What the heck does that mean? It means a lot of memories for five members of the '86 UCSB Black Tide Ultimate team. We were on our way to our hotel after arriving in St. Louis (site of the '86 National Championships) around midnight and decided to take the scenic route via the Thomas Jefferson Memorial. It was written in stone in front of the monument; "The tide cometh from the west, its immense swells crashing around us....." (a quote from the Lewis and Clark expedition). Oh well, I guess you had to be there.

Collegiate Ultimate at UCSB began in 1984 as Ronnie's Ranch Hands. The team was started thanks to a dedicated effort by Tom Kennedy and Greg Sharp. Mr. Kennedy always seems to get things started around here. Anyway, TK and Greggo attracted between forty and fifty players during the tryouts for the team. They trimmed the Ranch Hands down to twenty-seven members (it was twenty-six, but Greggo called me back after the cut and let me know that I had made the team after all. Thanks Greggo, I still appreciate that). The team included members of the Condors, and this team seemed unbeatable. That is, until the quarterfinals of Regionals when a very psyched Oregon Ducks team handed UCSB the only loss of the season. The loss eliminated us from receiving a National's bid.

Eighty-five saw Ronnie's Ranch Hands become Black Tide and the loss of most of the Condors from the previous year. However, TK and Greg Sharp recruited Nick Donahue to share the coaching duties. Nick, by all accounts, was a very inspirational leader, as well as the author of the infamous "pie theory" of Ultimate. I did not get to see much of his effort though, because I was busy coaching and organizing the UCSB Slicks, the second team. Neither team did much at Regionals that year, although the Slicks did manage to get their only win of the season against Cal Tech.

Before the start of the ‘86 campaign, the Black Tide asked TK and Greggo to step down. It wasn't that their efforts were not appreciated, but we didn't like being the only team with coaches. Something happened right that year, because even though we lost in the Semi's at Regionals (to Oregon) we managed to come up through the loser's bracket and beat Chabot to go to Nationals (how sweet it was). In St. Louis we won four of five pool games (guess who we lost to? Oregon), and finished first in the pool. In the Semi's we were pitted against another team from the west, Stanford, and they proved too tough that day. The Tide entered as the twelfth-seeded team, and we ended up third in the nation.


Regionals & Nationals 1986 (by Jeff Cutler):
The Tide came through with a crucial victory over Chabot to win the 3rd spot for Nationals at St. Louis. This was a huge victory in the history of the Tide!! We were hosting Regionals and the final day was a huge windstorm. The two semis games were played out on the big fields and not a single upwind point was scored in either. We lost to Oregon and Stanford beat Chabot, leaving us to have to beat Chabot for our first time ever to advance. Well, we were in front of our home crowd with many Condors looking on, and we moved the game to a much more sheltered field near the gym… and we crushed them (it wasn’t as close as the score looks). To this day, it was my most satisfying win ever in Ultimate.

The trip to St. Louis was a wild story from the moment we left until the tourney began. The team camaraderie was incredible… several of us even pitched into a fund so that some other players could afford to come, and we even had a fan club who decorated the bus with the infamous "Clug Slub" banner. It was supposed to say Club Slug, but they’d had too much tequila!

At Nationals we arrived ranked 12th out of 12 teams in the tourney, and our first game was against top-seeded Cornell, who was undefeated that Spring in East Coast play including having won a couple of open tournaments. Vince "the Fortress" Bertsch was one of our only experienced club players, and he got the whole team incredibly pumped up with a pre-game speech featuring saltwater, sand, and yes, black tar brought all the way from Isla Vista!! We beat Cornell at the cap with a diving block by Sean Daddy thwarting their final chance, and went on to lose to Stanford in the semis. This was especially tough because we’d beaten Stanford 3 out of 4 times that season.

As an epilogue, several years later here in Tahoe I became friends with a guy from that Cornell squad who says he’s still bitter over losing that game… he said the Tide took them completely by surprise and that we were all playing like wild banshees. What great memories.

1986 UCSB Game Scores:

01/xx/86 U.C.Santa Barbara xx xxxxxxxxxxx xx
01/xx/86
01/xx/86
01/xx/86
01/xx/86
01/xx/86
01/xx/86
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02/xx/86 ??????
02/xx/86
02/xx/86
02/xx/86
02/xx/86
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03/xx/86 ??????
03/xx/86
03/xx/86
03/xx/86
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SECTIONALS:
04/xx/86 U.C.Santa Barbara ?? xxxxxxxxxxx ??
04/xx/86 U.C.Santa Barbara ?? xxxxxxxxxxx ??
04/xx/86 U.C.Santa Barbara ?? xxxxxxxxxxx ??
04/xx/86 U.C.Santa Barbara ?? xxxxxxxxxxx ??
04/xx/86 U.C.Santa Barbara ?? xxxxxxxxxxx ??
04/xx/86 U.C.Santa Barbara ?? xxxxxxxxxxx ??
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REGIONALS:
05/xx/86 U.C.Santa Barbara ?? xxxxxxxxxxx ??
05/xx/86 U.C.Santa Barbara ?? xxxxxxxxxxx ??
05/xx/86 U.C.Santa Barbara ?? xxxxxxxxxxx ??
05/xx/86 Oregon ?? U.C.Santa Barbara ?? - (Semis)
05/xx/86 U.C.Santa Barbara ?? SLO ?? - (BD-semis
05/xx/86 U.C.Santa Barbara 17 Chabot 12 - (BD-finals)
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NATIONALS:
05/xx/86 U.C.Santa Barbara 17 Cornell 15
05/xx/86 U.C.Santa Barbara 17 Carnegie-Mellon 13
05/xx/86 Oregon 17 U.C.Santa Barbara 15
05/xx/86 U.C.Santa Barbara 17 Kansas 10
05/xx/86 U.C.Santa Barbara 17 ????????????? ??
05/xx/86 Stanford 19 U.C.Santa Barbara 15 – (Semis)