and I wasn’t playing.) Every time there was a turn, things got more intense. Fookie drops a swing, and literally 10 seconds later, runs through for a D. Hillary had the most elegant two-fingered sky ever (pinky out and everything) and tied it up at 11s.
So we call a timeout. I’m pretty sure this is legit under soft cap. Just to point out to everyone that it’s universe point, in case, you know, someone wasn’t paying attention. This point wasn’t nearly as long as the previous. Our poach-this-way defense that we started using in the second half generated a layout D for Abby. Abby hucked it to Danielle, who read the disk right to score. For a WUWU win.
I got back to the dorm and grabbed a new bar of soap to take a shower. The paper wrapper said “The ultimate point of life is joy.” We proved a few things today. We can come from behind and win universe points. We can take our time on the endzone line… sometimes. Also, we have so much more depth this year. We were short a bunch of cutters this weekend, and everyone stepped it up. Watch out, Austin. We’re looking to repeat at Regionals, too.
