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Dear Ramona alumnae (now including the class of '05!),
This is the first issue of the Ramona newsletter for this academic year, and we are happy to report that Ramona is thriving. We are led by returning captain Keri Dorko SY '06 and a pair of senior handlers, Molly Montes MC '06 and Sarah Gryll DC '06. We are still being coached part time by Holly Stephens, and now Kendra Frederick (Mona '05) is a second coach. We have a good batch of rookies who are enthusiastic, quirky, and talented.
There have been two weekends of competition so far. At club sectionals, our record was only 1-3, but we played well, showed off how hard we had worked on dumping and zone, and beat Chick Flick, the Connecticut club team. The rookies contributed with solid basic skills, and the returners who had spent the summer playing ultimate showed off new hucking and catching skills. This weekend Purple Valley was cancelled so nine of us drove to Brooklyn for casual scrimmages with Columbia and NYU. We won both scrimmages handily and got to practice our newly structured offenses.
The team also managed to cook itself a big chili dinner in the Morse Kitchen on Friday night, spring break style. We've written some new cheers, too. For example, to the tune of "Feel Good Inc." by the Gorillaz, we cheer:
"Don't stop, catch it throw it / You've gotta huck it score it / Watch me as I lay it out / Ha HA ha ha haa."
Despite all this playing and bonding, the most exciting parts of the fall season are still ahead. Our schedule for the next three weekends is as follows:
October 22 - Coffee Cup. New Haven
October 29-30 - Haverween. Haverford, PA
November 5-6 - Huck a Hunk o' Burnin' Pumpkin. Providence, Rhode Island
You are all invited to come cheer us on at these tournaments (even if you're coaching our rival teams). I would also like to propose another Game Before the Game this year. The Harvard-Yale football game is November 19. Many of you will be in town anyway, so perhaps we can have a Ramona reunion and pickup game in the morning like we did last year. Suggestions are welcome!
As always, we encourage you to send news, pictures, memories, questions, and donations to the address below. If any of you are in Sarasota for Club Nationals, look out for Keri Dorko with 6 Trained Monkeys and Steffi Wu with Mischief.
Love,Ramona '05-'06 Back to top
We're writing to report the fun, success, and contact with alumnae that has made our fall 2005 season a great one.
Our three major tournaments of the fall were Coffee Cup, Haverween, and Huck a Hunk o' Burnin' Pumpkin. At Coffee Cup, Ramona split into two squads, the Dinosaurs and the Spaceships. Both teams came in third in pool play with some rewardingly close games and went on to win against Wesleyan and Columbia in placement rounds. At Haverween, a team of four rookies and six returners, costumed as a baseball team, went 3-1 in Saturday pool play against Penn, Vassar, Drew, and Johns Hopkins, but went home on Sunday to avoid injuries.
The only two-day tournament of our fall season was Huck a Hunk o� Burnin' Pumpkin. We brought seventeen Ramona players and a coach, and this time we dressed as magnetic poetry. Every pool play game was close, and we pulled out an exciting comeback win over Wellesely. Our Saturday record left us tied for second place in the pool, but tiebreakers sent us to the losers' bracket, which we dominated.
That same weekend, four Ramona alumnae, Jenn Christenson '03, Rebecca Tucker '04, Shoshana "Swoosh" Woo '04, and Jessica Cohen '03, joined some Superfly alumni as the team Klass, which had a good weekend playing the tournament PADAMosh in Philadelphia.
Ramona's fall season ended two weekends ago with a home scrimmage against Columbia and a successful Ramona/Superfly party that even the grad students on the teams agreed was unusually fun.
Luckily, like throwing and running practices, Ramona revelry does not stop with the end of the ultimate season. Last weekend, Ramona players and alumnae were out in force at the Yale Bowl for the Game. The current Ramona team enjoyed seeing Maggie Dietrich '05, Diana "Horrible" Greenwold '05, Leigh Stemler '05, and Jenn Christenson '03 for baked goods and warm drinks in the morning, and then caught up with Rebecca Tucker '04, Karen Weise '03, and Ashley Hayden '01 at the tailgates. All have exciting stories about jobs and ultimate, and a few have recently gotten married or become engaged. Ashley told us that she is engaged to Noah Kolman, Superfly '01, and Joni Kletter '00 wrote to say that she missed the Game to take her honeymoon.
