Ultimate: US Open

The name Aurora comes from the goddess of the dawn in ancient Rome. Aurora is also a town in Colorado near Denver where US Open is held. Some notable things about the town are: it's approximately 1660m above sea level (or 340m below Sigurd Peak), when US Open happens it's usually around 35 degrees and smoky, and it also -- and I cannot emphasize this enough -- absolutely sucks.

The Tournament

The team generally arrived for a Thursday training camp. Since my job would skin me alive if I took another vacation day, I arrived at 1am on the Friday morning and generously woke everyone up and snuggled onto the sofa bed with my teammate. I also cannot emphasize enough how tiny and springy that sofa bed was.

Let me paint you a picture of why Aurora sucks: after waking up from your springy sofa bed you must fight for your life to get a crap hotel coffee in a buffet besieged with frisbee players. Then you must drive 15 minutes via some massive arterial road lined with various fast food franchises to the fields. For some reason, every morning, someone had crashed into a pole or another car on the way to the fields. There is no reason for this. Upon exiting the car you realize it's already 30 degrees out and there's no oxygen in the air.

Aurora does have a great sports complex, though, which brings us back to why we were there: to play frisbee.

Our first game was at 8:30am against Schwa. I was excited for the rematch since they smoked us on Traffic at PEC. We won the game 13-10, which was a balm to my bruised ego. In our next game we were up on Phoenix until they decided to break twice to win. Oops. After getting yelled at by the coaches, and with the wind picking up, we went on to defeat Starlings, a newer team out of the east coast. I asked if it was there first year as a team. It wasn't. Oops!

The day was done and we went to get pasta. I learned that my young teammates don't bring credit cards and just have everything on their phones, which makes me feel extremely old and also like maybe I need a new data plan since mine is $10 a day for roaming in the US.

On Saturday, our first game was quarters against Scandal. Again, they decided to break twice to win on universe. Certain patterns seemed to be emerging. We then lost to Bent. It wasn't on universe. Oops! Back to the pasta place.

On Sunday, we just had the single game, and we rematched against Phoenix and pulled out a win to come in seventh. We then watched a bit of the mixed team (in order words, infiltrated their shade tent). They came in seventh with us. The open team got bronze and some cool highlight videos online; hard to say which one is more valuable.

My Thoughts

I realize these short recaps don't do much to actually capture the games, but I feel like I must draw a merciful veil over our discussions on reset plays and throwing mechanics. For me personally, I feel like I played decently, but wasn't able to be as effective on offense as I can be. Once again I'm very happy with how my training has worked out, despite my initial resistance to so much strength training; I managed two weekend tournaments in a row without being injured.

Seventh isn't ideal, but the tournament itself was a perfect tune-up for Worlds, and I feel like as a team we definitely learned a lot. Sometimes I'm surprised at how much I can still learn about the game, ten years in.

August will be quiet, with no more tournaments until the big one, with my flight to Australia just 18 days away.