(Copied from my VUL forum post, which has limited formatting)
Womens – TRAFFIC is seeded 5th, but I think that’s a bit underseeded. They had an unfortunate loss to Underground (Seattle2) at Sectionals and have gone 2-2 with them this season. I’d be very surprised if they don’t come out on fire and beat them in the Round Robin. They will also be playing UPA champions Fury(SanFran1) in the round robin, who they’ve had 3 good games with this season, including a 1 pt loss at Labor Day. They’ll likely meet Zeitgeist(SanFran2) or Riot(Seattle1) in the crossovers, unless of course Schwa(Portland) can really get it together. They’ve beat Zeitgeist in their one matchup this year, and have beat Riot once and lost twice. A win in either of the crossover games will guarantee them a spot, else they might have to grind it out for the final spot…One way or another, I’m sure they’ll grab a spot. The Northwest is hands-down the toughest region, with the 3 women’s team at the Championships last year all making semis. I’m sure the NW could send like 6 teams.
Masters…is back! GAUNTLET is representing Vancouver at UPAs this year. They’re seeded 7th of 7 in a round robin format and will be playing against some more established masters teams from Corvallis, Seattle, Portland and the Bay Area. Sandy Lane has been heading things up for this team but that’s about all I know for sure, so I won’t make any predictions. Best of luck with the new team! Hopefully this will stick around for a few years.
Open – FURIOUS GEORGE and BLACKFISH (my team) are both representing Vancouver (BEEF SHARK wasn’t able to make the trip.) Teams have slowly been dropping out, leaving a wonky schedule of 13 teams with 3 bids to the championships. Both Vancouver teams are in the same pool now, along with Jam (SanFran) and SCUC (Santa Cruz). The pool promises for 2 very exciting matchups – Furious vs Jam in a rematch of last year’s game-to-go – and Blackfish vs SCUC in a matchup for a chance to break into the NW quarterfinals.
FURIOUS has done well with all their new players this season, and Jam has had relatively bad showings at ECC nor Labor Day. Regardless, the pool play game probably doesn’t mean too much here, as both teams will still make quarters (and likely semis). Revolver (SanFran) and Sockeye(Seattle) are well thought of as the 2 lockups for the spots, and it’ll likely be Furious and Jam meeting again in the game-to-go, where it will be anyone’s game. However, upsets are very possible amongst the top 6 teams – Furious could pull out their first win of the season vs Sockeye or Revolver or drop a game to one of the other teams.
BLACKFISH, like Furious, has something to fight for here. It’s the 3rd Regionals we’ve been able to make it to(4th season), and after winning the bottom bracket last year, we are hungry to crack the top 8 for the first time and get some much-needed games against the next-caliber teams before (hopefully) attending Prague next July. However, we are sending only 13 players to Corvallis due to school, injuries, babies, etc, so this won’t be the same team we sent to Nationals Jiff. Strange things happen when a team is short-rostered, and we could really gel here with less than half of our nationals numbers. Look for Colin Clay and Kieran McConnell to be helping with offensive line calling in place of captain Pat Gatien.
Favorite rivals Invictus (Calgary) won’t be there, so we turn our attentions to SCUC, where a pool play win is required to finish 3rd (or higher) and a chance to continue on. A win there would likely pit them against Rhino (Portland) to qualify for quarters. It’s very do-able, seeing that we finished ahead of SCUC last year at Regionals, and lost to Portland’s other team by only 2 last year. I guess it’ll really come to down to how much gas in the tank Blackfish has with such a small roster.
There will also be the always exciting Blackfish – Furious matchup Saturday, which is where the real score predictions should be made. Anyone got an over-under on this one? (m2c has this at 15-6 already.)
Don’t think we’ll be twittering this time (Phil?), but they may be updating scores somewhat regularly at:
http://upa.org/scores/tourn.cgi?div=20&id=6092 (open)
http://upa.org/scores/tourn.cgi?div=12&id=6111 (masters)
http://upa.org/scores/tourn.cgi?div=36&id=6105 (womens)
October 1st, 2009 | General | No comments