Scottish Club Season 2024: Alba

By Joel Terry

It’s difficult to describe Alba’s 2024 season. In terms of our on-pitch performance, i.e. the stuff that really counts, we fell short of our expectations. However, off the pitch, we found some real success with key learnings which I believe will set us up for future success. 

We ended the 2023 season on a real high, finishing top 8 at Euros, securing us a spot at Elite Invite in 2024. We’d felt like this could be a great opportunity to really push ourselves into the upper echelon of European ultimate. The layout of the season was looking great for us. Having an elite level, low-stake tournament to start off the season would give us a great opportunity to gain experience playing high level ultimate. And a mid-summer nationals would give us a halfway check-in point to assess where we were at and motivate us for a final push for Euros come October. But, the EUF then decided to change everything… 

With the new system, every game matters. Whilst that format has some pros, for us, it was mostly cons. Elite Invite was no longer a blessing; I doubt many teams would willingly sign up to a tournament like that with only 2 training weekends under their belt, knowing they were coming in as 7^th seed. 

If it wasn’t for the ranking system, Elite Invite would have been great. Considering our lack of preparation and more youthful roster, we were able to hold our own for the first two-thirds of all our games before the more experienced and drilled teams showed their class to take the game. Nevertheless, it was great watching players who hadn’t played at this level before improve game after game, while our more experienced players stepped up into bigger roles.  

Our next outing as a team was at Windfarm, where we were able to give caps to our Young Bucks. Again, it was really easy to leave the weekend with a sense of disappointment, especially considering it ended with 3 universe point losses on the bounce. It was these moments which came to define our season – if those games were to have gone the other way, it would have been a fantastic weekend. Unfortunately, they didn’t, but that’s just sports for you.

It was a similar story at regionals. We had a fantastic Saturday; we almost scored more Callahan’s than we conceded goals. On Sunday morning, we got the job done against SMOG to qualify for nationals. But then in our game against Chevy, as the weather turned horrible, our O-line became allergic to catching in the endzone for 20 minutes and before we knew it, we were 8-1 down.

We went on to play slightly better in the second half, but it was hard. As a team, we knew the loss meant two things to us: 1) Euros qualification was now looking very hard to achieve, and 2) we knew we were a long way off competing for the national championship. It was a humbling experience and felt deflating in the moment. 

Nationals was another mixed bag. We started with a loss against Smash’D which was effectively a quarter final. Credit to them, they played excellently by making the most of our errors and deserved the win. But again, a tough loss meant the rest of the weekend was mostly likely to be for naught. From that low, we were able to rally and demonstrate our potential. We pushed Clapham to a 15-13 loss and ended things with a 5-point run against Bristol to win on universe. While these were fantastic achievements, we had failed to achieve our aim of winning nationals, and the only way we were going to qualify for Euros was to win Summer Tour. 

At this point, we had a mid-season break. Two weeks off to reset and allow the leadership to implement some changes to training sessions in preparation for Summer Tour. The remaining 6 weeks were, without a doubt, the highlight of the year. We went back to the basics at training, but we brought the intensity. Every session was challenging as we pushed each other forwards. 

Come Summer Tour, we took our smallest squad ever of 14 players. It was great fun, a real throwback to the old UKU tours. Everyone got stuck in and came together like we have never done before. Going 8-3 down to Bristol, my thoughts turned to bad places, but we didn’t give up. We gave our D-line an opportunity and man they did they take it; 9 breaks on the bounce was fucking fantastic. We took the win 15-9. 

After that win, we took our revenge on universe against Smash’D who brought what seemed like 25 players. My lasting memory of that game is of our players dropping like flies from cramp and yet, when walking past their huddle at half, hearing the coach shouting at his players “There are fucking 14 of them, how are they making more noise than us?”. Unfortunately, our hopes for Euros ended with a universe point loss to XVI – a great bunch of lads. Our season came to a close with a final win against Bristol to cement our position as the 3^rd best open team in UK*.  While yes, our season had ended, I think we all left Leicester on a high, knowing we had given it our all and had a blast doing it. 

On reflection, we’d lost our identity at the start of the year. We tried to be something we are not by taking ourselves too seriously, and paid the price. At our core, we are a bunch of mates who love hanging out without each other, who don’t take the sport too seriously (although seriously enough to spend most of our time and money on it), but also thrive on challenging one another at training and then come together at tournaments to take on the opposition. At the start of the season, we over-relied on boring stuff like tactics, decision making and fitness. And while these of course do help, when games get tight and we are in a hole, it’s our togetherness which will get us through. We found this again at Summer Tour, which is what made it so great and makes me so excited to see what happens next year. 

Talking of next year, things are going to be totally different, and for the better. Firstly, we have a brand new leadership group, bringing fresh ideas and energy to the table. From the early discussions I’ve been privy to, there’s going to be a real focus on development and skills, basically just continuing on from where we ended this year. We also have had quite a bit of turnover this year with some of our older stalwarts hanging up their boots. This means there’s going to be ample opportunity for our roster to step up their game and take on meaningful roles.

And finally, a massive shout out to those earning their first Alba caps this year:

• Antoine Richard
• Joao Lopes
• Luke Anniss
• Theodore Herring 
• Timothy Groves
• Xander Froggatt
• Daniel Lindsay 
• Jack McDermott
• James Eyre 
• Jonny Lawrence 

Without a doubt in my mind, Alba is the place to be for players wanting to push themselves forwards next year, so looking forward to see what these lads, and the Alba squad, get up to.

*Let the results speak for themselves and don’t look at the EUCF ranking system – it’s shit.   

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Thanks for that, Joel! Looks like there’s a lot more to come from Alba in 2025, and we’re looking forward to it. If you’re interested, Alba’s EOI is now live! Click here to sign up.

We’ve got more club summaries coming your way, but in the meantime, have a read of GUXYZ’s season review, here! Or take part in our 7 days of Christmas, over on Facebook and Instagram!

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Featured photo by Rosie Hudson.