Our first Ultimate game of the season, on April 1, was a total disaster. Just kidding! April Fools!! In all seriousness, the day did begin with driving rain and wind, but our intrepid group layered up, brought a tent, and talked about how fun it would be to do layouts. Our 1 p.m. game began in a dense fog, but that fog lifted about 10 minutes in, to captain Jerry Huang’s exclamation, “Oh! I can see the other team!” The game itself was fun, challenging, and ultimately successful. Eagle Hill took us by surprise with a couple of fast points, but we fought our way back, trading points for a while until we took the lead by halftime with a score of 1000-101 (that’s 8-5, for those of you who aren’t using the binary system). In the first half, highlights included Sammy Sullivan’s knockdown defense as mark in the cup, Jerry and Alice Ai’s great D in the endzone, two awesome catches by Allyson Xu in the midfield (including one that was definitely not meant for her), an impressive pass completion by a player new to the game, Elena Tskhvitaria, and goals by two other players new to our team, Alice Wu and Zhexuan Li.
Coaches were impressed with good handler movement executed by a wide variety of handlers, by aggressive short-field defense that created turnovers near our endzone, and by Jeanlukas Meza’s solid midfield D. Also defensively, Sammy, Alejandro Simon, and captain Forrest Gao collaborated in a high-pressure cup that was hard to beat. Forrest, notably, did an excellent job both as handler and in the cup with very few errors, and he, along with Jerry and lead scorer Kass Gifford, gave it their all and played most points of the game. Highlights of the second half were Jerry’s overhead huck to Jeff Wang for point #13, Alejandro’s clutch catch for point #14, and the Sammy-Kass combo that brought us home. Additional shoutouts to Kass for great movement (throws on the run), to Sara Sookoo and Vivian Gonzalez for keeping stats, and for bus driver Andy Olanyk for picking up post-game pizza and having it ready for us when we got on the bus. What a great start to the season!