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Club Sectionals (Rutgers) The day started with a glorious return to Clockwork's traditional point of tournament departure: Terrace F. Club. Appropriately, there was a dude passed out on a couch in the front room. We were a bit light on numbers due in large part to what one might call asian absenteeism, but spirits remained high for the first tourney of the season. Arrival at the fields was slightly delayed due to terrible directions that we probably shouldn't have needed anyway since it was at Rutgers. Weather was perfect early, a little hot later. Game 1 v. Roots of Rhythm: L 9-15 Roots is made up mostly of Pennsbury alumni who have for the most part become quite good at ultimate. They seem to have toned down the douchebaggery, so I've decided I no longer hate them. Anyway, they've been playing together all summer at club tourneys and it showed against our heavy-on-freshman-week-Beast, low-on-practice squad. We got off to a slow start, falling behind 1-6 on some some unfortunate turns and lackluster D. We then flipped the switch and used some hot D to claw out a few breaks, and I think were down 4-8 at half. After getting to within 3 early in the 2nd half, we slipped a bit on O and they used an interesting blend of nice O with a bunch of swill to run off some more points and take the game. We played some quality ultimate in this game after we worked out a few offensive kinks and looked pretty sweet on D. Highlights included Bergman's layout score, Tomi skying for at least a couple goals, and several hot hustle/layout D's. Game 2 v. Penn: W 15-9 We moved over to a much smaller, skinnier field to play Penn, who apparently was missing a bunch of its good players. We decided we wanted to dominate, and went up 5-0 with little difficulty. An existential crisis then befell the team, as non-existent flow on offense and non-existent force-side defense allowed Penn to rattle off 7 straight. A switch to vert stack offense and a renewed commitment to the pursuit of truth and dump swings by our plethora of handlers along with some sick D resulted in a game-changing 3-0 run by the good guys to take half 8-7. A hustle D off of a pull shortly after half on their goal line by yours truly broke their spirit, and we never looked back, finishing out with chilly O and shut-down D. Game 3 v. Franklin & Marshall: W 15-5 Same field, same chilly vert stack offense, even more money D. It should have been mentioned earlier that frosh phenom Michael Gibbs had been pulling well all day. This resulted in what was in retrospect a shit ton of D's on the opponent's goal line, including the callahan Jabraham pulled down against the F&Mers (Triple what?!!). The long and short of this game was that we owned, and looked pretty good doing it. And we all know looking good is of course the #1 most important part of ultimate. Game 4 v. Forge: L 2-15 Forge was the 1 seed in the tournament, and I think we can all agree they were pretty good. We got off to a pretty exciting start by winning the toss (count it!), electing to pull (obvi), and breaking them on the first point with a sick D (don't remember how) and a long huck out of our Ho stack flow to a gorgeous deep cut from Tomi to the opposite corner of the endzone. Tomi skyed that dude too. Things went downhill fast, however, with our offense having trouble figuring out the 1-3-3 to man they were throwing at us and giving them a bunch of easy scores off of turns. Once we did figure it out, we had some success breaking through the zone and working it up the field for a bit. Fatigue was definitely a factor in our lack of more points and our inability to stop theirs, but we still played some pretty sweet ultimate except for that whole scoring thing. Our other point came on another huck out of our ho stack flow to another beautiful cut to the opposite corner of the endzone, this time by Michael Gibbs. All in all, a successful first tourney that points to some major potential for growth and utter domination. The grad student handling combo of Taint-Andrew is going to be unstoppable, and produced some of our chilliest offensive flow as well as prettiest puts this weekend. The sophomores were ballin'. The tournament food included pickles. I'm real pumped. - Petums 
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