posted Apr 17th, 2006 - Round ten of the FSL Shamrock Showdown 2006 completes the NSL-TV coverage of this event. This happens just in time since the new footage of the next FSL meet last weekend is already available. There are also the meet videos of the second Southwest Skydiving League competition that need to be uploaded.

The last round of the Shamrock Showdown included another effort by DeLand Fire to finish the competition with one more victory over the Italian national team Sinapsi PD. The Italian team had the higher scores on the scoreboard in seven of the previous nine rounds. DeLand Fire won only - but clearly - rounds three and four.

DeLand Fire lost one point in the judging room in each of rounds one, two, four, five and eight. However, even without the Fire deductions the Italian team would still have won each of these rounds. DeLand Fire lost another point in round ten, and this time both teams would have tied their scores without the deduction.

It was still not really encouraging for the DeLand team at that time. Fire's 23-pointer before the point deduction matched Sinapsi's 23-pointer only within the official working time of 35 seconds. The stop watch tells an additional story of both teams' performances in round ten.

Sinapsi PD arrived at the 23rd point, the first Bipole of Block 14, at 33.18 seconds after a fast and clean performance. The Italians were not too far away from completition of the second Bipole of Block 14 (35.56 seconds), which would have been the 24th scoring point.

DeLand Fire completed the first Bipole of Block 14 at 34.72 seconds and was far away from completion of the block maneuver. In fact, DeLand Fire had the second Bipole at 37.22 seconds. This means that Sinapsi PD was 1.54 seconds ahead of DeLand Fire when it came to the end of working time and 1.66 seconds ahead at the completion of the second Bipole.

The scores and numbers of round ten finally just confirmed what had already become obvious throughout the previous rounds of the competition, especially the second half of the meet: Sinapsi PD was clearly ahead of DeLand Fire in March of the World Meet year.

DeLand Fire was completely aware of that situation and had good reasons to still be satisfied with the results. Sinapsi PD was a well prepared team in March, while DeLand Fire came back after Natasha Montgomery's back injury with hardly any training at all. DeLand Fire's unofficial world record in round four was only one reason for an optimistic outlook.

However, DeLand Majik's reigning 4-way world champion and Fire's Center Outside, Gary Smith, mentioned that his team needs more training: "The competition is tough, and it will not get any easier from here on. The French team is back in business, as well, and we have to count them in for the medals."

DeLand Fire members Shannon Pilcher, Ian Bobo and Jonathan Taggle are back in town from the PD Factory Team trip to the French and Italian Alpes, and DeLand Fire has added training days to the team schedule. The NSL News will follow up soon with new information from the US team's headquarters in DeLand.

The last round of the Shamrock Showdown was also the last show-off for the Danish team, the Danez. The national team of Denmark had already posted impressive scores throughout the whole competition and caught the NSL News attention for the story on March 29.

Round ten was the peak of the Danish performance in DeLand. The Danez were closely behind Norway's team Arcteryx and Team Fastrax in several rounds of the meet. However, the Danish 20-pointer in round ten was the first time that the Danez tied the scores of both of these two teams at the same time in the fast sequence (B-21-J-14).

The Danez were more than happy not only with the score of round ten. The performance at the Shamrock Showdown set new official records for the team, and also unofficial records for the Scandinavian country. The Danez had a 19.1 average on the scoreboard after the ten rounds of the meet. This result would have been good enough for the 5th place at the last World Meet in Croatia 2004.

Round ten of the FSL Shamrock Showdown 2006 concludes the NSL-TV coverage of this event. The second round of SSL Meet 2 in Eloy and the first round of FSL Meet 2 in Lake Wales are next. Stay tuned.