After winning last year’s second division at Tom’s Tourney, PLAY> ranked fourth in this year’s competition. Overall an awesome weekend with nice weather, good games and some space for improvement.
Thanks to a holiday this year’s tournament took place from Thursday May 5 to Saturday May 7 at the fields at “Gulden Kamer” located just outside the historical city center of Brugge, Belgium. Most of the team decided to arrive by plane this time, while one group challenged their navigational skills and took the car, having also some of the others' camping equipment in the trunk. This lead to a small setting up challenge in the dawn of Thursday - sorry about that to all the other campers on the spot. Some of the team decided to stay at an Airbnb while also a luxury two-floor apartment (which served as refuge for impeded campers already in the first night) was rented this year.
Game day 1
After a short rest we played our first game on Thursday against a very pleasant Ultimate Deluxe from Luxemburg. The first part of the game was characterized by many drops on both sides. An effective use of our zone defense in the second half lead to a clear final score of 15-4. In our second game we faced Revolution’air from Paris. Upcoming wind made our opponents play a hard zone defence that was hard to break in the beginning. Consequently the score was tight for a long time. However, in the second part we managed to set up our strong zone again and turned this advantage into a series of very nice break points that lead to a final score of 8-4. We played our last game on that day against Nova from Kiev. The Ukrainians fought for every point and surprised with a really calm handling play against our zone, which brought them deserved success. However, in the end of this very tight game we managed to score important points and won 11-8.
The evening started with the traditional barbecue at the event location. It is always amazing how Tom’s Tourney volunteers manage to prepare this large choice of delicious food for about 1250 people without any waiting time. After that, some of our team decided to stroll around in the city center of Brugge - or at least found the way to a near-by pub to taste some of the local beers.
Our oldest, Wolfi, tries to relax...
Game day 2
Friday morning started with our last pool game against RMD. We were not able to recall the performance we had shown the previous day and our play started unconcentrated with lots of drops. That made the guys from Frankfurt/Main score easy points in the beginning. RMD continued to play text-book-style but we were able to find back into the game in the second half. However, it was too late: the game time was over at a score of 8-10. But not only we were surprised after this result:
Raging Bananas from France were our first opponents in the second round of the tournament. Obviously, a game at noon is not in our favour as we seemed to have our “siesta” for almost the whole game. Only in the last 15 minutes we managed to catch up some points, leading to a final score of 7-14. Raging Bananas knew how to raise our motivation again and awarded a delicious bottle of wine and some cookies to BigJ.
After this culinary motivation and the creation of the new cheer “Laufen schneller, Schraube enger” (“run faster, screw tighter”) we lined up against Diabolic Heaven from Belgium. In this game we came up much stronger as previously on that day and we managed to win 11-8. The fourth game on that day was against Belgium U20. After that exhausting day, this game was a challenge endurance vs. experience, where we managed to play smart and to win again with a final score of 11-8.
Tom’s Tourney organized a reception for all the players that evening. Nice summer temperatures and fine champagne made this a perfect spot to relax and recreate before heading to the party. Thereby the bouncy castle competition was as popular as spike ball challenges or other fun activities. Accompanied by pizza, we even managed to clear the champagne stock.
After the obligatory ride through Brugge taking the party bus, the last energy of that night was invested on the dance floor of the party location.
Game day 3
On Saturday morning we faced an opponent we played against at last year’s tournament: Helgtre delivered an exciting match at the semifinal, where we managed to gain the lead in the beginning of the game. Following some mistakes from our side, the locals from Belgium played a really consequent game and turned the score. In the end we lost against the later winner of the division 7-10. In the game for the third place we had the chance for a revenge against Raging Bananas. Although we managed to play stronger than on the previous day against the guys from France we didn't have a good start. Not even award-winning layouts by Hatsch (he got the wine and cookie present this time) were enough to make up for the deficit. We lost 8-11 in the end and consequently ranked fourth in this year’s division 2.
Together with our good third place in the spirit of the game ranking, the nice weather and the fabulous atmosphere this weekend was amazing. Some of us even used the rest of the weekend and spent one more relaxing day in Brugge.
We want to thank all Tom’s Tourney volunteers and the Freezzz Beezzz for this great tournament and we are looking forward to next year’s anniversary.
PLAY> Roster: Andi, BigJ, Damir, Delay, Dom, Etzi, Hatsch, Hone, Luki, Markus, Nemo, MichiZ, Moritz, StevieC, Wolfi
Links:
Picts:
MVP Hatsch
Final Open2
Final Women
Final Open1
some impressions from the city trip
some impressions from the city trip
