One of the best collections of L.A. teams we’ve ever had went to Scottsdale, Arizona this past weekend with hopes of advancing to Sarasota for Nationals at the end of the month.

Three teams had very legitimate chances of attaining that goal, considering the Southwest Region got the growth bid in Mixed and Women’s, allowing three bids to go to Nationals in both divisions.  Somehow a lot more women played in the Southwest this year, which is awesome.  I’m guessing it all happened in places like Colorado and San Diego, because I honestly don’t think we can get much of the credit here in L.A.

L.A. didn’t send a team in the Masters Division (oh, but wait until next year), and had only one team, LA Women, in the Women’s Division.  They finished 2-5 for 6th place out of 8 teams.  Both divisions were won by Santa Barbara teams.  Lady Condors took Women’s and Beyondors won Masters.

In the Open Division, L.A. sent two teams, Monster and Strike-Slip.  Strike-Slip had won Sectionals, in a breath-taking 15-13 game over San Diego’s Streetgang, and was the #2 seed going into Regionals.  They swept their pool, but lost 15-8 to Streetgang in bracket play.  That left them with only the backdoor chance for the second bid.  They outlasted the Santa Barbara Condors in an emotional 14-12 victory (as you may know, many of this year’s Strike-Slip players were on Condors last year before a …. um …… restructuring of the team occurred.)  So that put Strike-Slip up against Streetgang once again, since they had just lost to annual Regional champion Johnny Bravo from Boulder, Colorado.

  Above: Strike-Slip discusses strategy during a time-out against Condors.

I watched the Strike-Slip/Streetgang game, and I’ll tell you, it was a tough one to sit through.  Streetgang led the whole way, and just slowly increased their lead over the course of it.  The final score was 15-9 San Diego.  But Strike-Slip is a new team, and a young team, and I have no doubt they’ll be back in this position next year, and hopefully the result will be different.  Monster, meanwhile, had a good showing on Saturday, finishing 2-2 in pool play, but lost in the back-door bracket for the 2nd bid in a 13-12 upset by the host city’s Sprawl.

But it was in the Mixed division where Los Angeles had their best success.  Metro was one of the favorites going in, having won Sectionals in Long Beach, and they were seeded #2 behind Barrio from Tucson.  A good percentage of last year’s team returned, including their very tall and extremely affable captain Keegan Uhl, and a slew of L.A.’s best talent, including Barrs “More Barrs in More Places” Lang, Scott “Wonderboy” Mahr, the tallest short player in the world in Simon Margolis and the reddest beardiest ultimate player I’ve ever seen in Chad Christensen.

 Barrs skies a BCBC player.

But in my completely uninformed opinion, it was their new additions, especially on the female side, that made this year’s team significantly better.  Unless I’m mistaken - and I’ll be honest, I haven’t verified this information with anyone at all (this isn’t the L.A. Times here) - about 60% of their women were first time Metro players.  And in particular, the additions of Mary Kate “Uzi” Hogan and Karen Ko gave them two top notch female handlers.  And it’s also important to note they not only added ex-Condors veteran Matt Welsh, but also the uncoverable Jeff Chai.

So yeah, the team is stacked.  And they came into Regionals on a 9-game winning streak that extended back to the Labor Day tournament.  The streak increased to 12 with a 3-0 domination in pool play, winning 13-3, 13-4 and 13-7 over three teams from Colorado.  This set up the cross-over seeding game against Brown Chicken Brown Cow.

BCBC were the runner-ups in Sectionals.  They lost 13-12 to Metro in that finals, but every game the two teams played this year were close.  So there was good reason to believe BCBC had a serious chance to capture at least the third bid to Nationals.  They went into pool play as the overall #5 seed, 2nd in their pool to the Denver Cougars.

BCBC is a mix of players across California.  Less than half the team currently resides in L.A., but nonetheless they are listed as an L.A. team.  If I knew the team off the top of my head better, I could list them, but there’s no on-line roster, and Calle isn’t picking up his phone right now.  I do know they have the extremely multi-talented Ben Potash, and one of L.A.’s best women in Nicole Belle Isle.  And Laffite Lamberto-Egan has been a force both at the collegiate level and in the Open division.

    Above: Ben Potash unleashes a backhand.

BCBC knocked off Cougars and swept their pool 3-0, forcing the seeding game against Metro.  Both teams would go to quarters Sunday morning.  This game just determined who they’d play.

Fortunately (or unfortunately), I got to watch this game because my L.A. team, Merge, fell out of contention when we finished 1-2 in pool play, and ended up in a crazy situation where it went down to point differential between three teams, and we lost out by one freakin’ point!!!  Frustrating.  Anyway, that did mean Merge could get bloody wasted and heckle the Metro-BCBC game like any good L.A. player should.

Metro won the game 15-11, although it felt a lot closer than that.  And I actually don’t remember much of the game because we were all drunk playing Fantasy Ultimate, which I kicked ass in, but whatever.  Props to Diesel though, who called blind no-ding on Tim Leavitt’s next ding.  It cost him the win, but it was a visionary call. (Tim had failed in his previous three ding attempts.)  (Oh, if you don’t know what ding is, ask someone.  It’s so much fun.)  (Can you put back-to-back parantheticals like this?  It doesn’t feel grammatically correct, but anyway, I’m getting WAY off subject here.)

Sunday morning Metro squared off against Party Van from Hawaii in quarters, and won 15-9 while BCBC lost 12-9 to Killjoy from Fort Collins, CO.  That meant BCBC would have to go through the back door (which is not a sexual reference as much as I want it to be) in order to get the opportunistic 3rd bid.

Metro went to semis against Operation Kapow, the mixed Colorado team that came in as the overall #3 seed.  With their 15th consecutive victory, Metro won 15-9 and with that, clinched a spot to Nationals.  The Finals against #1 seeded Barrio was inconsequential, and purely for nerds like me who care about pointless things like the history of tournament winners.  But for Metro, losing finals meant nothing.  The real prize is the trip to Sarasota, which was no more evident than when I saw Rob Severson after their clinching win, covered in either sweat or beer (it was inconclusive) with a huge smile on his face, as though he finally saw your mama’s vagina, and it was wonderful.

  Above: Metro in the huddle.

BCBC had a harder road to travel, as their quarter-final loss meant they’d have to win three straight games to take the 3rd bid.  But a 10-9 win over Mesteno from Denver and a 13-10 triumph over Operation Kapow set up the “game-to-go” against the Cougars, who went to Nationals last year.  The word around town was Cougars didn’t want to go this year.  When I spoke to ex-LA player Kat Leitzell on Saturday, she told me “our plan is to make it to Nationals, and then turn it down”.  No explanation of why, for the record.  But some other people I spoke to were skeptical, since apparently Cougars said the same thing last year, and ended up going afterall.

Cougars took the game (I didn’t see the final score) and then went into a huddle, presumably to flip a coin.  When they came out, they had indeed decided not to go to Nationals, a move rivaled only by Woody Allen’s consistent decision to play jazz in some bar every year instead of going to the Oscars.  But it did mean BCBC would, by default, be the second Los Angeles representative at Nationals this year.  To quote an old friend from college, who admittedly was talking about something completely different:  it doesn’t matter how you get in, just as long as you get in.

So congratulations to both Metro and BCBC.  Do us proud at Nationals.  The rest of us are all jealous of you.