Students play in flag football regionals

Team places in top eight of 28 teams in championships at Ohio State

November 20, 2006 —

Exactly two weeks before Ohio State beat Michigan to ensure a spot in the National Championship game, a group of SVSU students traveled to Columbus to play for a championship of their own.

A squad of eight SVSU students headed to the campus of Ohio State University for the 2006 National Intramural-Recreational Sports Association Flag Football Regional Championships from Nov. 3 to 5. They finished in the top eight out of 28 teams.

The Ohio State tournament was one of eight regional qualifying tournaments in the country with the winners of each traveling to the University of Texas at Dallas for the National Championships in January.

"The atmosphere was awesome," said team captain and Birch Run native Kyle Duby. "It was really just a fun experience."

The team did well despite the fact it came together rather quickly. While at an intramural flag football meeting, Duby heard Campus Recreation Coordinator KJ Foster mention that he wanted to send a team down to the regional championships. The idea lit Duby's competitive fires, and he set out to put a team together.

Using players from other intramural teams and fellow students from Birch Run, Duby put together a team of 10 players to travel to Columbus. With a donation from his father's work and $50 from each player, Duby was able to pay for the hotel and other fees to get registered.

As luck would have it, however, the team's road to Columbus was a bumpy one. Just before the tournament, the team lost its quarterback to injury and another player to a family obligation. This meant the team would carry eight players for a 7-on-7 tournament.

Tougher yet, some of the rules for the tournament were different than those used at SVSU and instead of playing two 12-minute halves, the games consisted of four 12-minute quarters. And while the longer games could have easily hurt a team with few players to begin with, Duby said it worked in their favor.

"I think it helped us to a certain extent," he said. "We weren't big but we were really quick so we just blitzed two guys the whole game."

The first two games the team played were part of a qualifying round-robin tournament. With 28 teams registered and only 16 spots in the tournament, the teams were divided into pools. Duby's team went 1-1 in the qualifying games, finishing as one of the top two teams in the group and ensuring itself a spot among the final 16 teams.

The team took the first game on Saturday to make it to the Elite Eight, but then lost to the eventual runners up from Wright State University on Sunday morning.

Duby said the experience was a good one and that he hopes to put together another team next year, this time with more players and more practice. In the meantime, Duby and the rest of his teammates saw the tournament as one more opportunity to revisit their high school football days and play for a championship.

"We got to play under the lights twice so it just sort of took us back to those Friday nights a little bit," he said. "It felt good to play football competitively again.”