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.

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.

I got scraped up on an unsuccessful layout on Saturday. The scabs are starting to heal, but my elbow and knee are still sore from the impact. My feet survived OK though. I often have problems with blisters when playing multiple games as normal measures like athletic tape and second skin tend to come loose after a couple of hours. This time I used a friction-reducing product called Body Glide that goes on like stick deoderant and work well (with one midday reapplication).

The tournament consisted of 4 games on Saturday and 1-3 on Sunday depending on how you did. My body can no longer take that much Ultimate in one week-end. My legs went dead after about 4 hours of play on Saturday and lasted less than half that long on Sunday.