Bathurst Stampede #19

Learmonth Park, Bathurst

Unfortunately this year for the tournament , we had limited numbers available to play, nevertheless with Dave's support I forged a path ahead for at least some of us to play... well we were saved by a last minute request from the Dubbo Meerkats to join forces.

So, I and two fellow players headed off to Bathurst to represent The Blue Mountains. We immediately gelled with Dubbo and I became the stand in co-captain. We were off to a good start in our first game with a narrow loss but also Linas got a bit injured, he fought on. We backed that up with a big win for our second game. There were also good connections from the blue mountains players working together and getting points to pull our weight on the Dubbo team.

After Lunch we had another loss, we had to warm up again after all. We ended the day with a win for the last game and in 11th position on the leader board.

Sunday, We had some bad news some women players that we were promised vanished. So we had to make do with the players we had.

We started the first game wondering where our opponents were,when some of them eventually showed up we gave them a player to get them started until the rest of the team showed.

We had a big win against them, getting our whole team fired up for the 2 games to come.

The two next games were great games. It came down to the wire in both with universe points in both. The first was against the colourful shirts of Manly. It was point for point for most of the game. At the end of time we had the same score as them. We played the final point to break the tie. We were on offence and got within striking distance, the disc was thrown to me and I caught it. I had the power to win the game in my hands, I threw the disc to the end zone. It went straight to our player, It looked like we had won the game; however the catcher looked like they caught it but in fact had fumbled it and then started juggling it for what felt like an eternity then dropped it. Everyone in the game was shocked and I audibly couldn't believe it. The other team felt sorry for us. But they also went on and scored the final point and won the game. We would have played for 9th place if we had won.

The last game, there was controversy. As the other team agreed to some terms we made (as we didn't have enough women). The other team then went back on the agreed terms and we had to play 6 vs 7 for half of the points. We came out swinging with a sizable lead. Unfortunately they caught up to us. We ended time with the same score again. Universe point was played but we ended up losing by 1 point again. The Dubbo women worked very hard and we were thankful for there perseverance in that tough last game.

We ended the tournament in 12th place out of 22 teams, making it the best result for the Bathurst Tournament with Blue Mountains involvement. All 3 of us had fun and played some of our best ultimate frisbee.

Elliot