The World Masters Ultimate Club Championship
The 2022 World Masters Ultimate Club Championships were World Class.
The University of Limerick is a perfect venue for a tournament so large. Its campus has some brilliant facilities, often within walking distance to large, high-quality 3G fields that were needed when the weather decided to drench us for most of the week.
It’s inspiring to see the enthusiasm for the support within the Masters divisions - across all 6 divisions there were over 120 teams! That’s a big event in anyone’s book. It really felt like ultimate players took over Limerick for the week. All week, we couldn’t help but bump into players at dinner that we’d seen in the merch tent that day.
Our sales rep Jess was coming down from Canada for her first world’s event. It was great for the whole crew to finally meet in person. After working for months on custom team orders - we had 32 VC/Lookfly teams attending! - it was awesome to see all of those amazing uniforms and put a face on some of the team’s contact.
The first day of competition was possibly our busiest day ever! The Opening Ceremony, followed by a round of games meant that the VC tent was packed out. People were so excited to be back playing international ultimate and we were really pleased to be there too!
Whenever we run a merchandise tent we always have a card payment option, and a backup, because WIFI in a field is always a tricky beast. As it was, one of our systems went down on the first day and so lines were longer than we’d like but we worked through everyone on the backup system and are forever grateful for the patience and good humour of our customers. BIG shoutout to tournament volunteers who were managing the flow of people at the doors, restocking discs on tables and even lent us their phones so we could process payments.
By the middle of the week we’re in our groove, Andraž is off taking photos and Stotty is bumping The Red Hot Chilli Peppers 9am-5pm in the tent, much to Alja and Jess’s consternation. Religiously playing “Closing Time” by Semisonic at the end of each day, we were having a blast. Jess flew back home mid-week as we couldn’t keep her away from her computer much longer - much more uniforms needed for upcoming events!
Then I had a tickly cough at dinner and tested positive for covid when I got back to the Airbnb and immediately isolated. We thought everything would be fine but Stotty then tested positive the next morning and suddenly it was a bigger problem as we were now down 3 crew members as Jess has just left. Andraž and Alja were continuously testing negative (perhaps thanks to recent boosters!) and so headed to the tournament with some backup from the excellent tournament volunteers.
I was trying to help and answer any questions or queries from the team, I was lucky I had it so mildly. We had heard that some teams were having a lot of problems with testing positive and having to isolate, it brought it home how things still aren’t “normal” in June 2022. It seems unnecessary to say, but it’s still a very present, serious issue that we will be dealing with for a while to come. I hope everyone affected at the event had symptoms as mild as mine.
Limerick was great, the city is a lot of fun and the organisers are top notch (they run Siege as well - try to get your club team to that in 2023!). EUC is heading there next year and anyone who is heading to that is in for a great time at a great venue. Fingers crossed that the organisers are thinking about bidding for more tournaments, too!
Finally, it wouldn’t half as much fun without seeing so many of our teams at the event:
Australia: Status Quo, Pie Wagon
Canada: lowercase, NSOM, Dead Circus, Toast, Grey Owl, Max Power, ReUnion, Berta, MaQramée, Still, BoD
Germany: Seagulls, JinX
Ireland: Masterclass W, Masterclass O
GB: LMU, MCP, Reading, Thundering Herd, Flash, Big Fish, Little Fish
USA: Royal Stag, Woolly Mammoth, Molasses Disaster, Johnny Encore, Ripe, Pacemaker, HiJinx, Johnny Walker
Venezuela: Spanglish