The Wolfpack men’s and women’s club ultimate teams are hosting the Brickyard Brawl tournament this weekend, Oct. 19-20, on Miller Fields and Method Road Soccer Park.
Alpha Ultimate, the men’s team, will be hosting a 16-team tournament, held mostly on Miller Fields starting Saturday at 10 a.m. and Sunday at 9 a.m. The Pack is the No. 2 seed at the tournament behind the UNC-Chapel Hill team, which finished second in the country at nationals in the spring.
“[UNC-Chapel Hill] got second in the country last year,” said senior captain Michael Lee. “People expected them to win, so it was a pretty big shock when they didn’t. They graduated about four, so they’re going to be really good. We competed with them last year. We were really close in a couple games, and we beat them in a showcase game last year, so I think we can hang with them, and that’s going to be our big focal point.”
Miller will hold eight fields to accommodate a four-team pool play tournament. The top seeds in the pools are UNC, NC State, UNC-Wilmington and Virginia Tech. The fifth seed, the second team in the Hokies’ pool, is the Tourists, the same high school travel team that beat NC State in the Bank Run Tournament in Charlotte.
“Wilmington will be good; Virginia Tech will be OK,” Lee said. “Because it’s so early in the fall, I don’t know who is back for different teams and how healthy they are and what their freshman class looks like; can’t do scouting for two more months.”
On Saturday, NC State will play three consecutive games on Field 3, starting at 10 a.m., against the three teams in its pool: Duke, Davidson and East Carolina. After those three games, it will play one game from another pool against a team to be determined.
“We have Duke, Davidson and ECU,” Lee said. “Duke will be a good game. Duke is an up-and-coming team. They haven’t been very good, but they got a good freshman and they’re starting to put it together, so that will be a good game for us.”
On Sunday, the winner’s bracket will consist of the top 12 teams competing in a single-elimination tournament starting at 9 a.m., with the championship game at 2:15 p.m. on Miller.
After Alpha’s second-place finish in Charlotte, the team was finalized, which allowed Lee and the other captains to implement some new things and improve on the team’s weaknesses. One thing they focused on in practice was their end zone set and making sure everyone on the field was moving correctly to score more efficiently.
“We taught our end zone set this week, so hopefully that gets a lot better,” Lee said. “Based on [Monday’s] practice, it needs to get a lot better. We hadn’t even taught it [before the first tournament], so we were trying to run our normal offensive principles around the end zone line, and the deep space is compressed, so it’s pretty difficult to run the systems we want to run.”
As the fall season continues, the team will continue to grow and the young players will get more experience. All of this is building on the basics so the team is ready to go when the spring season comes around.
“We need to make sure we are taking smart shots and that the deep throws we are making are to really good spaces and to really good matchups, as opposed to just throwing them to throw them,” Lee said. “That’s something that all teams go through in the fall. That’ll take us a little while, because we’re really good at throwing deep throws, so we want to do it a lot.”
The women’s ultimate team, JagaMonsta, will be hosting its own women’s tournament at Method Road Soccer Park. Both NC State teams should have good showings, with a chance to win their respective tournaments. Keep an eye on technicianonline.com and @TechSports on Twitter for recaps.
