APA Team Nationals Wrap Up

Thousands of APA players are headed home this weekend after a very full week of tournament play at the 2010 Team National Championships. Although I didn't participate in any of the marquee team events this year, I made several trips to the Riviera to check out exhibitor booths, watch the action, and participate in a few Mini Mania tournaments.

I did my best to keep an eye out for Las Vegas teams and saw a few here and there, but honestly lost track of most of them amongst the hundreds and hundreds of teams in the various events. I wish there was some sort of regionally based listing we could refer to that list all the Las Vegas teams (for example), their current status, and the time of their next match... but I guess maintaining something like that might be a pretty big task (although I bet an enterprising programmer could build it into the APA's tournament management software pretty easily, since team numbers and member numbers appear to be regionally encoded).

Vinnie and Jim discussing strategy during a time out.

Anyway, one of the teams I was able to follow fairly closely was an 8-ball team from Las Vegas called "Vinnie and the Youtes." Two of the members on this team, Vince Ciano (capt) and Jim Tellier, are on my APA Masters team... and Jim is also a co-worker in the 'real world' so I kept in touch with them and cheered them on as much as I could. They did a fantastic job wading through the sea of 732 teams to make it to the "sweet sixteen," only to lose a heart breaker of a match in sudden death.

Taking 9th place in this tournament is a huge accomplishment, and something they should all be proud of for sure! The team that beat them ended up taking 3rd place, and they were in turn beaten by the team that took 1st. Well done!