Tuesday, April 19, 2011

Bashionals and league predictions

Congratulations to Conquer or Quit who finished 3rd at Bashionals on the weekend. They also took out spirit and Konrad Wallace won MVP. So sounds like they had a good tournament.

So Autumn league is about to start. Once again I will make some suspect predictions. I don't know what happened in summer league but I suspect I was wrong.

Div. 2: Having said all that I am very confident in saying that Shazam will take out div. 2 this comp. With Annunaki a clear second (no bias here). Expect 'Jonno's team' to struggle with only 1 player registered so far.

Div. 3: Again the sheer number of teams in div. 3 makes predictions difficult. I am going to pick 99 Luftballons and Annunaki to fight it out for the title, with Go Fetch and King Truckers fighting it out for 3rd and 4th.

Thursday, April 14, 2011

Bashionals this weekend

Believe it or not, this seemly quiet weekend is actually a really important moment for club level frisbee in Australia. Several years ago, a set of regional qualification tournaments were set up to trim down the number of teams attending nationals to a maximum of 16 in each division (things had been getting very big and unwieldy, especially in the open division, before that). For some open teams, the new regional tournaments have become the end of their season. If they didn't qualify for nationals, there were no more tournaments for them for the year.

This weekend, a new national tournament is being run for the teams that didn't make it to nationals. As with all these things, in its first year it's a pretty small and low key affair. But hopefully as more players come into club level ultimate and competition for nationals spaces becomes fiercer, this tournament will give an increasing number of teams a great goal for their season. After several years on the drawing board, Bashionals has come to life. Hopefully, from here it will just get bigger and better.

This year the ACT will be represented at Bashionals by Conquer or Quit. I had the great pleasure of joining in for a few of their drills last night and they're a really exciting team to be flying the flag for Canberra. I'm sure they'll have a great time in Melbourne and it will be really interesting to see how they go. Hopefully some kind of twitter-hashtagy thing will pop up to keep us all posted on their progress. This is real low-fi ultimate - no fancy shirts, sports medicated diet plans or business class flights here (a bunch of the guys are driving to Melbourne for the weekend). If ever you've wanted to get involved in tournaments teams like this are an awesome way to get hooked.

Good luck boys! Hopefully we'll get a write-up from someone when they get back (hint hint).

Sunday, April 10, 2011

Autumn League and Pickup

After a few months spent in exile at Kaleen, Autumn League is back at the home of Ultimate in the ACT, Dickson fields. That means more space, more teams, more convenient beer and fewer mosquitoes. Autumn league is the pinnacle of the ACT frisbee exerience. The cool still air makes the disc fly flatter and truer for longer, there's no sun to get in your eyes and you can watch the final with your hands wrapped around a mug of warm soup (or at least you could when I was a lad).

Anyway, Autumn League is awesome, and this league might even feature appearances from some of the ACT's most fragile, shy and endangered players.

League starts on the 20th of April and runs until the 8th of June. It's on Wednesday nights, at the Dickson fields (Antil street, Dickson). Division 3 kicks off at 6:30 and Divison 2 starts at 7:45 (someone had better correct me if I'm wrong...).

The registration page for Autumn league is now online at http://www.afda.com/rego/showcompetition.php?competitionid=990.

If you just can't wait until the 20th for your next frisbee game, Pickup has resumed on Sundays at 5:00pm at Downer playing fields (cnr of Melba and Bonython streets, Downer). These details were apparently decided BEFORE the end of daylight savings so contact Erik (erikjanlindeboom at hotmail dot com) if you want the full story.

Monday, April 4, 2011

Factory finish with Silver

Factory lost to Wildcard 15-9 in their final in Brisbane this morning. It sounds like the first half was really close but Wildcard ran away with the game after half-time. Congratulations to Wildcard for winning the tourney and to Factory for a great result. We look forward to the ticker-tape parade and heroes welcome when the team gets back.

Sunday, April 3, 2011

Factory are in the final

Factory won their semi final at universe point over Melbourne's Honey today. They play Sydney's Wildcard in the final at 10:45 tomorrow. Follow forcesideline and #auc2011 on twitter to see what's going on.

This is the first nationals final an ACT women's team has played since 2003. Let's hope they can notch up one more win.

Nationals update

OK, I've been a bit slack updating, so it may come as a suprise to you that the Australian Ultimate Championships (which all the cool people just call Nationals) is on right now in Brisbane.

The ACT has two teams attending; Fyshwick United in the open division and Factory in the women's division. You can have a look at some of the previous posts to see how these teams have gone in their last few tournaments (Eastern Regionals and the Brisbane-Canberra Invitational) but both teams have had some good results so far in the season.

Nationals started on Friday, and since then it's been a pretty turmultous few days in both divisions.

First the bad news: Fyshwick won two of their three games on the first day, but haven't managed a win since then over any of the real contenters at the tournament. Their results from day two mean that they're out of contention for the pre-semis and the highest they can now place is fifth. After several years at the top end of the results ladder (FU have made semis in all of the last three years and the final in two of those years) this is a really disappointing result for the boys and I'm sure they're all wishing it could have worked out differently. That said, there's still a bunch of good teams to play and beat left in their part of the draw and I'm sure they'll put in some good performances today and tomorrow.

Now the good news: Factory came second in their pool of 7 teams, losing one game to Sporting Team Box Athletico United (the reigning champions) and winning all their other matches. This includes some really important wins over Sand Dunes from Sydney and Kaos from Perth, both firsts for the season. It sounds like the team is feeling positive and is fired up to play their quarter final today. Their opponent for that game is still undecided (it depends on the result of a game that's probably ending right about now). Either way, it's a great result for Factory and hopefully they can keep it up all the way to the final on Monday.

If you're looking for results or more info there are a few sources to try. First, Simon Talbot and the Forcesideline crew are providing regular updates and blow by blow commentary for a couple of games on twitter. Summaries of the day's results are here. There are also some slightly sketchy results on the tournament website. And finally, there are a mix of perspectives and posts here. Between all of these different sources you can usually get a reasonable idea of what's going on.

The women's final (hopefully starring Factory) will be on on Monday and Forcesideline will definitely be covering it (they've even been trying to stream video footage so keep an eye out for that). If Factory make it through either get access to Twitter at work or stay home and claim you have an unsightly and infectious rash.