Manhattan Ultimate – End of Summer League

Today was the last game of the summer league season. I know, most of you are very surprised because I haven’t written anything about the first 10 weeks of games, well, get over it. The point is, I’ve been playing summer league as a member of the Maroon team of the Manhattan Ultimate Disc (or ‘MUD’ for short) summer league.

I was completely psyched to be playing ultimate in Manhattan and not having to trek all the way up to Westchester to play in the WUDI league (which took about an hour and a half each way if you had to take the train). I joined WUDI, payed my dues, went to one game, the captain yelled a lot and was pretty tense for a summer league captain… and that was the end of that.

But Manhattan Ultimate… now that’s a different story.

The first time I get an email from the captain (a great guy named Mateo) he starts off by saying: “I didn’t draft any of you, but if I had been given the opportunity, I would have drafted you all anyway, so let’s have a great time.” Ha. Great. So basically, I’m on the reject team. The team that was drafted by a representative, after which they found a captain to assign to the motley crew of ultimate misfits who nobody else wanted. What was even funnier was that the first game of summer league both the captain and co-captains were out at another ultimate tournament with their (more serious) club teams and Mateo sent me an email asking me to be the default captain for that day.

To make a long story short, we were the worst team in the league.

But that’s not really what counts. What counts is that, even while we were soundly being crushed week after week (I think we won two games out of 12), we had a hell of a time. Yes, we were not a very balanced team, yes we lacked experienced players, yes me and Joseph were the only ones who showed up one day (THAT was a fun Sunday)… but damn it, we had fun. We laughed a lot, we played as hard as we could, we had parties, we did all the things that you want your summer league team to do, and so I count my first season in the Manhattan Ultimate Disc league as a great success and hope to be joining again in the Spring.