The Vail Lacrosse Shootout’s Elite Division began a new era as it took a tournament-seeding detour into pool play for the first time ever today. The eighteen teams entered were divided into 4 groups and each team played the others in its pool on day one. The destination for the tournament organizers was to get to a fairer tournament place and a chance for every team to more or less seed itself for the larger tournament bracket by how they fair on that first day of competition. On day two it will become two single-elimination tournaments, the championship one with eight teams and the consolation bracket with ten.

The results of the day was not perfect in leaving everything clearly cut and well-defined, and tiebreakers were used more than once to determine what is to take place tomorrow. The multi-game day played under mostly sunny skies was also grueling, even for the very impressive collection of young and studly lacrosse bucks that are playing in Shootout 2008. The amount of young talent at this year’s Shootout is impossible to ignore and made for a very entertaining day one of Elite lacrosse, albeit way too much gaming for one scribe alone to witness.

POOL A brought both surprise and disappointment within one four-team class. Defending champion Reebok was upset, and convincingly so by the (Rocky Mountain) Oysters, 11-7, and even though they won their other games the Reebokers had to hold their collective breath through the goals against tiebreaker before being moved on to the Division One challenge Friday. Meanwhile the Oysters were disappointingly relegated to the consolation part of the draw via the same goals against route. A third team, Merrill Lynch, moved on to the Championship Bracket from the very top of this extremely competitive pool, and they accomplished this despite losing to Reebok 7-6.

POOL B had a much more well-defined totem pole at the end of the day with defending tournament runner-up Lax Grip team from Canada going undefeated without being severely tested. Lax Grip handled the Mermen 10-6 in the final game of the day for this pool, but the Mermen will move on as well.

POOL C was hard fought with Cornell’s Team 21 eventually emerging as the top team. AIG Livestrong lost only to Team 21, 5-1, and they will live to have the chance to be champions. Brine Elite will have to settle for the lower division after losing two of their three overtime games in Pool C, including a 9-8 heartbreaker to the undefeated Team 21.

POOL D saw the waters somewhat muddled again as the Club All Stars lost to the Lofers 6-5 while the Generals beat the Lofers by the identical 6-5 score. The Club Stars took the top spot tiebreaker in this set of teams. The chilly tiebreaker waters this time left the Generals as the third or odd team out, the one headed to consolation side of the bracket.

Each of the four groups had a winless member, but only Lax Grip and Team 21 came out of their pools without a blemish on their record.

This promises to be a very competitive tournament with more than a handful of teams having a real chance to take it all on Sunday.

FORD FIELD

The quarterfinal, single elimination match-ups for Friday, July 3 are as follows:

9:00 a.m. – Club All Stars vs. Reebok
11:00 a.m. – Lax Grip vs. AIG Livestrong
1:00 p.m. – Merrill Lynch vs. Lofers
3:00 p.m. – Merman vs. Team 21