Well, it's been a while since I looked at this club's messages, and things seem pretty dead, and downright boring. So here are some thoughts about Georgetown Cup, grad students, and the general state of things. First off, congratulations to Alexis Mansfield for doing as good a job as any I've seen. She was a great TD, and handled protests fairly, quickly, and thoroughly. The readers were all good, especially Rick Grimes. We had a good time. The packets submitted to, and edited by Georgetown were really good. This tournament has had a stigma in the past because of shoddy editing and writing, but I didn't see anything like that this year. Maureen Smith of Maryland submitted a particularly nice packet. The rounds from Vanderbilt were too hard. That's all there is to it. The amount of pop music and television trivia was obnoxious to ACFers' sensibilities, but what else is new. Those who didn't submit don't have a right to complain...and I guess that includes me. Maryland did its usual thing, splitting good players up onto multiple teams. John Nam, that minty biscuit, was on one team with Brian Goldenberg, who is now at Maryland. They won, then won, then lost their game against Cornell, since the protest on the Cervantes bonus was at first settled in their favor, and then finally in ours. David Hamilton dominated in the way only he and Andrew Yaphe can. Zeke Berdichevsky took first all-star playing solo ("Zekestrong") as a Michigan team. Zeke told me some wild stories about hardcore studying and ACFing going on at Michigan. I'm mightily impressed if even half of it is true. To have freshmen studying and taking notes and writing questions is impressive. It's exactly what needs to be done to keep ACF healthy and popular. Undergrads at Harvard and South Carolina have impressed me in recent years, and I expect Michigan under Zeke's care is going to do even better things. I continue to work on my promising frosh class at Cornell. Maybe we'll start writing questions for practice next week. For our freshmen at Cornell I bought four used copies of William Langer's Encyclopedia of World History. It's a very good history source, especially for writing bonuses or doing date-checking or looking up things you took notes on in practice, for your own education and improvement as a player. Just part of my effort to turn our younger players into a mean ACF machine in about a year or two. It was sort of disappointing to see the usual suspects take home scoring honors at Georgetown. It was basically Maryland alumni and Maryland players and solo teams: the top six, in no particular order were Pickrell (solo), Zeke (solo), John Nam, Hamilton, Adam Fine, and me. All grads or 6th year men. I was 6th, finishing just out of the prizes -- though I told Alexis that I wanted her to skip me and give the hardware to an undergrad if I did make the top 5. No real signs of a great young crop of undergrads in the DC area. I remember in 1995 Maryland's freshmen and sophomores beat its juniors and seniors twice at ACF Regionals. That could never happen now. And the team's age is getting up there: Hamilton a 6th year senior, Julie Singer a senior, Shaun Hayeslip, Josh Allen seniors... I won't even talk about John Nam -- though I note that he declared in front of a sizable crowd of witnesses at Gtown Cup that this would be his last year of playing college tournaments. That's about all for now. Next tournament: Heinrich Bowl down at GaTech, where I'm playing with high school phenom Darren Abernethy. Matt
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