By Melina
Ahh Edinburgh, it’s the time of the year I let you steal my heart again, using the Edinburgh Tournament as an excuse to revisit my University city. But surely that’s not the only reason to join for this amazing adventure, and everyone who’s ever gone knows this, which is how we ended up with 17 players, sending two Swiss teams for the first time ever!
The trip started a bit bumpy with Swiss airlines cancelling the outbound flight to Edinburgh, making the Zurich based people needing to get a little creative to arrive there. However, this did not deter anyone and on Friday night we all made it to the Three Sister’s pub to meet the other teams over drinks, prior to facing them in the hall.
On Saturday we faced the group phase, which would determine the top teams to face each other the next day. With a carefully orchestrated strategy we split our players in multiple creative ways throughout the day to create two equally strong teams for all games (some memorable mentions of divisions: “Battle of the Bens” and “Fabienne’s present”).
Our brilliant plan rewarded us with all victories and only a single loss, which meant that our two teams now had to face each other for a spot in the top 8. In that instance, for the first time, we did a real split between the Zurich and Basel players, just to prove once again that Zurich will always be on top! The agreement for this game was also that anyone who scores in the second half would need to take off their shirts, but given we had some shy players on the court, only me and Carra obliged to this very important rule.
To celebrate a very successful first day over dinner we unlocked a new achievement by making the restaurant run out of shot glasses (because who doesn’t drink tequila in a Japanese restaurant). What followed was, of course, the ceilidh event, where I personally managed to collect more injuries than during the actual game time.
Day 2 found us a little tired after a night of crazy dancing, with team Zurich competing for a spot in the top 8 and team Basel looking for a placement between 16-9 (out of 32 teams). Team Basel did an amazing job, winning all their matches and securing that 9th place. On the other hand, Team Zurich had some really tough opponents to face, including the Dutch, but still ended up winning the last game of the day and placing 7th! Of course we celebrated with some more food (this time Indian according to Silvie’s wishes) and (who would have thought) managed to finish the tournament with very little drama involved (ok maybe there was some shirt ‘borrowing’ business towards the end but I’ll just skip
this part). I would like to thank everyone for joining and being such good sports in and out of the court and I am already looking forward to next year’s trip!