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It's fairly rare to play the same team twice in one weekend, rarer still to play that game back to back, but it turned out that way at ECC when AMP followed a final round loss to CTR on Saturday with the same match-up in the quarterfinals Sunday morning.

What we knew about CTR coming into the tournament came from one of their primary handlers, Bhavin Parikh, a three-year teammate on AMP who had switched coasts and teams for graduate school. I'd talked to Bhavin during the early season and heard of their fairly tight matchups with Mischief and his developing team. They'd been finding their stride on Friday and added some teammates on day 2, but were clearly stepping up by Saturday afternoon becoming the first team to beat Flycoons in the round before our game. AMP was coming off of wins over Slow White and D'Oh in rounds 2 and 3 after a first round bye. When a hammer from Bhavin was caught for a score early in the game by a receiver jumping over one of our better defenders, I thought we might be in some trouble with the 14-person roster who had made the cross country trip feeling some fatigue in our third back to back games. We got fired up to fight back and converted two breaks, but CTR answered with a total of six against our O line over the course of the game and we failed to generate enough Ds to compensate. Final score 15-10, CTR.

I felt strongly about our chances going into the rematch on Sunday; thought we'd be more rested in the morning, focused and determined to correct our mistakes from the evening before. AMP had shown great mental toughness over the first two days at ECC to move past mistakes quickly and get back to what needed to happen on the field. Unfortunately for us CTR stayed consistent as well, delivered some early breaks and played terrific possession offense to keep our D from breaking the entire game. The game ended with an identical final score of 15-10, CTR. AMP moved on to the consolation brackets, pleased to see the only two teams we'd lost to meet in the finals.

AMP had made some subbing adjustments in the rematch in attempt to fortify the offense a bit and compensate as our roster shrank by one on Sunday, playing our first 3-women O points of the tournament. This may have taken some of the transition threat away from our defense as we forced more turns in game two than game one, but converted none. We made an effort to mix our D looks as the game went on and produced some nice plays out of CTR's men and women, but were again frustrated not to generate a score in transition. As their tournament results showed, CTR is a tight, very capable team that's improving with each tournament this summer. We'll expect to see them in Sarasota, looking forward to round three.

Patrick Sherlock plays for Philadelphia's AMP.