The Ballad of Florida & Oregon

I'd intended to sit down and do a post on my reflections of Nationals today as I nurse a cold, but I jumped on to RSD to find out some news on the UPA College series that has been playing out over the last couple of weeks. I thought there'd be the usual news - my 2007 Mixed Nats teammate's club made Regionals but no futher, Wisconsin smashed all comers and hopefully some Cinderella story coming out of the midwest or somewhere.

But instead I found a veritable shitstorm of posts - two of the top three contenders for the title were out of the running for very different reasons.

Florida have made semis in the last three years, with a title win in 2006 and finalists in 2008 against Wisconsin. They were considered to be the number one team in the nation. They cruised through their pool on day one of Atlantic Coast Regionals, but lost their crossover game. They regathered and breezed past UNCW, then got beaten 14-9 by eventual winners Virginia. This put them in the back door bracket where they were facing NC State in the game-to-go, NC State being known to Australians as the college that Brett Matzuka attends. Here's a write up of that game.

But the bigger controversy is Oregon. They were playing their B-team at Regionals and decided that they couldn't really be bothered with a proper game, so they reported the score as 13-9 and instead played one point of "shirts only vs pants only". Seems harmless enough, but a complaint was filed to their college's sports committee and all of a sudden they found themselves withdrawn from the UPA series by their Club Sports executive committee.

Then it gets weird. They appealed to the committee and the media got involved. Because of prior incidents involving underage drinking and speeding fines, the decision was upheld and the captain of the team was quoted in the Seattle Times...

"Speeding, drinking, nudity — they're not bad things, they're things a big portion of the community doesn't think are wrong."

“We need to recognize the difference between the ultimate culture and the club sports culture.”

The second quote is pulled from a more extensive article from the Oregon Daily Emerald, the college's newspaper. What the captain of that team fails to recognise, is that the media is far quicker to jump all over negative misdemeanours than they are over the positive actions a team or club performs. Sports stars and teams behaving inappropriately is one of their favourite topics - just look at North Melbourne's rooster video, or Greg Bird being found guilty of pulling a 'Chris Brown'.

Hopefully we don't have to face this kind of situation any time soon, but the best course of action would be to not talk to the media without any kind of preperation. It is so easy to be taken out of context, especially when your personal opinion is assumed to be the party line and you end up speaking of behalf of all ultimate players whether you intend to or not.

The other point is that one of the dumbest things we do as a world wide community is try and advertise ourself as a serious competitive sport in some avenues, yet try and obtain different treatment when it suits us. We are either a serious sport or a recreational activity - we can't have it both ways.