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.

From RSD, the first announcement of 2009 Nemesis:

This is a call-out for players to try-out for Nemesis, a Chicago-based team that competes in the women’s club division. Nemesis will be holding open scrimmages and several weekends of open and invite-only try-outs starting at the end of April. During the season, we practice on weekends in Chicago, so out-of-town players are encouraged to try out.

Please send any questions to captains@chicagonemesis.com.

Regionals was this past weekend in Wisconsin at the same fields as Cooler Classic. No cheese cows, but with a greater prize within our sights, Nemesis set out to claim one of the two bids to Nationals for the Central region.

We were in the pool of 4 (since one team dropped out), so enjoyed a lovely first round bye, and 3 pool play games to 15 on Saturday.

First game was against Thrill Show, the 2nd team out of Madison. Nemesis came out of the gates hard on this one… 15-3. Of course I don’t remember anything that happened in this game, so I assume there were some hucks to tall girls, sweet D’s and nicely flowing scores.

Second game we decide to make things more interesting by splitting the team into 3 lines that would play exclusively with each other the entire game. Hayride played a gritty game, with some big hucks when you were least expecting them, and some crazy catches left and right that made the game interesting. I don’t think it was ever very close, but they definitely made us work for each point and mounted a valiant comeback in the second half. 15-10, Nemesis (and I’m pretty sure Team Candice lost the challenge, badly).

Last game of the day was against Madison, which of course is always a pleasure. Georgia’s hucks were on the money, especially to the speedy Wisconsin receivers (you know, the ones that dress the same even though they’re not related, so I’m told), but other than the Bosscher show, Madison gave Nemesis plenty of chances, which we gladly took. 15-8 Nemesis….

Dinner at the Thunder Bay Grill consisted of my table getting the shaft with the crappy waiter with the crappy service. How the tables that sat down after us got their food and paid for their dinner before we received our entrees still baffles me… did they have to go kill the bison first? Come on now. And of course tip was included, so I couldn’t subtract for poor service. Well played….

And finally, Sunday of regionals. Our first game (semis) was against Hooptie, who we’d only played once before at CHC. As the ex-Mojo-Clutch vs. Nemesis rivalry was in full effect, we knew this would be an eventful game. Nemesis came out strong, taking the lead early on and pretty much never looking back. Hooptie has some fast, athletic girls to match ours, but we managed to make fewer uncharacteristic turns than they did, winning the game 15-9. The observers got a lot of action in this game, which is about all I remember in terms of details. I don’t remember it ever feeling too close for comfort, but then again, I think I have muddled the two Hooptie games in my mind. More later.

On to the finals against Pop, our arch-rival who has gotten the best of us a number of times this year. We stormed out to a 3-0 lead, but then immediately relenquished it, and allowed Pop to pull ahead. Once Pop got it in their head that they were ahead, there was no stopping them… at one point it was 12-6 and though we played hard, they played harder and came up with more of the 50/50 shots, some ridiculous layout grabs in the endzone, and some timely D’s and skying catches. Had some of those gone our way, the score would have reflected a far smaller margin…. but that’s ultimate for ya.

Celebration for Pop ensues while we gear up to play the backdoor final against… Hooptie, all the while breathing in cigar smoke from the celebrating Minnesota teams on the other sideline. Since our first semis game that morning, we had a 1.5 hour bye before the finals game, which allowed us to rest up and relax while cheering Machine on. Hooptie, on the other hand, had played 2 straight games, one to double game point against Madison, which meant that they were looking pretty tired before the game even started. While Nemesis was doing their warmups, Hooptie was sitting on the sideline hydrating, eating and resting. Funny enough, both teams came out a little careless, with a stupid number of turns in the first few points. Once both teams calmed down a bit, though, we showed then that we had the legs to outlast them… I think we took half 8-5 (but this may be entirely fictional), and though we let them back in a bit in the second half, we still came out with the win 15-10. Our first game point was ridiculous though – we huck it downfield about a yard from the endzone line, call a timeout, manage to eff up the play and turn it…… they score and we have to try again. Second game point Meagles cuts like a madwoman in the endzone until someone throws it to her for the score. Tourney MVP right there.

A bottle of whiskey, some shotgunning and more beer later, everyone is happy, wasted, and ready to celebrate. Some people shower, others don’t, and a party ensues…

Photos by Candice T. Apparently playing for Nemesis means 90% goofing off and 10% blanking other teams.

Sectionals wrap up? Please, what is there to wrap up?

*sigh* here goes…

Sectionals in South Bend was a riveting one day tournament consisting of Nemesis, Dish, Sauce, Purdue and Valpo. Written from the perspective of Nemesis, this tournament was more for us to work on specific things (different looks on D or speedy and efficient points, for instance) than to worry so much about the specific opponents at hand.

First game against Sauce. Who? Is that like Saucy Nancy (the college team), but grown up? Who knows… They scored the most points on us (5) the whole day, but I’m going to chalk that one up to first game lack of focus and inefficient (read: many turnovers) points. They beat us deep a few times by catching defenders flat-footed… throws that you really didn’t expect them to put up, they did, and discs that you didn’t expect them to catch… they caught. So then we decided, enough f’in around, let’s get serious… they scored 4 in the first half and just 1 in the second. 15-5 Nemesis.

Second game was against Purdue (I think). College teams get suckered into club tournaments and then are almost guaranteed no more than 3 points against non-college opponents. I don’t know why that’s enticing, but whatever. 15-0 Nemesis. This one ended as quickly as it began, despite the few ex-standout Purdue players on the team.

