One down, two to go

Yesterday was the day of the corporate Ultimate tournament. It's been a bit of a nightmare over the last few days, so I'm pretty glad it's over. We came second over all, which was the same as last time and what we expected. The top team are a long way ahead of us with a hard core of brilliant players, where we have only a couple of players who play seriously.

In spite of only playing four 30 minute games, I'm feeling surprisingly stiff. Probably something to do with the cold out there - from start to finish I was out for five hours or so I guess.

I'm glad it's over. That's not to say that I wish I hadn't organised it (in spite of what I might have said on Friday), but it's such a relief when it's finally finished and everyone goes away happy.

The next couple of weeks I'll be going along to trial sessions for a London team to see whether I can get a place. I fancy playing for a team that's properly committed, because the one I play for just now don't seem to really want to win and training is patchy. If I'm perfectly honest I don't think I'll get in (so much so that I'm paying £42 to play Ultimate somewhere else, that I probably won't be able to make if I get on the team), but I felt I had to try - otherwise I would just wonder.

Ultimate Pain

Sometimes I wonder why I get myself into things. A few months ago I organised an Ultimate (you'll find out soon enough!) tournament for companies. No one had ever run one before, so we weren't sure how it would turn out. I wsa the person who really pushed for it to happen and did a lot of the convincing to pull it off. It proved to bea reasonable success - six teams and a pretty good time. Only one injury and it was to me (a very badly bruised knee, a month out and not being able to sleep properly for a week were my rewards).

A few weeks ago, someone suggested we should run another tournament. Since I'd run the first one, it seemed a logical choice to run this one. I'd managed to put away from my mind what a pain it was to put on, and just think about the good things.

The first couple of weeks went well - lots of interest. In fact at one point we had a potential eight teams. One week later and suddenly we were down to 4.5 teams. Not good. The tournament's on Saturday (two days from now) so I spent a good part of today sending out emails, trying to sort out people to play. One particularly promising lead was from one of the usual corporate teams who couldn't field a team. A few hours later they came back to me. "We can't enter a half team, but we'll enter a whole team....". Aaaaaaaaaaaaah, no!!!!!! So now I have 4.5 teams. In fact, I only need a couple more players and I could make up the sixth and final team.

So I've contacted the only two people who I could think might be able to field a vaguely corporate team at such short notice, but to no avail...

Tomorrow I'll get down on my knees and beg some of my Ultimate colleagues to help out. I'm sure we'll find someone!

So why do I bother? Well the truth of the matter is I'm a born organiser. I don't really think I'm a leader, but I make a good administrator. Sad eh? I've got a series of mini-tournaments coming up over the winter - the London Indoor Winter League. Should be interesting - I've never really organised anything where people are paying genuine money to enter - £25 a team this time.

Oh, and I still haven't sorted out a trophy for Saturday!