Eric the Blue

I’ve been with my daughters in Oregon, where their high school ultimate frisbee team was in a national tournament. And they won it! They get annoyed when relatives think they must be playing frisbee golf or something, so if you want to see what “ultimate” looks like, here’s one of their games from Friday’s pool play. The championship game is on YouTube, too–here–but it was played in the early evening and players’ long shadows are kind of distracting. (Plus, my older daughter is interviewed on-air after the pool game.) There’s a recap of the championship game here.

At the high school level, the sport has been dominated by teams from the Pacific Northwest. Last year, five of the eight teams that made it to the quarterfinals were from the Seattle metro, and for the last three years in a row the championship game has been between the same two schools–one from Seattle and the other from Eugene, Oregon. This year my daughters’ team, Washburn High in Minneapolis, defeated that Seattle school, the defending champion, in the quarters–after trailing by two points late in the second half, they scored the game’s last four points to win 10-8. In the semis, they built a big lead (7-1) early and then held on for a 14-11 win. The championship game was against the team from Eugene, the tournament’s #1 seed. Washburn won easily, 14-6. Our team has a big roster, lots of solid players, and I think maybe Eugene relied more on a small corps of stars who were spent by the time we played them. It was 90 degrees in Salem, the host town about an hour south of Portland, and both teams were playing their third game of the day, sixth of the weekend.

Next day we had time to kill, so drove back to the Portland airport by way of Pacific City on the Oregon coast. Here’s my happy national champions with the ocean in the background.

One of the other dads sent me this picture of the three captains with their gold medals after the championship game:

Number 27, Charlotte, is one of Lydia’s best friends. Number 9, Samantha, is one of these all-everythings–gifted athlete, valedictorian, merit scholar, “one of Augustine’s fit and fair” as a critic once said of John Updike. By chance, I sat next to Samantha on the flight home. I’m on the aisle, her dad by the window, she’s between us, my daughters in the row in front of us. Soon as we were up in the air Samantha pulled out a door stop of a book and began reading. Figures! Her dad did the same. It’s genetic! My girls, phones out, buds in, were probably planning their Insta posts. Everyone kept at their diverse activities, which in my case meant trying to make those dribs of coffee they pour you last till South Dakota. Had flashbacks to interminable work meetings made bearable only by the contents of a travel mug. Fun weekend though.