The Pre-Season Tour Continues

To me there are three ultimate seasons: the pre-season, the spring season, and the fall series. Usually the fall and spring you play with you club team, but the pre-season is wide open and this year I am taking advantage of it yet again to play with top-level club players from other teams besides the Condors. I always enjoy it. Don’t get me wrong, I love the Condors and I have made life-long friends in my last 7 seasons in Santa Barbara to go along with winning a few titles. But there is something about playing with new people at tourneys, where the whole life of the team is that one weekend, which I enjoy. I've already played in one tourney, the Leiout beach event a few weekends ago with Carbomb. This weekend I’m playing in Tempe with ZiPPo, which will consist of club players from last year’s Condors, Bravo, Ring and Tampa’s Bulge. I played with them last year and we came up 3 points short of a perfect weekend: made new friends, partied like rock stars, got some sweet preferential treatment with our local grizzled vet that got us on the “good” fields all weekend and almost won the whole thing, losing 17-14 in the finals.

I’m confident we will have the same results in everything we had last year in regards to partying and good times. I’m looking forward to playing with classic ultimate icons like Mickey and Jimmy Price. I’m just hoping that we can secure those last 3 points this time, should we make the finals, and bring home the Tempe trophy. A win would be a solid accomplishment with JAM ’06 making their 1st appearance of the year (apparently there is no pre-season in San Francisco) along with other great ringer club teams. And it would be nice to win a major tourney 6 years after the only other time I’ve won there, marking what would be the longest I’ve gone between winning a tourney two different times. I’ll try and get a recap up next week.