Our third opponent was Valpo. Again, the college thing. This game ended in 34 minutes, 47 seconds (minus halftime). A new record? Very reminiscent of old Northwestern v. U Chicago games before they got halfway decent. 15-0 (also reminiscent of NU v. UC, haha)

Final game of the day was against Dish, the second seed in the tournament. Nemesis focused on conversion percentages (the equivalent of a plus/minus in hockey), which helped energize the team and deter people from grabbing the beers, margaritas, mike’s hard lemonades and other goodies that appeared in coolers on our sideline. This game marked the end of our shutout streak but we were glad to be done with it all the same, mainly so we could start drinking.

Drinking, reindeer games, silliness ensues. From the other results, it looks like the only games that were worth playing the entire day were Valpo v. Purdue and Dish v. Sauce. That’s 2 out of 10 games, or 20%. Again, riveting weekend in South Bend… perhaps one of the most exciting moments of the weekend was realizing that the McDonald’s on the way home from South Bend was in CST (whereas South Bend was in EST), so we would actually travel back in time and be able to have McDonald’s breakfast (OMG! It’s only 9:45am here!!! OMG OMG OMG! Egg McMuffin and a sausage burrito here I come! *Drool*!!!)

Editor’s Note: The above post is the stated personal opinion of Candice only and does not reflect the positions or opinions of the Chicago Nemesis Womens’ Club Ultimate Team (CNWCUT) or its individual members. Well, except for one, obviously.

Nemesis had a pretty solid weekend at CHC, holding seed and placing 3/4. Nemesis was quite motivated coming into the weekend, as two of the three teams that had beaten us this year made the trip to Plainfield as well. With 5 straight games to 15 on Saturday, I’m not sure what Akira was thinking, but such is life, and here goes…

First game of the day was against Hooptie, the ex-Mojo-Clutch Michigan team that we lost to last year at Regionals. Not only that, but the lingering ill effects of the “shove heard around the world” were still fresh in some of our minds, even though neither player involved was present. I don’t really remember much about this game except that we took half, showed them who was boss, and won 15-9. Looks like the loss of those Ohio folk, and whoever else got knocked up, really hurt them.

Next up was Wicked, nationals qualifier from last year, but word on the street that they weren’t as strong this year. True to their rep, Wicked definitely struggled in this game. Inopportune turnovers really killed them, as Nemesis turned around and easily capitalized. 15-7, not much to talk about here except that their tallest and most athletic player stepped back to handle more often than not. A 6 foot ex-varsity basketball player as a handler? Come on, what a waste… get some little asian to do it instead.

Third game of the day was against Hayride, the team from Oklahoma. They were seeded last in our pool, but the score doesn’t really reflect that. We made this game way harder than it should have been by turning the disc a bunch, and definitely should have beaten them more efficiently. 15-7, nbd.

Next was a game against the Canadians, PPF. Aside from Val’s love affair with the whole team, the only memorable note from this game was that they were all very tall, and refused to acknowledge a double team by their four-man cup. Who cares, they stopped doing it (probably because we shredded it later), and sent them packing 15-8.

Last game of the day was a rematch of Colorado Cup under far more playable conditions (read: no driving rain and wind) against Showdown. It was a highly contested game, with snippy calls all over the place, and Nemesis’ turnover bug continued to plague them, especially when tired at the end of the day. Showdown took this one, but we don’t have obnoxious cheers, so there.

The evening festivities included free flowing PBR and Killians, and a game I called Mario Kart with trash. It basically involves one person driving a golf cart with a beer in hand, one person sitting in the middle with a beer in hand, and one person sitting on the right side linking arms with the middle person, and then leaning over and grabbing garbage bags at full speed, then throwing them into the back of the cart in one smooth motion. Not hitting the driver in the side of the face with a leaking garbage bag is also a plus.

Memories fade at this point, and I awake the next morning with no hangover and a craving for cheesy eggs.

Sunday brings a first round bye and 3 games to the championship. First game begins against Alloy, the 2nd Atlanta team behind Ozone, who broke seed and ended up 3rd in their pool. They started off the game by getting run through-D’ed by our sweet defenders, and once we decided to contain their only big thrower, their offense was pretty much shut down. Other than the fact that I thought their team was pronounced “al-LOY” but they cheered something closer to “AL-loy” I don’t have much of a recollection of this game. 15-4, couldn’t have missed much…

Semis is against Pop, ex Small Rackages (ugh).. but let’s just call them Bait. They had beaten us twice on double game point earlier this season, so we knew this would be an intense game. We trade points for a while, but make some dumb turns and give them a few easy points. They make fewer dumb turns than we do, break us like uncooked spaghetti, and they take the game 15-10. Never to fear – we will cook our spaghetti and slap them in the face with wet noodles at our next meeting.

Thus ends Nemesis’ weekend at CHC – I think Showdown won the whole thing but everyone ended up watching the Open final anyway. It was far more awesome watching Hensley dabbing blood all over his new jersey, Bill Finn macking a D 30 yards downfield into the endzone, or the butt and backs of the people standing in front of me while I was trying to watch what was going on. Seriously, girl with the Facebook.com backpack – I wish I had thrown my empty beer can at you. Seeing as I could only see half the field, sometimes between the legs or bodies of the people standing and pacing in front of me, I hope someone else has better things to say about the final other than that they re-tapped the kegs from Saturday night halfway through the game.