Hello Dragon Coalition Fans! This last President’s Day weekend D-Co hosted one of the most competitive tournaments of the regular season made up of most of the top teams in the nation. On Saturday, we debuted our super cool new jerseys and brought the heat for our first pool play game against UT Dallas Melee. We were amped up and ready to show off all of the new cutting skills and defenses that we’d spent the last month working on, so D-Co came out strong and immediately got up by a couple breaks. Melee continued to fight hard throughout the game, but they were unable to catch up and only managed to get 7 points against our 11. One exciting play from that game that further solidified our win was Kezha “Crush” Neale-Sacks’s super cool Callahan (the fourth D-Co Callahan this season!) that she got after backing the Melee handlers into their own endzone and making a crazy snag. Our next game of the day was against UC Santa Cruz Sol, one of our biggest rivals that we consistently have close, competitive games with. While we played a hard and close game, Sol managed to get the one-up on us this time, finishing with a final score of 9-11. We look forward to seeing them next weekend at Stanford Invite to play another competitive game against them! Our final game of the day was an evening game against UC Davis Rogue, another team we see at most tournaments and often have close games with. This time was no exception and the wind had picked up, adding another variable into the equation. The points were long and hard-fought, but in the end D-Co were able to come out on top ahead by 3 with a final score of 9-6! It was a long day and we were proud of our 2-1 record for pool play. 

We got to the fields bright and early on Sunday ready to face both of the teams that hailed all the way from Colorado, UC Boulder Quandary and Colorado State Hells Bells, for our reshuffled pool play. But for our first game, we had our first rematch of the season against Stanford Superfly, who we beat on universe point a few weeks ago at SBI. It was another close and hard-fought game, but D-Co managed to do it again! We had another universe point against Stanford and managed to punch it in when it mattered, ending the game with a satisfying 12-11 score. Next we went up against Hells Bells and though they are an incredibly tall team, D-Co flew higher, and it really wasn’t a very close game. In the end, we scored 12 against their meager 8 and proved that their win against us last year at Nationals was a one-off win that we won’t let happen again. For our third game, we were up against Colorado Quandary, a consistently top team in the country and semi-finalists at nationals last year. Knowing all of this, we were a little nervous going into the game, but you wouldn’t be able to tell by the way we played on the field. D-Co was playing at the top of our form and absolutely gave Quandary a run for their money. The game was close the entire time and we went back and forth trading points for essentially the entire game. For the second time of the day, the game came down to the last point and we were tied 10-all. It was a close last point and went back and forth a couple times, but unfortunately Quandary managed to score the final point. Nonetheless, we felt incredibly proud of how we played and can’t wait to have more match-ups with them in the future. Our fourth and final game of the day was the quarterfinals game against Oregon Fugue, another top team nationally and probably one of our hardest opponents. The last time we played Fugue was at nationals last year when they crushed us in pre-quarters 3-15 to knock us out of the tournament. This year, however, we are a different team and played a much closer match against Fugue. Unfortunately, we were on incredibly tired legs that had just played 3 tough games back to back so were unable to come at them with everything we had, but we were still able to play a closer game against them than we were able to at any point last year, ending with a final score of 9-13. 

On Monday, we awoke at the crack of dawn to arrive at the fields before our 8:00 AM game against Victoria Vikes in the fifth-place semis. We were fired up from our games the previous day and gave the Vikes a tough game, coming out pretty easily with a 13-8 win. Our scary zone defenses got to them, and Vikes were unable to break through, so we progressed onto the fifth-place finals game. This game was tougher against Utah Spiral Jetty, who are another one of our rivals that we often go back and forth with. We got up a few breaks at the beginning of the game and by half we were feeling pretty good about our chances of winning, but after half Spiral Jetty came back with an unforeseen fire and managed to break us back until it was a tied game and we were entering our third universe point game of the weekend. It was a close last point, but unfortunately, Spiral Jetty managed to score and take fifth place, and we finished the weekend in sixth place overall. Ultimately, it was a good weekend and D-Co played many great games. See you in two weeks at Stanford Invite!