Tuesday, July 20, 2010

World Stage Moves to Florence

So this week sees the inaugural World Ultimate u23 Championships, held in Florence, Italy.

The Open Japan team rolled Switzerland in the Opening Feature Game. The first full day starts tonight Australian time, and you can keep up with the live scores if you're good with the refresh button.

Day one sees the Aussie Women (featuring Queensland's own Blair Sheard, Bree Edgar, Terri Morgan and Simone Ryan) start the event up against Germany and then Ireland, followed by two more days of round robin. A top four finish in the pool gets them to the Semis.

The Aussie Lads (featuring our own John McNaughton, and sorta-ours Cupcake, and we may as well mention Tiger too) begin with a square up against locals Italy, before a big Day 2 against Canada and Sweden. Columbia, Austria and Ireland round out the rest of their pool A. The Aussies need to be in the top four of their pool to go into the quarters.

We'll do our best to provide some coverage during the week.

Edit: I was going to put this in the comments after Mansauce asked about the USA's absence and I repeated some old gossip, but figure this interview on the US's experience at the WFDF Congress in Prague gives an answer is generally interesting for those who follow US Ultimate (thumbs up also for the redesign and increased content on the new USA Ultimate website).

4 comments:

Unknown said...

Any word on whether there is any live coverage, JDR?

Mansauce said...

Why aren't the US playing?

JdR said...

Last I heard, the US felt that WFDF had not given enough notice of the intention to introduce the u23 Championships, and as a result felt they couldn't do justice to their u23 population in selecting and preparing a team in a rush.

Of course, everyone else managed it.

It may have also have connected to the US College season or something.

Unknown said...

Did the Aussie Women win both their games 17-0? Or is that just a scoreboard error?

Andy Mc