Round Two (11:00 – 1:00)

The women’s pool is very deep this year, with at least 9 teams having a legitimate shot to win the tournament! Picking the women’s final four is especially difficult as two of the lower seeds, Brown (#6) and Tufts (#8) have the advantage (and crowd support) of being the "home" team.

The no-brainer game to watch this round (« « « « « ) features two final four women’s teams from last year: Georgia (#4) and Carleton (#9). The Carleton women (Syzygy ) won last year’s championship for the first time after being perpetual final four contestants. Both of these teams are stacked with good players, with Georgia having two Callahan candidates in captain Katharine Kidd-Shippey (#3) and Angela Lin (#71). Carleton lost several key players from last year’s championship team, but a super recruiting year has left them in excellent shape to make a run for a repeat. However, for both of these teams to make the final four one of them is going to have to win an early game Saturday morning ("the pre-quarters") – a tough row to hoe.

The men’s division doesn’t have anything that quite compares to the Georgia / Carleton women’s game, but for a couple of teams, their season will already be on the line. The pool A game (« « « ) between Brown and UNC-Chapel Hill should rock and if UNC enters this game after a tough first round loss, they’ll have to dig very, very deep or they’ll be looking at a pre-quarters game – or worse. Brown won the championship last year, but lost a good portion of its starting team to graduation. Moses Rifkin, is trying to become the third consecutive Brown player (behind ’99 Fortunat Mueller and ’00 Justin Safdie) to win the Callahan Award, but he’ll have his work cut out for him trying to cover UNC’s Ray Parrish.

In Pool B (« « « ) Michigan could find itself in a similar position to UNC, facing a strong Tufts team after having played a brutal first round game. On paper these teams look very similar and this game is likely to end 15-13 one way or the other.

Finally, pool D features ultimate’s white hat, black hat game (« « « ) with Carleton College taking on UNC-W. Carleton College (located somewhere in Minnesota), is everyone’s favorite college ultimate team, while UNC-W (rightly or wrongly) is its most vilified. Both teams have had great success, with Carleton qualifying for the championship tournament virtually every year since man created flying plastic, and UNC-W dominating the sport in the early 90’s. Carleton features a horde of good players, none gooder than Alex Nord (#5 – 6’5), this year’s overwhelming favorite to win the Callahan Award. Alex is simply one of the best players to ever to play college ultimate and Carleton’s fans (of which there are plenty) are counting on him to help CUT to its first championship title.