REGIONAL INTEREST
Ho-Down and Slo- Down Success
Alberta Written by: Tammy Carter
The third time was the charm this year for Calgary’s Ho-Down Slo-Down. After being cancelled due to the flood last year and losing one day of play to rain in 2012, the sun was thankfully shining June 21st and 22nd in Calgary.
Teams from across British Columbia, Saskatchewan, Alberta (with a healthy contingent from Calgary) competed in A and B divisions of play in Ho-Down and a C division in Slo-Down. All together 21 teams competed in a fantastic tournament with amazing friends, new and old.
Calgary’s own Rats took the A division in a hotly contested final against the Edmonton squad Rogue. Nelson’s Homegrown were the winners in B and vowed to come back next year and take on the A division. Slo-Down is all about fun, especially for The Graduates. That didn’t hold them back from becoming the Slo-Down champions (in more ways than one).
As always, special thanks to the many volunteers that helped out at the tournament. So much goes on behind the scenes and every contribution helps put on a great event. We look forward to 2015, when we host our 30th Annual Ho-Down and Slo-Down!
Life of the Party: Past Meets Present at Reimagined Winnipeg Tournament
Prairies Written by: Yacine Bara
Loud music, revelers in bright costumes and an alternate currency lavished upon those partying the hardest: scenes not from a routine day at Mardi Gras in New Orleans, but from the fields at Winnipeg Ultimate Park over the weekend of June 7/8, 2014. A passer-by stumbling across the spectacle might have mistaken it for a cross between an all-ages summer camp and a poorly-timed Halloween party; heck, so might some of the people actually participating in the event. Such is the nature of an Ultimate tournament where the game itself takes a back seat to everyone’s favourite part of the tournament experience: everything but the Ultimate.
Tongue-in-cheek sentiments aside, this year’s (new- &-improved) edition of Winnipeg’s annual ‘Beat the Skeeters’ tourney explicitly aimed to acknowledge that without the laughs, festivity and camaraderie that go along with the on-field activity, Ultimate players (serious and casual alike) probably wouldn’t bother investing as much time in the sport as they do. Participating teams scored points for a wide variety of prescribed activities that had nothing to do with on- field results: wearing costumes, singing songs, pulling off trick plays, having music playing on their sideline, and just about anything else that could be construed as contributing to the weekend’s party vibe. Sure, there were some Ultimate games played, but the official tournament scoring system placed relatively little weight on the outcomes of those; to wit, the eventual tournament champions didn’t actually win a single one.
The scoring component of the weekend was set against a backdrop of auxiliary events and amenities more typical of a summer festival than an average Ultimate tournament: Saturday dinner for all participants, beer gardens for those of age, on-site camping for those really looking to throw down with some of Manitoba’s finest mosquitoes, live music and DJs into the wee hours, Sunday-morning pancake breakfast in support of the local juniors program - the list goes on.
‘Beat the Skeeters’ has existed for a number of years as a more conventional, if still recreational,
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