For the second week-end in a row, I played in an Ultimate tournament, but this was the first in about two years that I actually traveled to. Our (former) masters team, THOR, decided to try “one last tournament”. We added some young talent and trekked to Savannah for the popular Toss in the Moss tournament.
I don’t know why they keep holding this tournament in the heat of August, but this year wasn’t so bad as the temps stayed in the 80’s at the cost of some occasional downpours. Forsythe Park, shown in the photo, is the primo location for playing, having great fields and a heart-of-the-city location. Unfortunately, 40-plus teams is way too many for the park, and we ended up playing most of our games at satellite fields.
We finished 2-2 the first day to land in the B division for Sunday, where we lost in the semis to a very fast team from Columbia, South America. We older players appreciated a comment overheard from the college team we beat in the quarterfinals, “they’re just too fast for us,” even if it was directed at our younger players.
We didn’t come away empty-handed. We won the Saturday-morning opening parade by chanting a Viking verse as we marched with plastic swords, hammers and home-made Viking helments.
With a heat index of 109° this must have been the worst week-end of the year to hold a masters tournament, but that’s where I was from 10:30 to 5:30 on Saturday. Fortunately, we were blessed with an afternoon shower to cool things off for a while. I didn’t feel too wiped out at the end of the day (just hungry), but I am sore today and my skinned knee looks a little worse. 
It was a hat tournament organized by Dave Kaminski with teams assigned semi-randomly, and I ended up a on well-balanced team. We went 3-0 through pool play, and, after some minor re-balancing of teams, we kept rolling through the semifinals only to run out of poise in the finals. All of our suppressed mistakes manifested themselves in the second half of the finals where we didn’t score a single goal. 
One thing about masters players (33+) is that they come prepared. We had plenty of shade tents, watermelon, first-aid supplies, etc. Though the fields were in excellent condition, we had to supply our own shade, as seen in the sideline photo. 
It was Rich’s first masters event, so perhaps that accounts for the slip-n-slide. He’s making a diving catch onto the slide in the photo. He even went to the trouble of lugging a cooler full of water out to the fields just for the slip-n-slide. The cooler turned out to be very popular for dunking one’s head in to cool down.
After 10 good years, I’ve finally parted ways with my Saturn wagon. The photo shows the old Saturn and new Prius as we make the sale in the parking lot of Sam’s.