Central Plains Sectional Preview

Hey here’s a crappy bit of a preview of this weekends sectionals touranment for Chicago’s representative teams. Crappy because: 1- I didn’t get the time to put into it that I wanted, and 2 – It’s coming out the day before the tournament. So to anyone reading this… you should probably get moving you don’t want to get into South Bend too late tonight.

Machine:

I’m sure this team is psyched to get to sectionals this weekend. These guys will have plenty of time to catch up on paperwork, schoolwork, do sudoku puzzles, and Vijay will be studying for his upcoming board exam in the downtime between the beatings they’ll put on teams. On the plus side, it will give some of their rookies a chance to get some field time. They have to be careful though against a few of the teams there or they risk not doubling up the score against them.

Haymaker:

How do you beat this team? Pretty easily actually, usually all you have to do is show up. If you’re not familiar with the term “cavalcade” look it up, because it describes pretty acurately the commitment this team has to unforced errors. It’s not just that there are a lot of them, but they happen so regularly sometimes that they seem to be part of their gameplan. Hopefully the return of captain Dan Baker to the offense will have a calming effect on this team. Haymaker’s success will likely be tied to how boring their offense is. They don’t have the height to make mistakes in the air and the less flashy they are the better. This is also a team that is anchored by it’s defense. We’ll see how they come out this weekend as well because without them picking up some slack this team won’t be able to get over the hump. The potential of this team has been close to being realized though, and if they can bring everything together this weekend, it should turn into one hell of a performance.

Story this weekend – There’s 2 bids, and 2 teams vying for 2nd place in the section. Haymaker vs. Skeet is unquestionably the match-up of the weekend. Grab a beer and come see some sweet foul calls.

Lush:

Ex-Briefcase is working to get back to the glory days by… changing their name. In reality this team does have many new faces from two years ago, the last time they made it to nationals. That year was a great year in that all three major Chicago ultimate teams moved on to nationals. This team has known who it’s major rivals would be for a spot this year for a while now (peppermint bon-bon and ICE), but a new player has emerged in the CN who has given them a run lately and is the #1 seed in the section going into this weekend. The 2nd best story of the weekend will be who will emerge as the #1 seed out of the CP, Lush or Abusement Park. After pasting them at Mo-Town 13-3, they have lost to Abusement 13-7 and 13-9 in their last two meetings. Now with Abusement on their home turf, this match-up becomes very interesting. Especially with Lush’s failure to have beaten either ICE or Bon-Bon yet this season it will be a nice leg-up for Lush if they can secure the #1 CP seed.

Gambit:

Here’s a team that is probably not expected to make a run at the two top teams in the section this weekend, but who has been knocking on the door of an upset more than a few times. While this team won’t turn too many heads with flashy play, they’ve got the determination to make some noise along with a chip on their shoulder about being assumed to be the 2nd tier co-ed team in Chicago. Unfortunately for them it’s a correct assumption.

Food and Liquor:

This team, I admit, I’ve got a special place in my heart for. I’m a big fan of many people on this team, and I don’t know if there’s a better guy in chicago than robbie moy. (He’s a roommate of mine and does much of the cleaning up after us, I pretty much have to put in a plug for him.) That said the goal of this team this weekend is plain and simple. Beat Gambit. If I were them my goal would be to make sure that they don’t lose to SPUN again like last year and try to make sure they get a high enough seed to make regionals, but this is another group of chipped shoulders that would love to get that victory above the team everyone assumes is just above them. Unfortunately again for them, they’ve yet to beat Gambit this year. But I believe in them! Their best performance against Gambit was two weekends ago at CHC so hopefully they can improve upon it.

Just Liquor:

Another team with a singular goal, beating their parent team Food & Liquor. This rivalry would seem to be a bit less contentious since the two teams often practice and scrimmage with each other, but after some of the things that Whitey has been saying about “Idiot Liquor” as he calls them, I can imagine how badly this team wants the upset.

SPUN:

Despite the abscence of their matriarch Lisa Weaver, who did an amazing amount for frisbee in the Chicago suburbs (West league is actually not that crappy, it’s worth a try), this team is back together for sectionals this year. Their only other tournament this year has been the St. Louis Classic back in May. While they did pretty well there they had several players that won’t be with them this weekend. Another team I have a special place for in my heart since I learned to play at Wheaton pick-up longer ago than I care to think about. However since I have almost no idea who it is that will be playing for them this weekend, I forsee a realistic goal for them to be to win a game or two. Unless of course they have Frank the Tank. Then they’ll beat Food & Liquor again.

Nemeis, Dish:

The women’s division at this tournament is going to be so boring they haven’t even bothered to post the schedule for it. If they can’t be bothered to post the schedule then I can’t be bothered to write anything about it. It was hard enough thinking of anything interesting to say about the Co-ed side.

About the Author

Rich Aycock played for FIST at the University of Illinois is currently a member of Haymaker. Ask him about politics sometime.