Regionals Champs!

Team Box is still undefeated. We are so awesome! This weekend was excellent in all ways and I have a lot to tell you. This post will be about the tournament. Another post will follow shortly about my adventures on my extra day in the wild Kingdom of Tasmania (but rest assured it is filled with more bragging about what an incredible time I am having).

You can check out some results from the weekend here and more will be here soon.

The tournament was great. The fields were nice, lined, grassy fields. The games were on-time and fair. There was a lot of great, free food provided. The fields were a 50 meter walk from the shoreline of Hobart bay, which is incredibly beautiful. The weather was perfect on Saturday with wind picking up on Sunday.

We had a great weekend. Everyone played hard and fair and well and got along well and had a wonderful time. On Saturday we played four games, of increasing difficulty. We started off with a nice warm-up against a team from South Australia. We rolled them. Then we played a new, inexperienced but very talented team from Tasmania in the battle of the vulgar slang: Team Box vs. Bush. ("Bush" is the term Aussies use for wildlife. A weekend of camping/hiking is a weekend "in the bush".) It was very strange for me to hear a group of women yelling "Go Bush!" and for me to not join in. I did accidentally cheer for them a couple of times, but we won the game anyway. Next we had a great tourney provided lunch.

After lunch, we played the two teams from Victoria that we beat in last weekend's scrimmage. These games were tougher but we pulled them out. First we played Honey. We won 11-8. The game followed this pattern. We would get up a few, decide the game was over, let off the pressure and they would come right back, then we would step it up again, get up a few... repeat. We were glad to put that one behind us.

For the last game of the day we played Ishtar. The tournament format for the 5 entrants was a round-robin. We were the only team not to have a bye on Saturday. As we warmed up for our fourth game, we were clearly feeling it. We ended up beating Ishtar soundly (11 to 2 or 3) but the points were long and ugly and we weren't running our offense as well as we had earlier in the day. After that game we had a nice team dinner at a Thai/Vietnamese place and went to the tournament party, which was pretty typical, except for the fact that we lost one of our juniors and didn't get her back until the next morning. She was fine.

On Sunday morning the other teams had their last round-robin game and we had a bye. Because we won all the games, we also had a bye in to the Final, so we played one game at 4 PM. We slept late, went out for breakfast and had a nice long warm-up and worked on some new defenses. The final was against Honey again. The game was very windy and both teams were playing a lot of zone. We played a lot of 1-3-3 which they call "puppy-fence" here without a hint of a smile. We were trading points in the first half, but stepped it up to take half 8-7 and never let up after that. We won at the cap 11-8 again.

This makes us the #1 seed for nationals in April. Look out! (Last year's champions are not returning and last year's runner up is Ishtar, which is why we get the #1 seed.)

I played pretty well all weekend and threw and caught some goals. As always, I had the most fun playing D as I was assigned to 'assassinate' a player on the opposing team and got some big stops.

The victory was followed by a celebration. We went out for some vegetarian Indian dinner which was quite good except for the bit about Joy (one of the captains) wearing most of her curry home on the plane courtesy of a clumsy waitress. After dinner there was a typical mad dash to the airport, made more exciting by the wrong side of the road for me. After I dropped the team off I started my Tasmanian exploration. More on that soon. I'm tired. I'll get the pictures up on flickr soon.


Note: Tho Hoyas won the Big East Tourney as well, so all my teams had a good weekend. Look for them to stay in a loooong time when you fill out your bracket.