With only 2 days to go until the climax of the UKU Open and Womens seasons you can bet that there are plenty of teams who want to take this last opportunity to prove their worth on the UK Ultimate scene in 2009. Tour 2 saw some big gains made up the tables by the likes of Fusion East, Devon, Lemmings, Flyght Club and GB open U17s as well as some teams dropping off from the pace and their seedings including Kent, Mild Mannered Janitors, Steal, Lucky Huckers and Strange Blue 2. Will these teams have had chance to fallback, regroup, iron out the creases and get fired up once more to prove themselves worthy of their Tour 1 placings at Nationals 09?
I can safely say that there will be no easy games this Sunday. From the top of the A tour to the bottom of C there are teams and players who all have their own goals they hope to achieve. Be it to win Nationals and qualify for WUCC 2010 or to beat the team they lost to in sudden death last Tour. Unfortunately without the completed schedule being released yet we don't know exactly how things will be working at the weekend or when the big games will be played but we do know that on the Saturday there will be standard peer pooled group games for Tours A, B and C and then on Sunday the Tour boundaries will be removed and teams will play their Quarters, Semis and Finals down the rankings. I look forward to seeing the schedule to fully understand what that means!
A big difference between the Mens and Womens Tours, besides numbers, is the overall stability of each tour. The mens competition sees teams making massive jumps up and down the table, (mostly in B and C) as well as a constant shifting of a few spots here and there by a large percentage of teams entered. This is in contrast to the womens tour where the top four teams at tour 2 saw absolutley no change in position from the original seeding and the bottom half saw just small amounts of movement in both directions. I wonder why this is. Maybe it is due to the fundamental differences between men and women in sport. In the mens game, you will often see highly speculative play. Big hucks, 50-50s, quick transitions and on average a faster paced game. All of these features of the mens game are high risk which results in the chance for greater reward and failure. Women on the other hand have been seen to be more calculated in their decisions with perhaps higher levels of judgement resulting in lower levels of risky play meaning teams end up where they should, infrequently causing big upsets against better teams. Although there is some evidence to back this up, it's only a theory, what do you think?
So here's to heading to Wales once more to play 2 full days of competitive Ultimate, finding out which is the best mens and womens team in the country and to the end of another hard fought UK Ultimate season.
To finish off, I'm very pleased to announce that Lookfly will be sponsoring the Ultimate Frisbee and I, Film and Photography Competition II- Nationals 2009 prize! Tell your friends about it and be sure to take plenty of photos this weekend and enter them, I promise it will be worth it. More to come in the near future.
Paris Midwinter Night League 2006-07 D1:2
12 years ago
I think women move less mainly because there are fewer teams. The more teams you have the closer each team is to the next above. If we had a million teams we'd expect teams to go hundreds of positions up just by being a little better than in the previous tournament. More interesting is what percentage of the division they move between tours. Having said that my gut reaction is that women's teams are still slightly more stable though...
ReplyDeleteGood point! I'll have a look at the team movement as a percentage of teams played and see if there is still a difference between the mens and womens tours.
ReplyDelete