I was so pumped to go up to Sean Ryan last week. We had been prepping and planning furiously, organizing rides, practicing zone and getting people pumped up.
Tuesday morning I got a text from Big Jake saying that he was forwarding us the Santa Cruz email. I thought he was referring to the captain's packet or schedule or something, so I thought nothing of it. After all my classes, I went to check my email and find this gem:
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: CSULB Ultimate <>
Date: Tue, Nov 10, 2009 at 2:42 PM
Subject: Fwd: Sean Ryan field Trouble
To: Smaug Ultimate <>
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Slug Ultimate <>
Date: Tue, Nov 10, 2009 at 12:24 PM
Subject: Sean Ryan field Trouble
To: [a bunch of teams not including Smaug]
Hey All,
The UCSC men's Soccer team make the DIII playoff tournament and decided to host the first round at our lower fields. This means, that in spite of the Ultimate team having the field reserved for the last two months, as of last weekend we are suddunly very cramped for space. In order to solve this we are cutting the number of teams we are inviting to twelve for each division. Im sorry for the inconvience, the 12 teams invinted were chosen based on past attendance and proximity.
Thanks for all of your intrest hopefully we can avoid being screwed by our university in the coming years.
Here are the teams invited, in seed order:
Stanford
UCSC
California-Berkley
California-Santa Barbara
California-San Diego
California-Davis
Las Positas
Humbolt State
Cal Poly-SLO
Claremont
Chico State
Santa Clara
--
Cassidy, Russell, Max
Slug Captains 09-10
Keep in mind that this is Tuesday and we're supposed to leave Friday morning. I spent the next few hours seething and trying to find the phone numbers of any of the UCSC captains to call them and get some more info.
I found 2 of their numbers, and called about 10 times with no answer. I left voicemails for them to call me. I wrote a very angry email to them listing our complaints and asking them to call me.
Still, it took until late that night before Arbiter reached one of them and asked if they could adjust the schedule to accomodate for the teams that got booted. No, they couldn't do that.
My complaints:
1. Not telling a team that's planning to move 30 people that they're spot has been canceled 3 days before they leave.
2. They said the reasons for cancellation were proximity and continuity. We've been going since 2005 [edit - Kiosk thinks since 2000]. UCSD and Claremont are farther away.
3. Last year we finished in the top 8, beating squids and losing to Stanford 11-9. Crappy teams got in ahead of us.
4. It impacts teams that are further away more than it impacts teams that are closer. We have to plan more for the trip and commit to hotel reservations.
5. They couldn't man up and return any of my phone calls. I can understand that your school screwed you. At least be men and return my phone calls.
6. It seems like the right thing to do here because of the short notice would be to change around the schedule and share the burden between all the teams. Saying "F you" to 4 of the teams is not the better option.
The whole thing kind of took the wind out of my sails for the week. We were counting on Sean Ryan to be our tryout tourney for our A-team, and now we only have SoCal Warm Up before winter break, which were sending a split squad to.
I was so angry, and it was even more frustrating because we were totally at their mercy. There's nothing we can do about it, and it's not even likely that we'll play them this year because they're out of region.
Basically we had to bend over and take it.
Thanks Santa Cruz.
