At the beginning of October my Munich team (the Woodchicas) headed to Basel for the 3-day European club championships (the cryptic acronym of EUCF is “European Ultimate Club Finals”). We qualified by playing a regional tournament including all teams from Germany, the Czech Republic and Austria. We won the top spot in our region, but were a little worried about the notoriously strong and huge British squads. We were down to 9 people on Friday and 11 on Saturday/Sunday thanks to a wedding, an ACL injury and two pregnancies.
Although there were some tough games along the way we managed to make it to the final on Sunday against last year’s title holders Iceni from London. First we were ahead and then fell far behind after a string of mistakes. Incredibly, with a change of defense and a cheering section arriving from another game, we managed to turn it around from 7-13 for Iceni to win 15-14 in time cap! My first gold medal of my life!
Directly after the game and before the medal ceremony: pure elation
Leaving Munich: packed up and good to go with 2 cases of delicious Munich beer.
Our crazy defense-star Katja with our brilliant Finnish captain Sara:
The Swiss did a fabulous job of organizing the tournament. We all slept in bunkers (made in the sixties to house the entire Swiss population in case of a nuclear catastrophe) right next to the fields. The party was at a beautiful venue along the Rhein. Coming home Katja snapped this shot.
The best part of the evening was an impromptu paper-airplane fight. I guess when you give everyone a paper placemat after they’ve been throwing pieces of plastic around all day, what can you expect? It was wild to see literally hundreds flying around the room at once.
