Nemesis spent the past weekend at the Naperville Polo Fields for CHC. There was a decently competitive field, including all our sectional/regional rivals (Pop, Hooptie, Dish, Spicy Tuna) and some out of town regulars, such as Showdown and Scandal. The 22 womens’ teams were split into 2 power pools of 5 teams each, and then 2 B-bracket pools of 6 teams each. Our pool consisted of us, Showdown, Wildcard, Dish and Starkist. The day began with a few of us on an eventful parking duty, which was far more stressful than one would anticipate… especially with Beef in the crucial role of car director. As a disclaimer, I may have indulged in a lot of the free beer available on Saturday night, effectively erasing from my memory most of the details from Saturday’s games. However, since I promised a recap, here goes…
After a first round bye, we faced Dish in the second round. I was a little curious about Dish, given their results against Spicy Tuna (a team which, judging only by individual players, should be a pretty solid team) and Hooptie. The game started with us trading points for the first few, but then we got a few D’s and pulled away from that point. I have no idea what the final score was, and I’ve had too many concussions to bother remembering details, but I think it was pretty lopsided. They proved to be a solid team that clearly benefited from many years of playing together, but in the end our D forced more turnovers than they were probably used to, which led to a number of easy points.
Second game was against Wildcard, a team from the great state of PA. Other than heckling their injured captain every time I went on the field, I don’t remember much about this game, surprise surprise… I promise my memory returns by Sunday… but score reporter says the final score was 13-6 Nemesis, with enough time to go watch Machine for a bit.
Third game was against Starkist, a Canadian team from Toronto. Didn’t know much about them, except we noticed they only had 8 players…. which meant we ran them a lot. Silly Canadians…. 13-5 Nemesis.
Final game of the day was against Showdown, a rematch of sorts from Chesapeake just a few weeks earlier. According to our secret spies on the sidelines, Showdown was particularly amped for this game, constantly peering over and watching our games whenever they had timeouts, breaks or byes… and it showed. They came out of the blocks hard, forcing a few early breaks, and held the early lead through the late stages of the game, which proved insurmountable. The final score was 9-13 Showdown, and this rivalry has proven to be something that could be a heck of a lot of fun in the future. Especially with them calling a particular member of my team “shorty” and all that. wtf.
After a ton of free beer, and not nearly enough free pizza to balance the alcohol (but that was a personal problem), Sunday came around with a first round bye and quarters matchup against the winner of Top Shelf and Madison Club women. To my surprise, Madison was playing with the one and only Georgia Bosscher. I didn’t pay enough attention to the game to notice how big of an impact her presence made to the outcome of the game (I was too busy recording my version of “Buy U a Drank” on Rippl’s “I am T-Pain’ iPhone app), but I’m sure it wasn’t negligible. We prepared to face Madison for the quarters game, only to find out once the game started that Georgia is nowhere in sight. Without her, these guys looked far less intimidating and we beat them pretty handily. No idea what the final score was (Score Reporter why are you letting me down?!), but it was also pretty lopsided. As a college team though, they were definitely not too bad.
The semis game was against Scandal, in our fourth meeting of the year. After having played them at Boston and twice (on the same day) at Chesapeake, we were kind of sick of playing these guys, but nonetheless they always provided some solid, spirited (if not feisty) competition. We came out strong in this game, and I think we were tied or lead pretty much the whole time. With some stifling dump defense, we forced a number of inopportune turnovers on Scandal’s part that led to easy scores. The final score was 15-9 Nemesis….a solid win and an improvement upon on our closer previous margins. The re-appearance of Sally, fighting through pain and despite being ravaged by a bear in a UFC match the weekend prior, definitely pumped the team up a ton. Thanks, Sal!
Finally, the much anticipated rematch against Pop is upon us. Despite having attended all the same tournaments this entire season, we somehow managed to avoid each other up till now. They had just beaten Showdown in the semis matchup (who had beaten us), and we had just beaten Scandal (who had beaten them), so it was sure to be a good game. The game starts off with Nemesis on O, but we promptly get broken and Pop goes up 1-0. After a little while, Nemesis is down 3-5 and things aren’t looking so good. However, a few people step it up HARD in this game, and before long the D team has turned it around for Nemesis with some hand blocks, layout D’s, run through D’s, oh-excuse-me-i’ll-take-that D’s and we take half at 8-6. Shoutouts to the girl I smacked in the face with a disc on a fake so hard she called an injury… oops, didn’t mean it! After half, we are all business. We go up 10-6 at one point, and after a marathon 25-minute long point, hard cap is looming. At 12-10 we have already won the game, but we have the last point to play out anyway. The O line is on but turns it somehow (yeesh), and Pop scores the last point, despite losing the game. Prizes ensue, including free Chipotle and Five Ultimate jerseys!
Congrats to Nemesis for an awesome tourney win and for bringing the CHC cheese belt back to Chicago, and to Sensei for running a great tournament. 
P.S. All the views stated here are solely the views of one occasionally overly-verbose and opinionated person, and not representative in any way of Nemesis as a whole.
