Van Buren Boys Win the UPA Club Championship!

Admittedly, I don't know much about ultimate or how tournaments work, but what I do know is that it's just like my mom always used to say: it's not whether you win or lose, it's how good your timing is when you win.

Dave says "Plan sounds good Kev, I'm in!"

The Van Buren Boys, of course, reinforced this principle in early September by losing 5 games and winning just 2 to finish higher than our initial seed at CHC. I don't think it needs to be said that we planned our entire season around this principle. The ultimate community at large is undoubtedly aware of Kevin's recruiting platform: We're going to put the least amount of required effort, time, and wins into naming the team, designing jerseys, and qualifying for Nationals, but we're going to get it done. Truth be told, most of us were stunned to read Kev's email about practices being scheduled in June and promptly put an end to that kind of thinking by not showing up. After that, we were back to our minimalist approach toward qualifying for Nationals.

Initially, the plan was to win 0 games and qualify, but teams like Zebra Muscles, Mephisto, and Hustle no doubt had heard of our plan, adopted it, and were just simply executing it better than we were early in the season. Plus, the VBB braintrust had been unable to find a 0 wins path to Nationals that didn't include mass disqualifications and they had foolishly put the only guy capable of disqualifying his own team on our roster. Regardless, had a scheme like that been attempted, the UPA evidently no longer disqualifies the entire team for playing an ineligible player in the series, just the captain, and the plan would have failed miserably.

Next step, try to concoct a scheme to win just 1 game at Regionals and qualify. And it nearly worked! The UPA helped out tremendously with this plan by announcing that Regionals would be held in a state that only 8 people have heard of. It was conceivable that all but 1 or 2 other teams would either get lost trying to get there or just stay home. Sadly, 13 other teams showed up and it was time for plan C.

Heading into Regionals, we were 0 for 12 against teams ranked 39th or higher. We knew there were 2 ways we could win just 2 games against similarly ranked teams and get to the big show. One was to beat Machine in pool play and then win in semis, but since we were relatively sure Machine would qualify and that beating them would be, let's face it, hard, we decided on beating top 39 teams on just Sunday. So that's what we did. And our season was unofficially a success.

But we still had 7 games yet to lose.

Photographic evidence of our Championship

Which brings me to the title of this post . . . we won Nationals! Don't ask me how or why, I'm not a great tournament-format mind, but immediately after the last game on Sunday, they clearly announced our name over the loudspeaker, promptly handed us a trophy, and crowned the Van Buren Boys champions, despite losing every single game of the tournament.

No wonder nobody takes this sport seriously.