Night Before Competition Starts

Tomorrow: up at 7:30am. Coffee: we have some in the apartment. This is important as the bagel and espresso shop downstairs with some extraordinarily delightful coffees opens daily at 10am.

10am. Evidently that's morning time in Praha 1, near Old Town Square, close to Powder Tower. 10am. That's when the city starts to wake up. Every day, not just weekends.

The hired minivan taking the team of 20+ wives, girlfriends, children and Clayton departs 8:45am. Game time 10:30 versus Helsinki.

Then 2:30pm scheduled game versus Surly. Or is it? With all three American teams in the same pool for the Masters division (out of 8 teams total in the pool) and given the fact that Surly won UPA Nationals two years ago, lost in the finals this year, they were seeded behind GLUM from Canada who finished 5th at Nationals this year and bottom half in 2008. So on one schedule it says we play Surly, on another schedule it says GLUM. They may have switched the seedings to move up Surly, which would make an awful lot of sense for everyone.

However, as Jane Carlen has aptly noted before, "no one cares about Masters." This, of course, is a fact. At least from a spectator point of view.

6:30pm highlight game broadcast live is Women's Hot Beaches (Czech Republic) versus Storm (Montreal).

I went to the cozy stadium today to see where those featured games will be. It's nice. Maybe room for 5-8,000 spectators I'm guessing? One berm side with built-in stands and a long row of press boxes above it. A clear view of the turf field. An orange running track encircles the field.

All around the stadium are smaller field areas which will be lined for ultimate. There are 12 additional fields surrounding the stadium, all on various levels, like conjoining Vietnamese rice paddies.

This is the Vrsovice area, one of two distinct cross-town areas for the tournament. The other is on the "Castle side" of the river and a 30 minute bus ride away. In between is downtown Prague. We've got the city surrounded.

The next few days my bloggotyping will join in with the WUCC newsletter, both online and printed. You can see the link on the right under "Worlds Main Link."

If anyone reading this wants to add Worlds blogs, contact me. its mrtonyleonardo AT yahoo DOT com.

Also: feel free to text me. I have a USA phone number and its easy and free. Email and I will give you my phone number if you don't already have it or didn't already get it from the women's stall at Tenjune.

And finally: a tidbit rumor picked up today was that BULA, the Beach Ultimate Lover's Association, would be joining WFDF as a separate but equal entity (or something like that) and that USA Ultimate was taking a strong interest in the Beach game, anticipating a possible future when the Beach game could become a very marketable and successful part of USA-U. Details to be ironed out, i suppose, but this is basically something I have been advocating (and others, certainly) for about 6-7 years now. So maybe its time has finally come.