thrillah in manila

this weekend was the manila spirits tournament - biggest tournament in asia, i'm fairly certain. for the first time, there was a women's and open division! 9 teams for open, 4 for womens. it was fantastic. my women's team was made up of players from beijing, taiwan, hk, and one girl from shanghai. we got to play in the finals and ended up losing by 2 :-( ah well, so it goes. my highlight moment was a stall-9, inside out flick, upwind(?) to the back of the endzone for a score. heck yeah.

mixed was on saturday and sunday, and i played with a team called "ninja cowboy bear" made up of people from all over. lots of beijing people (the captain was from there), singapore, philippines, japan, hong kong... good times. it was awesome because we did really gel together, and we worked as a team, even though we had some huge stars who could have totally dominated the game.

we made it into the quarters after winning our crossover against the beijing team. we were playing against boracay, and it was going really well (8-5) until the cap... then we just couldn't score. we only had to get to 9, and they got up to 8-8. at which point, all heck broke loose. on a bad throw from me, our player skyed his defender and came down with a disc, and a girl was also trying to get in the mix. he dumped it, there was a swing and a score. go ninjas. we started shaking hands, and the boracay captain noticed his girl on the ground yelling that she had called foul (or injury). no one heard a call, no one knew what the call was. if it was injury, it could have stayed with our guy... turns out she claimed a foul, so it had to come back to me. my mark fouled me, and then i threw it away on my 3rd try. they scored, game over.

someone was taping the game and showed it to us afterwards...

1) there was no foul: he skyed her by about 3 feet, she never left the ground and got in his way as he came down.

2) she never acknowledged any call. she played defense and then went to the ground AFTER the score.

our captain, not known for a calm temperament, took the video straight to the TD and the other captain. after debates, they agreed to talk to the girl and see if she stuck to her story. if she didn't, they'd figure out what to do next. what stunk was that she wouldn't admit to a bad call. so there was nothing we could do, and no acknowledgment of violating the spirit of the game. SUPER frustrating end to our run, especially because they got destroyed in the semis, and we would have had a chance at making the finals against the other team. i voted we put the video on youtube, myspace, friendster, facebook, etc :-)

but, overall, it was a REALLY fun weekend and great to see all the ultimate players we know from all over since basically every team was there (32 mixed teams, 6-700 players!). and now it's back to the real world until the next tournament...