Here at Yale, we are just getting ready for winter league. As always, more news, photos, memories, suggestions, or tax-deductible donations are welcome at the address below. Expect another newsletter in the spring!
Much love,
Ramona '05-'06
Welcome - at long last - to the first 2006 edition of the Ramona Newsletter. We had a good winter league season (in which we discovered that there is a space on the roof of Payne Whitney Gym open to the public for such activities as extra windy throwing practice). Our first outdoor tournament was hosted by UPenn in February. All our games were close and fun, and we won them all except one.
Spring break was filled with the usual team bonding sandwiched between Terminus and Southerns. We finished somewhere in the middle of the pack at both tournaments (we were the Chumpions of Terminus), and suffered a few major injuries, but we also played well and upheld the glorious Ramona tradition of cheer composition. In between the tournaments, we played on the sunny fields and beaches of Daytona Beach, Florida. We asked the rookies to compete against one another (Team Fork against Team Spoon) to make travel guides to the town, but they rebelled and insisted upon working together to make one supremely hilarious guide! A lesson in teamwork for the upperclassmen.
Two weeks after spring break, Ramona hosted a B-team tournament, where our rookies got to step into leadership roles. Meanwhile, a few of us played at Fool's Fest, either on a New Haven coed team with Ramona alum Fi Cheng '05, or on a women's team with Becca Tucker '04 and Amy Woolever '95 (and against Divya Rao Heffley '01!). Then, after the next tournament was rained out, and a brave band of Ramona alums and their friends were already playing under the Ramona name at the Paganello beach tournament in Italy, Yale Cup was suddenly upon us! There were 19 women's teams in the tournament, including all the big names from our region - Brown, MIT, Dartmouth, and Tufts. Ramona went 1-3 in pool play and finished in the bottom half of the tournament, but we worked on some new offenses, gave everyone plenty of playing time, and started thinking hard about our strategies for Regionals. This past weekend we played at Sectionals. We beat Brown B, Connecticut College, and Wesleyan by very wide margins while playing five rookies at a time. Divya Rao Heffley '01 made a very welcome appearance to cheer us on against Connecticut College. The last game of the day was against BROWN. It was close from the first pull until the hard cap. Brown threw various clam defenses and heavily structured offenses, and we fought back with hard man defense and our own bag of offensive tricks. In the end, Brown took the game 12-8.
Regionals is in two weeks at Dartmouth and the only thing keeping us from imploding with anticipation is our dose of three practices each week. Please send news (for example, stories from Paganello?), photos, questions, suggestions, or donations to the address below.
Love,
Ramona '05-'06
Welcome to the last Ramona Newsletter for the year. As you may have already learned, Ramona came in tied for seventh at Regionals. Yes, there were the usual tears from a few seniors when we lost to Northeastern to be knocked out of the series, but we are proud of our performance this weekend. The day started with the traditional win over Harvard. Our second game of the day was the highlight of the season for us - a close and hard fought 15-11 loss to Tufts. Tufts, a strong team coached by Alicia Kersten '95, went on to qualify for Nationals on Sunday. We played a variety of offenses and defenses against them, had some sick individual play, and played our line of seven seniors for a couple of points. Several of us spoke with Alicia about the game afterwards, and appreciated her everlasting Ramona spirit. We were drained and happy after that game, went on to beat Hampshire, and then lost to Northeastern.
Back in New Haven, we completed the usual end of year rituals. The underclassmen presented the seniors with songs and trucker hats in exchange for chili, corn dogs, and chocolate mousse, and on Monday we elected next year's captains. Steffi Wu is an English major in Pierson who was a force for the coed team Mischief at club Nationals this fall. Iris Shih, BR '07, studies graphic design (she's responsible for our jersey and disc designs) and, after spending last summer playing winter league in the southern hemisphere, has been one of our most reliable handlers this year.
A brief shoutout to Diana Greenwold '05 and Claire Hirschmann '05, both of whom we had the pleasure of seeing, overflowing with Ramona enthusiasm, during the last few months.
Well, I suppose I'll introduce the first person pronoun for the first time in this newsletter series to say it's been a pleasure corresponding with many of you over the last two years. I am turning over the position of Alumnaeatrix to Brooke Danaher, PC '07, as I proudly join the ranks of Ramona alumnae.
As always, news, stories, advice, pictures, memories, suggestions, and donations are welcome. Please see the new address below.
Much love,
Ramona '05-'06
