H^3: My first experience with a hats tournament

This past weekend I attended Hats Hops & Hucks 19, my first ever hats tournament for Ultimate. It was a hats tournament in the sense that all the teams were random (as if drawn out of a hat, although they were also supposed to be as balanced as possible) but also in the sense that it had one abnormal rule since it was a "fun" tournament: every player had to wear a hat at all times, otherwise anything you did while on the field was invalid, such as diving to catch a pass and then having your hat fall off.

Anyway, first the events themselves and then my overall impressions. I drove up Friday after dinner with Nathan and arrived at the campsites, where we set up out tent and talked to the few people we knew. There was a DJ on site and thus it wasn't quiet until around 11:30/12, so I sadly didn't get to go to sleep until then. We were awoken at 7:30 and drove to one of the field sites, where we got a pancake breakfast before playing out first game. I headed to my field and met my teammates for the weekend for the first time and about 10 minutes later got started on our first game. I played 4 in total that day, back-to-back for the last three since we went to hard cap each time. We did pretty well, winning 3 of our 4 games, and 2 other teams also had a 3-1 record forming a weird tie in which we had beat the team the other had lost to. It came down to point differentials, and in the end we were seeded 5th out of 15 teams for the next day. After a surprisingly good dinner I went and lied down for a while, suffering from a sun-induced headache, and eventually felt better and again didn't go to sleep until 1 due to the "party" going on, again with a DJ. 9:30 was the wake-up call for Sunday and we received another surprisingly good breakfast before playing our first single-elimination game against the team seeded 12th, which we won fairly easily after we got our synergy back. The next game was against the only team we had lost to, and we managed to beat them for the revenge match. I hadn't expected our team to get farther then this game, so happily surprised I found myself in the semifinals. The team we played next had a no-loss record, and so I suspect they were utterly stunned when we beat them 13-7, getting an early lead they were never able to overcome. Again to my surprise I found myself in the final game, something I had never done in a tournament before, facing again against a team that had never lost. We actually came out incredibly strong, getting a 6-0 lead before they finally started seriously fighting back. For this reason, although the other team was seeded better, they won the crowd (being heckled by a large crowd was also a new experience) and although they had a worrying comeback after halftime, we ended up winning 17-12. In an extra little cool thing, they had this thing called the "Magical Mythstery Score" (the theme for the weekend was Mythical creatures) where randomly during one of the games the person who caught that point would get free HHH for life. This point got announced during the finals game, and I ended up throwing the winning point. Sadly there was no award for the assist, but I did feel good about giving it to someone else.

Anyway, a hats tournament was definitely an interesting experience. On the positive side, it was definitely more about having fun then playing super competitively, and the majority of players had that mindset. Also, it was a good chance for me to get back to playing, since I just went 6 months without playing at all and I could definitely feel how out of practice I was. Thus 8 usually 2-hour games in 2 days was a definite boon to regaining my skills. In addition, the tournaments I usually go to are with "unequal" teams in that some teams are just naturally better than others, and in a hats tournament ideally every team has a good chance of beating another. While obviously this didn't  happen, all the games we played were close, with several going to soft/hard cap. It was also kind of cool to play on a mixed team again, compared to the mens-only team at Claremont, and as a bonus all of our girls were really good. Unfortunately one of my friends got on a team that was rather sexist, and we played a couple teams where  it felt like the girls were being somewhat ignored, but as a whole it was nice to see genders working together. Also, I paid a flat fee and got everything for the weekend (food, lodging, drinks, jersey, disc, etc) so it was nice to have a weekend where I just played Ultimate and didn't have to worry about anything else.

On the more negative side, the randomness thing can be bad too. I'm always more on the competetive, and if I ended up on a "bad" team I probably would have ended up rather frustrated. Also, I'm used to playing with players I know pretty well, so adjusting to new people is obviously a bit different. Plus, I'm not the best at names, so I didn't really get everyone's name down till the final game. One of the biggest problems I faced was also that, as I said, I was both a bit out of shape and out of practice at the start, which probably showed in my playing. Thus I wasn't playing even close to how I expect myself to play till the final game, which while is a good time to finally start also means I felt like I playing inferiorly up to that point. There were also lots of moments where I think it showed how much more professionally/competitively I've played in the past, since we'd say lots of tactical stuff on the sidelines, and I'd often be one of the only ones actually doing these things on the field, despite how often I'd help remind the others. For instance, the sidelines kept getting very clogged, and so I'd stay in the stack to keep that space free. I'd feel like I was looking lazy to others, but it wasn't as if I could cut with that many people in the space. Nathan had similar problems, and he confirmed that it wasn't just my imagination with these things. And even when I did have some good cuts, sometimes I'd get looked off for no good reason. While I expect this every once in a while, it happened a lot more than it has in the past. Still, I can't complain since we did win overall. I attribute this (and again Nathan agrees) to having a very balanced team: everyone was at least decently athletic, everyone could at least throw decent throws, everyone kind of knew what they were doing, and our girls were all great and often better than the opposing teams (something we exploited often). Thus, while we didn't have any signature strong points, we did everything well and by our 3rd game had a good rhythm and strategy that we just stuck with for the rest of the weekend. My only worry now is if I ever go back to a hats tournament it's unluckily I'll end up on another team like that.

I'm quite happy I went to the tournament, all complaints aside, since I feel much more in shape now as well as having had a fun weekend playing a sport I love. My biggest regret? My team was the Valkyries, we had a boombox, and I didn't think until Saturday to load my iPod with Ride of the Valkyries.

-HTMC