Today was the first day of Los Alamos' annual ultimate frisbee tournament, The Atomic Blast. [Almost] Every year we put on the tournament and somewhere between 4 and 10 additional teams drive in for two days of ultimate, camping, and grilling. And beer. Generally, most of the teams who come are sort of club-level teams that practice together and the quality of play is usually quite high. The exception is the Los Alamos team, which is comprised of the people who attend our twice-weekly pickup game after work. The level of play on the Los Alamos team tends to be so low that our best players defect to other teams in order to get a bit more competitive play in during the tournament, which only further degrades the quality of the Los Alamos offering.

This year our best player, Chris, was going to join the team from Lubbock, TX, which he usually does. However, there weren't enough people from Lubbock who could make it, so instead Chris and four very good Lubbock people played with Los Alamos and vastly improved the quality of play. As a result, we had a fighting chance for the first time in many years. (The last time we won a game at the Blast was, I think, in 1999 when we beat Lubbock, ironically, because they were at the time brand new and very bad. The next year they returned and handed us our asses.)

Despite our infusion of talent from Lubbock, our first game saw Santa Fe completely dismantle us for a final score of 13-2. I scored one of our points, which I was happy about, but on the whole we played abysmally. However, there was a noticeable improvement in our play during the game, and during the course of the following two games, which we lost 13-4 and 13-6. Our final game of the day, against a team from Albuquerque, we actually won! It was incredible. By the end of the day the team had figured out how to deal with zone defense and hard runners. A lot of the people on our team are new this year and had never seen tournament play, so there was a sharp learning curve, but by the end of the day they were getting the hang of it and it was great to watch this happen. So for the first time in probably 7 years, we were not the worst team at the tournament. :)

Anyway, four 90 minute games of ultimate later and a huge dinner at Gabriel's, I'm going to bed a couple hours early. Tomorrow we play the championship bracket. I don't anticipate we'll last past the first round, but the team morale is pretty high on account of our win.