Sectionals -- Middlbury VT

As the last post discussed, we did not reach VT until 7:00AM and our first game was at 10:00AM. With little to no sleep we played three games in the 30* weather on Saturday. Thinking that we were away from Maine and the weather should actually be warmer, this only made our trip more depressing. We ended up not winning any games on Saturday or Sunday, but considering this was our first legal sectionals tournament ever, we enjoyed our trip because of the experience. Our ending record does not do us justice because how we played does not reflect how we did. On Sunday, the weather was not only cold, but also it was like you were playing in giant mud puddles. With this being said, it was hard to concentrate on playing your best when you could barely run.

The Drive -- Sectionals 11'

I feel like there are always complications driving to tournaments. So remember in a previous post I discussed seeing two accidents, similar situation h happened when driving to my sectionals tournament in Middlebury, VT this past weekednd. Due to sorority events and a member of my team who had to work on Friday night, 5 of us ended up leaving for our sectionals tournament at 9:00PM. Two of our fellow players from our mens team came along for the journey too. Six and half hours into our trip (3:30AM), my teammate that was driving noticed the "check battery light" turned on. She proceeded to drive until we reached a 24 hour gas station (we were on route 2 headed to Vermont and there are limited gas stations) to take a bathroom break. About a mile after leaving the gas station, our headlights turned off. Knowing this probably isn't a good sign, we turned around and headed back to the station. This must have been a good idea because when we got there our car completely died due to a bad alternator. Luckily we were in University Vehicles, Motor Pool, so they had to help us with this issue. After spending over an our on the phone contacting teammates and people at Motor Pool, we finally got our car towed to VT and had one of our teammates come got us from Middlebury. Considering we were an hour away, my teammates did not get to us until 6:00 so we did not arrive to our destination until 7:00AM.

Steakfest 11'

We had to arrive at the field at 8:30 for the captains meeting and play started at 9:00AM. Not only after getting 3 hours of sleep we did not expect to do well, we also only had 1 sub the entire tournament. On Saturday we played in around 30MPH winds, meaning that it was pretty much impossible to throw the disc upwind. We ended up going 3-3 for the whole tournament, we were satisfied with this because before playing at Steakfest we had never won any games as a women's team. We are now preparing for (probably) our last tournament of the semester, sectionals. Sectionals is going to be held at Middlebury College.
Sectionals is different this year because teams are split up up into conferences instead of regions. Before this semester, teams would play teams in their area. For example, last year we played teams like Colby, Farmingtion, UMPI, and UNH. This year we are divided into sectionals by the amount of people in each school. This makes sense because bigger schools obviously have an advantage, but for schools like UMO where ultimate is not very popular, it is hard to try and compare to schools like Middlebury, Dartmouth, and UVM.

The Drive -- Steakfest 11'

Considering the University of Maine it not really near any big ultimate cities, it is necessary to drive from 3+ hours to go to most tournaments. Most recently, UMaine's women's ultimate club went to Manheim, Pennsylvania to the tournament, "Steakfest". Knowing we had a long drive ahead of us, we all packed in a University Van and were on our way at approximately 3:30PM on March 18th. The drive was supposed to take around 11 hours; little did we know we would encounter numerous complications on our way. During our travels through Maine, NH, Massachusetts, and Connecticut we did not have any problems. In New York we got lost twice and got stuck in a traffic jam due to an accident. This accident was a caused by a drunk driver that “fell asleep and fan off the road to the left, hit and damaged 50 feet of guardrail, then crossed the highway and stopped facing east in the right lane”. The people in this accident were medevaced to the nearest hospital. After traffic about 45 minutes we were finally on our way once again.
Of course our night was not over yet, we got off the final exit to our hotel and saw an actual car accident happen. The vehicle went up an embankment and overturned. When this first happened we were a little confused as to why there were lights facing towards us that were directly on top of each other, we soon realized shortly that the car was on its side. A teammate and I ran out of our vehicle, helped the two individuals out of their car, and called 911. Likely, there were no injuries and the two were pain free.