Mardi Gras XXIII

At 9:00pm on Thursday February 11, the ladies of Saucy Nancy loaded up and headed South for the first tournament of spring semester, Mardi Gras XXIII. After 15 hours of driving through ridiculous weather, including a blizzard in Mississippi (wth?) and after Kristen and Cracker Barrel were reunited, we finally made it to the snow free land of Baton Rouge. After spending a while in La Quinta with food, showers, and naps we piled back into the cars to head for New Orleans. The time spent in Mardi Gras traffic was passed with Alanis and alligator hunting (unfortunately none were spotted) until we made it to our destination. Upon our arrival on Bourbon Street we were greeted by a lot of creepy old guys... although they were quite tempting, all of the saucies managed to behave themselves. Audrey racked up the most beads with a staggering 86 - making her the new record holder and bead queen. After a few chilly hours on Bourbon Street we headed back to the hotel to rest up for our games the following day.
Saturday morning we got to the field, which was actually more like a swamp, where we picked up some fanboys -
Sedg and Danny... Thanks so much for all the sweet pictures and your moral support!
Anyway... we started out strong, winning our first game 13-3 against Texas A&M. We held on to this momentum and won our next three games (Northpark 13-7, Vanderbilt 13-6, Minnesota 13-6) finishing the day undefeated.
Despite stuffing ourselves with jambalaya all day at the fields, it was still necessary to go to a stand-alone chik-fil-a, they just make Dre so happy. After dinner we did our traditional toasts and snuggie ceremony. Snaps to Dre for winning the coveted snuggie and for being
an awesome captain, awesome handler, awesome at workouts in & outside of practice, for getting us awesome jerseys, and for just being awesome in general. The toasts were concluded with Justine doing the disc and a cupcake made of cupcakes for Justine's birthday (it's cool because her last name is Hart and her b-day is v-day). Following all of this some girls stayed home to study (nerdz) while the rest headed to the tournament party. We owned the party, beating the boys of LSU and Texas in game after game after game of flipcup and headed back early to get our sleep on for Sunday.

On Sunday we started out the day against one of the teams we always enjoy playing, our fellow Iowans- Grinnell. It was a rough game on an extremely muddy field, but we managed to pull off the win, 12-8. Next we played North Park again (13-6) and Notre Dame (13-10), putting ourselves into the championship game against Iowa State. The game against ISU showed just how important and great it is to have so many girls on our team, having 19 saucies at this tournament allowed us to keep our energy and intensity up until the very last point of the very last game. Everyone played hard and fought for every point, ending the game 8-13 ISU. Even though we didn't win, that's 5 more points than we got at Warmup in November so it shows so much improvement and 2nd place is pretty damn awesome. Plus the state of Iowa definitely held its own down South... congrats to Woman Scorned on first, Sparks on first, and Saucy Nancy on second!
At the end of the day we piled back into our cars sore, burnt, and tired but very happy with how the tournament went. The suburban made a stop at Subway before heading out of Baton Rouge, because yes Justine... believe it or not they do exist in Louisiana. Our journey home was stalled south of St. Louis because of bad weather but after a short stay in the Best Value Inn and 22 hours after our departure we finally made it safely back to Iowa City.
Good job girls, what we saw this weekend was just how deep our team is. Each player was willing to get dirrty dirrty and lay it all out on line (literally). From the rookies to the vets, every individual brought so much during these games to combine into beautiful flow as a team. Keep up the hard work and lets see where it takes us at Throwdown in 3 weeks!