The Tournament...

To get to the airport, we hitched a ride with the shopping bus that was taking teachers in to Kaifaqu... we pretty much overloaded the bus. Teachers weren't super happy, but there really wasn't another way to get the students to the airport on time. Mr. A in the grey hoodie up front is one of the other assistant coaches.

Our group was split onto two planes. Due to a two and a half hour delay to the second plane there was a lot of waiting and we weren't able to  get into our hotel until almost two on Friday night. Made for a rough start the next day. In order to keep the kids occupied, Mr. B. taught them how to play hackey sack. Some of them got pretty good by the end of the weekend.

Saturday morning we were up bright and early to play Ultimate in an old soccer stadium that construction workers were repairing, that had a mostly burnt grass field (literally burnt... not sure why) but which provided a pretty decent break from wind (at least  the first day).

Two of our boys playing against each other when we mixed our team with the national champions. There was no way we were going to win, so we forfeited and mixed our teams up to play a fun game. They were called "BIG BROTHER" and were mostly ex-pats. Definitely were an ultimate machine and so much fun to watch. They gave our kids some pointers and our kids basically have some idols to look up to.

Construction was going on all around the stadium. There were times when a disk would catch the wind and end up less than an inch from the diamond cutting blade of a concrete saw... China.

Our team captain with the trophy our team one for "Spirit". In ultimate this is actually a real prize, as the goal of the game is to have fun. Teams take having fun seriously. So seriously that some of the BIG BROTHER players had to buy the sheets of their hotel room after they all dyed their hair bright pink... It is definitely awesome that we got to bring home some hardware, and that everyone at the tournament recognised how amazing our kids were.

Maple Leaf Mallards with some of the students from Maple Leaf Tianjin