Kevin's Dim Summary: Jeju

As previously mentioned, Ace and i took a quick trip last weekend to the resort island of Jeju, South Korea. This was for an Ultimate Frisbee tournament called Gnarly Nines. Ultimate is played with seven players on the field per team, and normally a team brig 15-20 players to a tournament. For this tournament, each team is only allowed nine players total, meaning you have very few subs, which is called "playing savage". I've played a few "savage" tournaments in the past and they have been some of my favorite tournaments. This one was no exception. These were also, by far, the best fields i have ever played on: Six flawlessly maintained, professionally lined, regulation size, grass fields. They were awe-inspiring. These are the practice fields when South Korea hosted the 2002 World Cup. They were so well maintained, we were not allowed to have food or beer on them. Which was fine with us; bleachers surrounded the entire stadium and they had tents set up everywhere.

Historically, the annual Jeju Gnarly Nines tournament has horrendous weather every other year. Last year, the tournament was held under 25 mph gusts and a sunless sky. This year, we were blessed with a perfect weekend of Ultimate: Occasional breeze, partly cloudy, no chance of rain, and 68 degrees.

The Saturday night Rubik's Cube party was fantastic. Everyone came wearing all six colors on the cube. The goal was to "solve" your outfit by trading with others until you are one color. A bonus goal was to solve all the colors by the end of the night, meaning you had to wear 6 completely different outfits throughout the night to win. I made it through Green, Orange, and Yellow. Joe finished all six colors, and won the party award. The trick was to just trade your whole outfit with someone else who also has a completed outfit.

At the tournament, Big Brother finished with a record of 5-2 and out of 22 teams, ended tied in 3rd place with Japan. We lost to both Shanghai and Korea who played each other in the finals (congrats to Korea for winning and hosting a great tournament!). But we played hard and struck fear into all our opponents. We employed a trap zone defense that shut down all our opponents. We had a physically short team, but we were arguably the fastest in the tournament, with the best overall handlers. We definitely held our own.

As my fellow photographers scramble to upload their pics to facebook, i'll start with mine and add more later. I didn't bring my camera to the party, and i didn't take any action shots, but here's what i got.

The view from the bus as we arrived at the secondary fields, located on a small peninsula surrounded by volcanic rock outcroppings. Stunning!