Everything a busy Saturday in San Diego taught us, plus one reporter's overreactions to a single day of ultimate.
February 16, 2025 by Graham Gerhart in Recap
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Who wants a boring, clean-cut, uncomplicated tournament, anyway? Thanks to the weather and UCSD school policy, the first day of the Presidents’ Day Invite was… unconventional. Between shorter rounds, shorter fields, and smaller sidelines, the tournament had to do some serious cramming to make it all work. Thankfully, dynamite comes in small packages, and there were some explosive games that have the potential to really shake up the rankings once everything settles. Here’s everything we learned from a busy Saturday in San Diego.
The Best Team in the Southwest is…
Unconfirmed. If you were hoping that the games from Presidents’ Day might help clarify the pecking order in the Southwest, you weren’t the only one, but it was not meant to be. Instead of making sense of the results from Santa Barbara, it’s even less clear who the top teams are. Coming out of SBI, it really seemed like #7 UC San Diego Dragon Coalition, #13 Stanford Superfly, and maybe #14 UC Santa Barbara Burning Skirts were inching their way to the top, with #9 Cal Poly SLO SO Motion and #16 UC Santa Cruz Sol set to play spoiler. SLO Motion might have taken the weekend off, but UC Santa Cruz certainly didn’t. The lowest-ranked team of the group came into the tournament and confidently beat both #12 Western Washington Chaos and UC San Diego to emerge as the top seed in their pool, striding confidently into Sunday’s reshuffle as the only Southwest team without a loss. Looking back at it, perhaps their close losses against both Oregon and Washington should have been seen as some indicator of their brilliance, but it certainly would have been hard to predict that Sol would look this polished. Led by Rachel Chang, Kai Agueros, and Juliette Delany, they made very few mistakes on offense, and while their defense wasn’t the best of the tournament, it was enough to earn them the advantage in the two games that they played. Sol are very real contenders, but with only two games under their belt so far, they’re not the clear and away favorite in the region just yet.
Presidents’ Day Invite 2025: Lessons Learned on Day One (Women’s Div.) is only available to Ultiworld Subscribers
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