The NC State club ultimate team took to Athens, Georgia for the Classic City Classic and came in third place of 16 teams in a two-day event on Nov. 16-17.
As the two seed in a pool with Pittsburgh, UCF and Tennessee, the Pack went 2-1, only losing to the top team in the pool, and second seed overall, Pittsburgh. Then, it advanced to the semifinal before getting knocked out by UNC-Wilmington.
“We haven’t had a great history of coming out super strong to begin tournaments,” said senior captain Austin von Alten. ”But we had a really good warmup and everyone was really locked in from the beginning.”
In pool play, the Pack started with an 8:30 a.m. game against Tennessee and left the field with a 13 to 4 win. Then, Alpha went into the biggest game of pool play against Pittsburgh and lost 11 to 7.
“The wind started to pick up and that’s where they started to capitalize on their zone look,” von Alten said. “That made it tough for our O-line to work through such pressured spaces. In high wind, they got us on a lot of deep looks that we took; some leading away shots at high risk, high reward that didn’t go our way.”
The team had just recently started practicing it’s zone defense, something that was tested by the Panthers and it gave Alpha a little trouble.
“Pitt through some zone defense looks at us that we hadn’t really seen,” said junior captain Trevor Lynch. “And we hadn’t really practiced against too much, because we hadn’t taught our zone defense until a week or two ago.”
Finally, to close out pool play, the Pack ran through UCF 13-2 to get some much-needed momentum for the rest of the tournament. To get to the championship bracket Sunday, the Pack then needed to beat South Carolina in a crossover match. After a back-and-forth match that was close to the end, Alpha topped the Gamecocks 12 to 10.
Sunday morning, the team was met by a Michigan team that it had seen at the end of last season in quarterfinals. NC State was able to sneak by with a 14 to 10 win to reach the semis against UNC-W.
“[Michigan]’s a good team,” von Alten. “Not better than Pitt but better than all the other pool play teams we played. We came out really hot in that one. Our sophomores played really well in that game which was super good because our starters could get more rest… [senior captain Michael Lee] played super well in that game.”
Alpha faces the Seahawks quite often, so it knew what to expect going in from past experiences. Unfortunately for NC State, it was unable to get to the finals, falling 13 to 11 at the hands of the familiar foe.
“They did break us a few times early on,” von Alten said. “We were able to come back and get one or two of those breaks back but never enough to put us back in the lead. And they ended up kind of coasting and holding through the second half.”
NC State was able to avenge it’s pool-play loss to the Panthers, however, as the Pack won a modified game to seven at a score of 7 to 4.
“Given the circumstances, we came into the weekend a little bit short-handed,” Lynch said. “And then having people go down later on, on Sunday, hurt us, but I think given that, we played pretty well… We were prepared to break seed and get into those later games in bracket play.”
Alpha is now finished for the fall season and will look toward the spring season where its games start counting with hopes to get to nationals at the end of the semester.
“What we want to do now is kind of lock in on all the fundamental stuff that we’ve talked about in the fall,” von Alten said. “Because come spring time, everything we’re teaching is going to become to niche and situational to certain things and everyone’s going to have to lock in on all the concepts.”
