Wildwood

This weekend Natalia and I (and a bunch of ultimate friends) made our annual pilgrimage down to the armpit of the Jersey Shore, Wildwood, for the 18th annual Wildwood Beach Ultimate Tournament. If you don't know Wildwood, then consider yourself lucky. If you do know Wildwood then you know exactly what I am talking about.

At first glance Wildwood looks like any other shore town--boardwalk, beach, funnel cake, amusements, motels. The days tend to be pretty calm as many of the beachgoers are families with kids and, as such, are pretty respectable. But as the sun goes down and the boardwalk heats up Wildwood lives up to its name. Lots of tattoos, lots of questionable fashion choices, and just a lot of questionable decisions in general. Think MTV's "Jersey Shore" minus the class--that's Wildwood.

The tournament, though, is a lot of fun. This year there were in excess of 300 teams (I've probably massively underestimated that number too), all playing 4-on-4 ultimate on the beach. This is probably my 10th or 11th trip to Wildwood...the city never gets better, but the tournament does.

Natalia and I played with the Boston Aquasox again. Despite the huge number of teams, a lot of the organizers remembered us (the team, anyway) because we are (apparently) one of the most senior teams in tourney history...not in terms of the age of our players, per se, but rather because the team itself has headed to the tournament about 11 years in a row. (This is largely due to the efforts of our friends Geoff and Tracy who spearhead the efforts every year.) Though this year in particular I looked around at the mass of ultimate players crowding the beach and I thought "wow...I really am old." Between the two days we played 6 games against teams whose average age could not have been over 25. Usually we luck out and play one other "senior" team, but that was not the case this year.

Despite all of that, however, we held our own. On Saturday we went 1-2 in pool play and, somehow, still emerged as the number 2 seed in our pool. (One team went 3-0, and everyone else went 1-2, so we must have gone through on point differential. Maybe it was my layout Callahan in game 1 that sealed the deal.) Our final on Saturday--our crossover one--was a tight affair, with both teams grabbing and then relinquishing leads. Our opponents were a bunch of college kids (again) with boundless energy and ridiculous athleticism. Somehow we stayed close (Andy had some big throws, and Liz some big catches, among other great individual performances) and eventually won 15-14 on Universe point. Our reward: a trip to the top bracket of our pool! Our punishment: playing the overall 1 seed first thing on Sunday. Nice.

Buzz, Jeff, Stan, and Natalia relaxing (and hydrating) after a successful Saturday.

So Sunday started poorly (we lost big) but then we won our next game against--surprise!--a bunch of athletic (and drunk) college kids from Springfield, MA. And that was it...we ended 3-3 with no real injuries, major cases of dehydration, or other team dysfunction.

I must admit that going into this weekend I was very apprehensive. Low numbers, high heat, high ages--this is not often the recipe for a fun weekend. But as each game flowed into the next we found our stride and managed to pick each other up when we needed to. One or two more subs would have been a godsend, but I'll take 3-3 at Wildwood any year. (Especially since I had a record of 1-11 over a recent two-year span...yikes.) More pics posted in my slowly-expanding Summer 2010 gallery.