Heart of the Dream

What does it mean to go to nationals?

Numerically speaking:

• The Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association of America estimate that there are 824,000 Americans who play ultimate more than 24 times a year.
• Think of all those league players who play once a week for four months. They do not count.
  
• This also excludes all those Canucks.
• To be one of the 400 or so players to make club open nationals puts everyone on my team in the top 0.04% of the ultimate community.
• There are also about 13,000 adult men who have paid to join the UPA. This puts all the men on my team in the top 3% of that category.
• I could go on with more stats, but let's just say we reached an impressive level of competition.

Emotionally Speaking:

I have competed in sports my whole life (read previous injury blog). I was not an athlete. I wrestled for 6 years without winning a match. I played an entire season of baseball and was only put on the field for one inning. I played soccer for years and never scored a goal. My first ultimate tournament I did not catch a single pass. I am by all definitions a nerd. A nerd with a highly competitive addictive attitude. One day during my Sophomore year of college, I said to one of my friends that I was going to be the best player on the team next year. This was not arrogance. It was a goal. I needed something to focus on in life that was good and hard. I played as many tournament as possible. I believe 32 that year. By Spring Break of that year, I stopped taking subs as a part of conditioning. This was 500+ points without a sub. I played 3 days during the school week and tournaments on the weekends. All of this at best lead to a midlevel Regional appearance by Purdue.

After college, I moved around a bunch. I played for Smoklahoma/Rawhide over the next 3 years. This introduction to club ultimate drove me insane. I was used to hyper-competitive college ultimate and could never adjust to a more relaxed style of play, even if the team was more talented than my college team. This experience showed me a lot about club ultimate and what it takes to win. I then found myself in Minneapolis and now their was finally some hope to take my game to a new level.

Minneapolis is the home of Subzero a perennial national competitor. I went out to their open try-outs and made it through 2 rounds of cuts. In the end, I did not make the team. After years of leading teams and being depended on to take charge, I was told that I was not good enough to play for a team. Rewind to the beginning of this portion of the blog. I am used to failing at sports. I have dealt with it all my life, but this hurt more. I actually tried to be good at this. I wanted to make it the highest level of this sport and I failed. I continued to play and have fun with the Liquid Assets guys over the next year. I failed again the next year at tryouts and to save the suspense, I failed again the year after that. So maybe nationals wasn't out there for me. Next year Jenny and I will go where her Residency takes her and maybe all hopes of finding a national level team.

While lamenting about missed opportunities, I sent out a request to any team that might get me to nationals. I talked to the captain of Machine. He was not looking for tournament-only players. I talked to players from VBB. They were just looking for people they new from past experience. Nothing seemed to work for me. Eventually, over a couple of drinks I asked the right person to speak up for me. At this point, I would like to sincerely thank Ross for speaking up for me and Kevin for giving me a chance. I was given a tryout and made the Van Buren Boys.

I have loved this whole season. Even in our losses, I felt comfortable playing with these guys. I never felt like a hindrance to our success or the cause of our failure. I immediately felt like a part of the team. The team had potential. Potential makes me feel great when day dreaming about the season to come. Man, how I loved to dream about going to nationals.

Now I find myself in Tulsa playing at Regionals. Wow, are we not doing so well. 11-4 against Machine. 11-3 against Subzero. At least we will get to play a bunch of games and maybe have some fun "trying" to get to nationals. But really, what are the chances of us playing 3 games in a row without messing up just a bit.

In a perfect world, we win those three games and go to nationals. I guess this world is perfect.