Strange Blue Tournament Report

Women's Indoor Varsity Match

This year the women's indoor varsity team had a challenge ahead of them. Having lost indoors varsity for the last two years we were determined not let Oxford take it again.

The team was made up of nine women:

Lindsay
Sasha
Sonja
Alex C-G
Brittany
Jassy
Natalie
Kelly
Susanna

Most of these ladies had played both indoor regionals and indoor nationals. The improvement in the way that we play together indoors had been huge over those two tournaments. We had not seen WOW play at all this season so our opponents were very much an unknown quantity. Drawing on where we had been weak the previous year, we had talked about what to focus on a couple of days before the match. However, whether it would work in practice remained to be seen.

The match began and WOW took a point early on. Jogging back to the line after that point I had a sense of apprehension starting to simmer. However, the SB girls focused in on the job in hand and took our play up at least two gears. Everything we had worked on during the season was put into practice and we moved the disc easily around our opponents. Cuts were hard and committed and no-one was afraid to dump and swing if the up field options weren't there. Sonja and Lindsay especially set up their cuts well and always seemed to be free at the critical moment. Alex and Kelly handled beautifully with Alex, as usual, pulling out a few hammers for end zone scores! A special mention has to go to Kelly who had just played a hard game for the 1st open team and then immediately played for the women as well.

Our defence was efficient from everyone and it really gave Oxford no options, especially as their dump and main handler was being really pressurized by Kelly or Susanna. This all resulted in the SB ladies pulling away to a lead of 11-1 by about ¾ of the way through the match.

However, WOW then called a time out to try and clear their heads. We knew they would come out hard after this rest and we knew what they would probably try and play: simply huck and score. That is exactly what they did and it caused us some problems initially. We were beginning to tire and they scored three points quickly. However, the SB ladies stepped it up another gear pushing through the tiredness and bidding on every one of those long disc that went up. Natalie, Brittany, Jassy and Sasha notably D'ed several high discs. There were numerous dramatic skies and our ability to read where the discs were going improved.

Oxford's scoring run was finished when SB finally scored another point just before the one point cap was put on. This cap point was also successfully claimed by SB with a rather risky hammer option into the end zone. However, the disc ended firmly in an SB hand and we had broken oxford's hold on women's indoor varsity with a definite win of 13-4.

CONGRATULATIONS to all the ladies who played! The MVP for the match was deservedly voted the whole team. Everyone played excellently and I was very proud of you all, let's do the same at outdoors!

Susanna