EUC Regionals - Central Region - No Belgians..

Last weekend saw 4 belgian teams take part in the EUCR-C which is short for the European Ultimate Championships Regionals - Central region. This is a regional qualification tournament where the top 5 in open division and the top 2 in women's division is allowed to take part in the final weekend (EUCF,also known as Champions League) on 30/09 and 1-2/10.

What you have to know about this regional qualification tournament is this : This year's EUCF (final weekend) is happening in Bruges,Belgium for the very first time ever.

And as you can presume, we really really wanted a belgian team to be able to represent our country for the very first time at an EUCF (except for Mooncatchers who already played the xEUCF but that was due to the mixing of the 4-yearly European Ultimate Club Championships and the yearly European Ultimate Championship Finals-EUCF).

Guess what, unfortunately we didn't succeed in bringing home the qualification.

With four belgian teams (Gentle,Mooncatchers and Jetset in open division, Tabasco in women's division) none of us succeeded in getting that ever-so-desired 5th place for the qualification.
Gentle and Mooncatchers came out strong enough to make it into the quarter finals but Jetset (with a whole bunch of young and less-experienced Propellers and missing a few key players like Hakke and Peter) had some really hardfought games but were already eliminated in the poule plays just like Tabasco (which might somewhat look like a spin-off of MissB, the national ladies team, but just has all these ladies studying or working in Ghent).

Gentle and Mooncatchers made it an easy saturday night, going to bed quite early preparing for some history in the making. Gentle was looking to beat Ragnarok, against whom we lost by universe point last year at Windmill, and Mooncatchers was up for a battle against Bad Skid (a young team from Germany with so many talented players,who already kicked some Gentle-ass..).

Both quarter finals were lost by the belgians and so the top 4 was known. All we could do was win the 2 other games to make it to the 5th place. For Moon the qualification already stopped when they lost the next game against Cambocakes while Gentle played an amazingly beautiful, high level game against Feldrenner. Defeating these Germans we knew that the battle for the 5th place was on against our neighbours from the Netherlands : CamboCakes.

Gentle and Cambo have a little history in playing eachother at Tom's Tourney and Windmill Windup and these battles have already gone both ways a lot. Belgium-Holland has always been a classic matchup,even in football/soccer, and so the stakes were high for both teams.
Gentle came out really strong, taking the game in hands and being up 2-0. After that we started trading points and the intensity was very nice in this high-pace,high-level game with nice points from both sides.Gentle kept the early break and was up with one point the whole game until the Dutch had a late break to score 12-12. With a game to 15 us Belgians were getting some troubles getting open and this was mainly due to being undermanned. Fourteen Gentley's who had been playing all weekend in a hot sunny weather just couldn't quite cope with the Dutch pressure in D. As I've been told from people on the sideline you could see the intensity of the belgian cuts go down as the game progressed. The Dutch, who had a few more fit runners kept on putting a lot of pressure and won the game with 13-15.
Over and out for the Belgian dream to play the EUCF2011, but rest assured, the desire to come back stronger than ever is definitely there and it has been proven that the whole level of playing in Europe (and Belgium) is getting better than ever.

It's only a matter of time before we get to these competitions, but in the meantime I'm pretty sure Gentle and all other belgian teams will be practicing more and more to make our entries on the European scene.

But first of all : we will be enjoying a nice cold drink on the sidelines of the EUCF2011.

The teams from the Central Region who qualified are these :

Open Division :
1 7 Schwaben,Stuttgart
2 Heidees,Heidelberg
3 Bad Skid,Bad Rappenau
4 Ragnarok,Kopenhagen
5 Cambo Cakes,Amsterdam
6 Gentle,Ghent
7 Feldrenner,Mainz
8 Mooncatchers,Brussels
9 MUC,München
10 Hardfisch,Hamburg
12 Jet Set,Leuven
11 Frühsport 0,2,Köln

Ranking Women
1 Chicas,München
2 Heidees,Heidelberg
3 Primavera,Utrecht
4 Jinx,Berlin
5 Tabasco,Ghent

If you wanna know all the teams who already qualified for the EUCF2011 check out this link :
http://www.eucf11.be/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&layout=blog&id=10&Itemid=14
More info to come.

Keep on reading !