The Exiles First Tournament

This Saturday on October 1st,  The Exiles: Eastern's one and only ultimate Frisbee club, left around 5:30 am to set off on their journey to fight the good fight against Bloomsburg University and other participating colleges. There were a few twists and turns involved that were a bit unexpected such as the departure time, the merging of two teams, and the weather. The ultimate Frisbee team intended to leave at exactly 5am, but was sadly unable to do so because we were not able to get our hands on a van that we were supposed to receive. As a member of the ultimate Frisbee club I was too half asleep to actually understand what was going on let alone care, all I knew was we had to get there and leave at 5am and I was there and ready to go. We were also partly delayed because we had to wait for all of the drivers who volunteered to drive all of us to Bloom. The trip was around two hours long we were like a traveling cavalry of six cars all back to back, no other cars dared to join in on our line. I remember seeing this when we were almost at our destination I quickly opened my eyes to see how we were looking on our arrival time out of curiosity, and sat up and looked at all of the cars in front of us and a big smile spread across my face as I realized these were all of my team mates lined up.

Upon arriving we found that we didn’t have a game until 10:30am so we watched the other teams play and we attempted to warm up.  It was freezing outside and raining on again off again. Luckily we were instructed in an email we received earlier that week to bring garbage bags in order to protect all of belongings from the rain. So this fact helped. We were then led by Ben Creighton, one of our three captains, in multiple warm up drills. A few that incoming freshman and new players in general were not used to during any of our practices, at least I was not. There was a lot of running involved and we were to do, I’m sure silly looking, stretches such as “opening the door” and “closing the door”: which is when we take one leg and lift it up high in the air almost like opening a door with our leg alone, we would do this with either leg at a time walking to certain point on the field that we were allotted for space. We then “closed the door” which is the reverse motion of “opening the door”.  

We had a total of 31 people on our team who came to play in the Bloomsburg tournament; this number would have normally been fine if we were broken down into two teams, but because Bloomsburg University also had a track meet that day so they cut down the size of the tournament. I found it quite humorous after each game we would finish our team and our opponents would line up and say “good game”, as it is a tradition in all sports events in the spirit of good sportsmanship. Our team was one of the largest out of all of the other participating teams. After a while of the quick high fives, we would often hear the other teams say stuff like “Holy crap, you have a lot of people, when is this line gonna end!” Often including all sorts of curse words, but I was nice enough to exclude these. All in all though, regardless of these numerous complications, we wound up being okay anyway. It was well worth going through all of these challenges in order to get the end result of playing our hearts out and gaining awesome memories and forming closer bonds.

*Stay tuned for next week and enjoy the picture of all the Exile participants in the Bloomsburg Tournament!