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Results from Past Seasons
History - as told by Emeka Koren
I came to Rice in 1992. I had played Ultimate in high school with a club team in Buffalo, NY. I had been traveling to tournaments for three years before I came to college. By coincidence, however, the there were a couple of seniors, Brent Swift and Eric Roache, who had discovered that Ultimate existed outside of Rice the year before. That year they started a club Ultimate team on campus. I'm not sure I was the best influence on the team at that time. I felt that they really had no idea what they were doing and no connection to the outside ultimate community and of course I was the guy to lead them. But they acted like they didn't know the Messiah had arrived. I don't think they even had a name other than the Rice Owls. By the end of that year there were few people still coming out to practice or going to tournaments. It had pretty much flopped. But we picked captains for the next year and since I didn't attend the meeting (I just figured it was obvious), another guy, Steve Quach, got picked as captain too. Steve had played a lot of IM ultimate and was very athletic. He brought to the team a bunch of his athletic IM pals, but not much of the ultimate spirit. We clashed on some things but I think we worked okay together. The team was called Red Line, which I thought was horrible, but probably better than what I wanted to name the team--Crack Babies. We competed in Sectionals that year and came in second to UT (because of the athletic pals) but no one was interested in traveling to Birmingham for Regionals so the it ended there. Steve graduated and all his pals quit and we pretty much started over again the next year. The next year I was the sole captain, and still not a very good one. Again we recruited a bunch of folks in the beginning and eventually saw our numbers dwindle by the end of the year. At one point during the year I felt we needed discs. I saw a post card on the wall of a friend of mine with Winny the Pooh holding a balloon and floating among the clouds. The caption was, "How sweet to be a cloud." I thought that would be a great caption for a disc. So I had to pick a name that would go with it. Cloud Nine. This year I was lucky in that there were three freshman who kind of stuck with it: Alfie, Damien and Coco. They were all very talented. Needless to say, they were freshmen with no experience, but it was a start. At the end of the year we had seven people to go to Regionals. It was in Baton Rouge. At the time, the Southern Region spanned from UT to Clemson, SC. Yet in all this space there were only 12 teams who would go to Regionals. We drew the top seed, UGa for our first game. We lost two and were out. But there was enough of a core of returning players to make a solid seed for the team the next year. I also promised myself that year that I would return to Regionals and win it. Two years later we did. We beat UGa in the finals 17-15. My fourth year was a great year for us. The team was small but we had a lot of fun. We won some games at tournaments. We had consistent numbers at practice and most people steadily improved their game. We were known for our cheers at tournaments. My fifth year I played with the Houndz during the fall and Damien, Alfie and Coco ran the Rice team. Steve Quach had played with the Club team for two years since graduating and had become very good. He then returned to Rice as a graduate student with eligibility to play with us. So the five of us made the core of the team. We were fairly popular that year, owing to the charm of Alfie and Damien. At first we started out in the fun psyche of the previous year. But with five very good players there was a lot of pressure to reach for the next level. We made some tough decisions to become more disciplined; it almost ripped the team apart. But we came through it with 12 players. At Nationals we went 2-3. We lost to UNCW 17-16 at Ultimate point. I still think about that game. That game would have given us a winning record and a victory over a number one seed from another region. No southern team had done that since UT Austin more than five years earlier. But oh well. We were still known for our cheers. Nearly the entire tournament gathered round when we gave our cheer for Stanford. Rice continued to go to Nationals for several years after that, but never won a game since. For me, I needed to start a team, because Ultimate was my family. And I think that still exists at Rice. So for that I am proud. It's your team now, so it has to be the kind of team you want it to be. But know this, if you ever change the teams name from Cloud Nine, I will follow you the length of my days...and I will find you.... -Emeka
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