Arizona Overall
November 9 & 10, 2002

We had originally planned to be in Arlington, TX this weekend playing in the Veteran's Park Open. Due to the cold and unpleasant conditions from last weekend we decided to seek out warmer weather. We skipped VPO and drove to Phoenix, AZ. We planned to go to AZ after VPO anyway to visit my Dad. Now that we are here a week earlier we will be able to compete in one of our favorite annual events, the AZ State Championships. This is an overall event that draws people from all over the country including Hawaii, North Carolina, Washington, and Florida. This has easily been one of our favorite events over the last two years. Last year, however, we were disappointed when we found out the 2002 event would coincide with the VPO. The VPO is a tournament that pays well and the AZ states event is just that, an event. It doesn't pay out at all, but it is so fun.

This overall includes golf, accuracy, DDC, MTA, and freestyle. This year they tried something new and did a pairs overall. There was still the option of playing individuals, but we choose to do the pairs. In pairs, two rounds of golf were played. The first was best shot and the second was alternate. Shawn and I shot the best first round and did better than we expected the second round. We tied Conrad Daman and Harvey Brandt but lost in the sudden death playoff. In MTA Shawn did well enough to win if he would have been playing individuals, but in pairs they add his best catch with my best catch and compare to the other pairs. I had one really good throw, but couldn't make the catch. The catch I did make was only around 6 seconds so with Shawn's 10 second catch we finished middle of the pack. In Accuracy I made 13 and Shawn got 10 which was also near the middle of the pack. DDC is by far our worst event. It may not look like we made any improvement as we finished last, but we were happy with our play as we scored many more points than last year. Freestyle is the last event. This year we actually spent a couple of days prior to the weekend working on a routine. It went really well. We didn't have very much difficulty, but we did a number of co-ops and scored the best in artistic appeal. Overall we placed 5th out of 9 pairs teams.

It was a great weekend.