2006-2007 Season Review

The past year was a great season for Brighton, with improved postions in nearly every event.

We started off the winter by winning the London Winter League mixed division (placing 4th, 3rd, 2nd and 1st in the individual events!) and finishing high in the open division. Brighton’s indoor team then took the plate (9th) at indoor club nationals and over Easter Shocker finished 7th at Paganello.

The Mixed Tour was highlighted by Brighton entering two fairly evenly matched teams, with Brighton Mixed 1 finishing 8th, 6th and 3rd, and Brighton Mixed 2 finishing 13th, 8th and 12th. Mixed Nationals never happened, but Brighton’s over Tour positions were an excellent 3rd and 10th (the only club to have two teams in the top 16).

Open Tour was a success as well, with Brighton 1 staying in the top 12 of the A-Tour throughout (6th, 11th, 8th) and Brighton 2 consistently acheiving their best results ever in the B-Tour (14th, 12th, 11th). Their overall Tour finishing positions were 9th and 27th respectively.

The great results continued at Open Nationals, with Brighton 1 narrowly losing the 3rd/5th playoff to come 5th, and Brighton 2 finishing 27th and winning the Spirit prize.

2006 was also the first year that Brighton entered a fully-fledged women’s team into the Women’s Tour (last year they combined with other south-east women to form Blue) and they set an excellent precedent, coming 9th, 9th, and 5th at the Tours (overall position 6th), and finishing 5th at Women’s Nationals.

Well done to everyone who played with Brighton throughout the year for doing so well and thanks for making it all so much fun. Special thanks to our coaches, captains, transport organisers, and everyone who helps run the club. Finally, I’d like to say goodbye to two team members who played with us this year – Dexter and Inese – who left to emmigrate to Australia and return home to Latvia, respectively. Come back and visit some time guys!

Brighton players at EUC 2007 – the results!

A huge well done to all the current and ex-Brighton players at EUC 2007 last week. Their individual results are:

Thomas “Roach” Roach (GB Open, Gold medal, 5 goals, 5 assists)
Rich “Gash” Harris (GB Mixed, Gold medal, 8 goals, 9 assists)
Amie “Chi Amie” Channon (GB1 Junior Women, Gold medal, 2 goals, 13 assists)
Ryan “Tabasco” Tarascas (GB Junior Open, Silver medal, 2 goals, 1 assist)
Alizé “Bob” Clough (Belgium Women, 1 goal, 19 assists (out of a team total of 73!), Spirit winner)
Johanna “Lethal” von der Weppen (Belgium Women, 2 goals, Spirit winner)
Erin Brownbill (GB2 Junior Women, Bronze medal, 1 goal)
Lola Denham (GB2 Junior Women, Bronze medal)
Inese Birgele (Latvia Women, 10 goals, 8 assists)

It was an excellent weekend all round for the GB teams, with GB featuring in all 7 finals and achieving gold in the Open, Mixed, Masters, and Junior Women’s divisions, and silver in the Women’s, Junior Open, and Junior U17 Open divisions. Well done to all who played and thanks to everyone who staffed for making it a great weekend.

Tour 1

A quick update about Tour 1 before we go to Tour 2 and I get too behind…

Brighton 1 (A Tour)- Tough games against Leeds/Clapham/Fusion on Saturday, but won cross-over with Fire Of London 2 on Sunday to get in the top 8. After that, they won one more (Discuits) then lost the 5/6 play-off (a much closer game vs Leeds) to come 6th (up from their seeding of 8th).

Brighton 2 (B Tour) – Beat KO!, Black Sheep and Devon 2 but lost a tight game against ABH1 to put us 2nd in our group. We then beat ABH2 and GB Juniors on Sunday to put us in the plate final, but a long 3 hour gap before the last game somehow drained us of all ability to play Ultimate and we lost to Flump by lots. Overall won 5 of 7 games and moved up from 17th to 14th.

Brighton Women – Despite Cat and Megan’s injuries in the first game, they started strong on Saturday, winning all 3 games (GB Juniors, Steal, Mu2) by a good margin. Things were a little tougher on Sunday, but they still won 2 of 3 games (beat Discuits and Ltd Release), and eventually ended up 9th, 1 place up from their seeding. Megan’s knee is now impoving well, and Cat is out of hospital and recovering but won’t be back playing for a couple of weeks – get well soon both of you!

Mixed Tour 3 and final standings

All too suddenly the Mixed season has come to an end, but it ends with Brighton Ultimate acheiving their best ever Mixed Tour result. At MT3, our first team did exceptionally well, and only very narrowly missed out on an appearance in the final – winning 4 out of 6 games and eventually coming 3rd. They also ended the season in 3rd place overall in the Mixed Tour!

Brighton 2 had a tougher weekend, losing a lot of games by a slim margin, and eventually finishing 12th. It’s a testament to Brighton 2′s performance earlier in the season though that they finished in the top 12 at MT3 despite losing all their games. They still retained a great position of 10th overall in the Mixed Tour however (the best 2nd team by 12 places), which is an excellent result.

Last year our final Mixed Tour standings were 7th and 28th (although we then finished 3rd and 20th at Mixed Nationals), so to improve this to 3rd and 10th is awesome. Apparently having 2 teams in the top 8 at MT2 was the best any true geo-team has done (IF acheived it as well last year).

Hopefully we can carry this success on to the Open Tour and the debut UK outing for the Brighton Women’s team in a couple of weeks.

Well done to everybody who was involved in the Mixed Tour this year (especially the girls who had been playing for less than a year and suddenly were playing ironwoman against some of the best players in the country!), and many thanks to everyone who helped with coaching, captaining, transport, line-calling, finance, and filling Gash’s bag with pistachio shells.

UKUA Mixed Tour 2 report

“Comprising the rest of the top eight at close of play on Sunday, BAF had slipped a couple of places while Brighton 1 were joined by Brighton 2, even playing each other in the 6 v 7 cross in their penultimate games! For Brighton to get two teams into the top eight is a big achievement, and all credit to them: their selection tactics of splitting their squad into two roughly equal teams has paid off; I for one would love to see how a true Brighton first team would fare against the established teams, and perhaps Mixed Nationals, if it happens, will be the place to see.”

Read the whole report here.