Wolverine’s National Championships hopes dashed

On Sunday May 15th, Imperial Wolverines 1s played their last and most important Dodgeball tournament of the year. Placing in the top 3 teams would guarantee a place in the National Championships in June. The team met early at Waterloo, and after seemingly been fraudulently sold the wrong type of group discount ticket, headed off to Southampton where the South East England Championship would be played.

Our first match was against Winchester Bullets 1s. We expected a comfortable start to the event, as we were clear favourites, but after a number of mistakes in the nervous opening exchanges we found ourselves 2 games down. We were in serious danger of failing to qualify from our group.

Club captain, Alan Soltani, was somewhat distressed at this point. The Wolverines had never in the past won a match (5 games) from two games down. The third game was close, but we were building our confidence and making fewer mistakes, and as a result we won. Back to our usual capabilities we won the 4th game, with Alan and Adam Cutmore making a trademark simultaneous catch.

Only one game left to make Imperial College dodgeballing history. It wasn’t one for the faint hearted. At one point we were 6 players to 3 down, but we managed to secure a win thanks to a vital catch by Tom Peake, bringing Alan back in to finish them off.

Next match was against Portsmouth Cobras C. It was a match to enjoy and relax, we won 5-0, boosting our confidence further before the most difficult match of our group vs Knights.

We had a team talk in a separate gym to raise team morale and clarify tactics; we knew our chance of success against Knights was slim, as they had previously beaten us fairly comfortably. Just giving it our best shot, and fresh with two matches already won, we gave it what we could. To everyone’s surprise we came out victorious, 3-2! Another IC record smashed – until then we had never beaten a higher ranking team in our league!

The last game in the group stages vs Underdodge B we won 4 – 1 thus meaning we finished top in our group and setting up a semi-final against Southampton 1s, the home team. By this time we were tiring and, outmatched, we lost badly 4-1. However, in the third game of the match Alan and Adam again impressed the crowds with another double catch. Our last hope now of qualifying for the Nationals was to beat Fellows Appreciation Society, a team of ex-Warwick Uni players, in the 3rd place playoff.

Having watched our previous games and noted our reliance on good catching play, they wisely concentrated on not giving our catchers the opportunity to do what they do best, and so threw at our other players. This made the games difficult for us, not being able to make catches or play efficiently. We put up a good fight, but finally lost 4-1. We headed back to London with our heads held high, happy with our performance albeit a little disappointed in not being able to qualify for the national championships.

Also, we would like to give a special mention to Dan Price for stepping in at extremely short notice!