The adage goes that the winners get to write the history books. With that in mind, we received this write up of Northwest Mixed Regionals from Mischief player Chris Doyle who, along with his teammates, won the ever-competitive region.

Saturday morning started out as a crisp Autumn morning in Corvallis with temperatures in the high 30s to low 40s. The layer of frost on the field quickly melted off and by the times games began, the temperature was up and the air was still. Our goal for the weekend was to play each game with intensity and focus regardless of the score.

Our first game was against Night Train, a team we know well from our Section. We came out strong, getting D’s that led to scores to start the game off 4-0 and eventually taking half 8-2. With the game well in hand, our players and sideline lost some of the focus we were striving for and the final score of 15-8 reflects that.

After a bit of stern lecture from our captains we played Montana’s Bozo’s with renewed dedication to our tournament goals and won 15-4.

Our final pool play game was against the first seed from Oregon. All we knew about them was that they’re a non-practicing team of pickups, primarily from Carleton College. Historically, the Oregon section isn’t especially strong so it was difficult to judge what the relative ease with which they cut through it meant. No one likes to have an unknown wild card in their pool, but as it turns out, while they had a number of athletes and good players, they didn’t have the experience together or the consistency to run up the score. Hunzicker settled for a bunch of good-natured heckling about how serious we all were.

Going into the tournament, we knew that the 16/4 format would put us in great position to lock up a spot to nationals on Saturday afternoon. Also, as we suspected from the start, that road would lead
us to the 2007 Mixed National Champions, Shazam Remains. While their roster has changed a bit this year, since Worlds, we had only beat them once before (this year at Spawnfest/ECC where we came from behind to win 16-14). The wind had picked up slowly throughout the day and we thought we might see a couple zone points during the game.

We started off strong scoring on defense to start the game to go up 4-2. Shazam decided to shift strategies and began a campaign of two to three passes followed by a huck to one of their women. We were slow to defend against this due to some missed bids and a couple misalignments where we ended up leaving a thrower or a receiver open. They managed to break us on offense a few times including coming out of half to take the count to 6-9.

The most contentious part of the game came when one of our cutters was fouled in the end zone before scoring on his second attempt. He proceeded to spike the disc… accidentally straight sideways into a Shazam player’s stomach. It took a couple points for both teams to settle down after that and we finally managed to iron out the defensive errors that had plagued us in the first half and began
converting on offense. We closed the game out on something like a 4-1 run to win 15-12.

We were excited to win such a tight, tense game and a few teammates commented that they’ve never been as happy winning a game at Regionals before. The celebration was short lived, however as we knew that our finals against Mental Toss Flycoons would be a challenging affair. MTF have been consistently gaining strength over the past few years so their “upset” win over D’oh was not unexpected.

The MTF game works off their quick handler movement and a favorite play of theirs is the dump, dish back to the thrower to a huck (often to one of their standout tall women receivers). Finals saw them
playing a lot of force-middle and with poaches coming off our handlers. This caused us to play quite a bit of horizontal stack and to move the disc amongst our said handlers. We started the game off
trading points but much like semis, we found ourselves down by three during the first half.

A number of long points punctuated by great defense by both teams ensued but we were able to fight back and regain a lead at 11-10. This was the first game of the tournament where we had to tighten our subbing rotation and were primarily playing our top two offensive and defensive lines. With the soft cap on and the game to 12, Flycoons was forced to put up a high stall huck that captain Mark Smith reeled in, broken right hand and all. After working it up the field, Smith then pulled down a high break-mark score to cap off the game and his first turn-over free tournament.

I watched a few other games this weekend as well. I love those guys on Brass Monkey and was hoping they could pull it together for one last run at Nationals, but they were killing themselves with drops. CTR played a great last couple of games and ended up losing to Shazam in the 4/5 game to go. They play a smart offense but don’t have the raw athletic prowess to compete with the top teams. Night Train also performed above their seed and seemed to be playing well. Psychoplastique, a team from Edmonton, was looking speedy and athletic in the couple points I saw of them in pool play.

I think the best four teams from the region are being sent to Sarasota this year and I think there’s a good chance that both strength bids will be back in the NW come ‘09. However, given our early season losses out of region and previous champs Shazam coming in as NW #4, seeding for nationals is going to be difficult. There seems to be quite a bit of parity in at least the top 8 mixed nationals teams this year and I would caution against underestimating any team there. It seems like seeding in mixed is often more difficult than for the other divisions due to a number of factors. The lack of out of region play seems to be the biggest with many teams not committing to traveling more than a couple hours outside their respective regions.

Congratulations to all the NW qualifiers and thanks to Jon Ladd for putting on a great tournament. I’d also like to say thanks to my teammate Wes Chao whose writeup of the tournament I used to refresh my memory and plagiarize my structure.

Great stuff from Chris. The Mixed Division in Sarasota is going to be as strong as ever; it will be interesting to see where all of the Northwest teams land in the final standings. Is all in the top four possible?