2006 Women's Yale Cup Preview

I will try to do my best ICUltimate impression and write up preview of Yale Cup this weekend. Mine, however, will be uninformed as I have been in the gym with my girls devising wonderful strategery, and, as a result, I have not had much of a chance to see any of the teams play. Well...a little publicity never hurts, I guess.

Speaking of strategery, I am working on a couple of especially devious plays that are designed for Yale and Tufts. There are two plays (run differently depending on which team we are playing), but they come under the same name...which is "Boat Race Loser". Keri and Joggles can inform you as to the derivation if you are curious.

Keri has done a great job in gathering together a very competitive field in what should be a superb preview of both NE and ME Regionals.

From the ME are State College (My understanding is that they are still suspended as a college team), Skidmore(#13 in the region), Rochester(#7), and Cornell(#3). Missing are Delaware and Swarthmore, but this will be, obviously, a good chance for these teams to get a look at good competition before Regionals.

The field from the NE is great. ICUltimate has a nice pre-season article here You have the big three: Tufts, Dartmouth, and MIT. All have traveled to tournaments in the spring and are ramping up for Regionals. Tufts brings a top 15 ranking in (I use the RRI as I like to see my team have a bigger number than the UPA Rankings) plus a win at Ultimax and a top 8 finish at Vegas.

Then there is a whole pack of teams that will use this tournament to calibrate where they stand. Yale, Northeastern, Brown, Vermont, Harvard, Amherst, Wellesley, Middlebury, BU, etc.

Seeding will be interesting as there are not that many results yet, but a quick SRT work up reveals the following seeding order:

State College
Tufts
Dartmouth
Cornell
MIT
Northeastern
Rochester
Yale
Harvard
Vermont
Brown
Skidmore
BU
Wellesley
Middlebury
Williams
Smith
UMASS
Amherst

Is this "good"?? I have no idea.......

Ramona's website says that the tournament will have pre-quarters on Sunday. I won't attempt a guess at who ends up there, but I would guess that State College, Cornell, Tufts, Dartmouth, and maybe MIT are locks for quarters, although one of these teams will have played in pre-quarters. This leaves quite a few teams battling for the remaining 3 quarters positions.

I just checked the weather. Looks nice...chance of showers on Sat. Looks like teams will be able to get some zone reps in.

Should be fun......