The NC State club ultimate team, Alpha Ultimate, will travel to Athens, Georgia, Nov. 16-17, to compete in the Classic City Classic.
Alpha enters the tournament as the sixth-overall seed and will be the two-seed in the pool with third-seeded Pittsburgh. The top five, in order, are Brown, UNC-Chapel Hill, Pittsburgh, Michigan and Georgia. NC State’s pool also consists of UCF and Tennessee.
“The No. 1 seed in our pool is Pitt, who has gone to the quarterfinals of nationals for the last nine years, or something like that,” said club president Michael Lee. “That will be a really good test for us. And we’re still focused on development so it should be a good spot to see where our younger guys match up on the national scene.”
The Pack will play its three pool play games on Saturday against Tennessee, Pittsburgh and UCF at 8 a.m., 11 a.m. and 12:30 p.m., respectively. If NC State finishes first in the pool, it will advance straight to the championship bracket on Sunday, and if it finishes fourth, it will be put in the ninth-place bracket on Sunday.
In a more likely scenario, Alpha will finish behind Pittsburgh in second or third place, so it will play a crossover game with a team in Pool B, which consists of UNC, BYU, USC and Florida, at 2 p.m. on Saturday. The winner of that crossover game will advance to the championship bracket, and the loser will drop to the ninth-place bracket.
“This is our first week we are teaching our zone defense instead of just play person-to-person defense,” Lee said. “That’s going to be really beneficial because other teams have already taught that, and our offense hasn’t got a lot of reps playing zone offense.”
Alpha is coming off a fourth-place finish in Wilmington Nov. 2-3. The team went 3-0 in conference play against Maryland, James Madison and Carnegie Mellon to advance to the championship bracket on Sunday.
“The Maryland game was crazy,” Lee said. “We went down 8-4 at half, which is a lot to be down in an ultimate Frisbee game. I think we got two breaks out of half, starting on defense twice and scoring on both, and ended up winning [10-9].”
In quarterfinals, NC State beat Penn State 12-10 in a comeback victory but fell 13-10 in semifinals vs. Ohio State. The Pack faced UNC-Wilmington in the third-place game, but according to Lee, the team let a lot of young guys play and fell to the Seahawks 13-9.
“Also went down early [against Penn State]. It was a really windy game, and Frisbee does not do well in the wind; it’s really susceptible to the elements,” Lee said. “I think we had four breaks in a row at some point in the second half, so we really pulled away in that game and showed a lot of adversity.”
After the Classic City Classic, Alpha Ultimate will take a break for the holiday season before picking back up in January for its busier spring season.
