USC Men's Ultimate

After a relatively successful Saturday, the Ghettobirds found themselves in the championship bracket, and first up was Reno. Unfortunately for Reno, the Birds really wanted to win this tournament and many team members went to bed early at the Ghetto house the previous night (this may or may not have been a result of the carryover effect from the prior evening in Vegas). As a result, many players were well rested and came out firing. It didn’t take long for the Birds to put away Reno, and the final score was 13-7.

Next up was SLO, who have always been just a step up from the Ghettobirds. But the Birds have closed the gap quickly on them in recent years. Unfortunately, Ghetto was without grad student Ty Smalling, who played for SLO for the last four years and knew them as well as anybody. While he gave help from the sidelines, he wasn’t able to play due to a hamstring injury suffered the day before, and that was a blow to a team already suffering from poor numbers.

Nevertheless, Ghetto came out hot and scored the first point, thanks to a beautiful huck from junior Brian “Chi-City” Leung to freshman Nick “Needs a Nickname” Manos. However, the Core came back and scored three straight points to take a 3-1 lead. Ghetto wasn’t going away easily though, and junior “Tall” Will Price had a nice huck to Manos for Ghetto’s 2^nd score to bring them within 3-2. The teams then traded a few points before SLO took half 7-4. After half, Ghetto, who never gives up, made a typical late push but it was a tad too late as SLO took the game 13-10.

This pushed Ghetto out of the Championship bracket, but luckily for the Birds, SLO decided they had enough for the day and withdrew from the tournament. This gave Ghetto the automatic win and thus, the team advanced to the quarterfinals against a familiar foe, Azusa Pacific.

Many people questioned the mindset of the Ghettobirds, who were getting in cars to eat lunch when they found out SLO withdrew and thus, the Birds had to play in 10 minutes, but to their credit, they came out strong and fired up. After going up early, Azusa switched things up a little bit and threw a zone defense. The Ghettobirds were ready for it and continually shredded it down the field, until they got to the endzone. The Birds couldn’t figure out how to work it in the compact field, and turned it over on the end zone line three times in the first half. This allowed APU to get quick breaks down the field and they took half easily, 8-3.

But incase you haven’t picked up on a theme here, I’ll clue you in one more time. You can never count the Ghettobirds out. They could’ve resigned to the fact that this was the last game of the day, and just mailed it in, but they came out and kept fighting. They finally figured out how to score in the end zone as handlers senior David “V-Neck” Horrell, Chi City, senior Brian “Prius” Ball, sophomore Andrew “Jay-Bird” Bailey and Manos did a great job moving it side to side and tiring APU out. Pretty soon, APU was only up 10-9 thanks to some great deep cuts by junior Luke “Skywalker” Vollherbst and some hucks by sophomore Thomas “T Tom” Liu and V-Neck. Azusa stretched the lead out to 12-9 and looked to end the game on but Jay Bird came up with a huge D in the end zone to keep the game alive. Ghetto ended up scoring the next two points, but it was too little too late as Azusa finally ended it for a 13-11 win.

That was the last game of the day as the Ghettobirds tied for 5^th in the tournament. Not a bad weekend considering the depleted squad. Overall, lots of fun was had by all in Vegas and the Ghetto House.