posted Jul 24th, 2012 - After getting weathered out of the meet that was scheduled in June, the Northwest Skydiving League held its first meet in years on July 21 at Skydive Snohomish.

NWSL Director Deb Coreia reported that the forecast was not looking favorable. However, several teams still showed up on Friday night to receive the draw and walk and creep the dives. The plan was not much different for Saturday morning, as Deb coreia explained: "We planned to meet at 9am, knowing that most likely we'd have a good opportunity to continue to walk and creep the dives, which turned out to be the case."

This time, the situation improved for the NWSL teams and competitors: "Luckily, this time Mother Nature decided to be kind, and at 12:15 the first load boarded the plane, and the rest of the day provided good enough weather for most of the teams to complete five rounds."

July 21st, 2012			Round 1	Round 2	Round 3	Round 4	Round 5	Total	Avg
Rank	A Class		7,K	B,N,P	8,9	21,G	6,J	Total	Avg
1	Fun Sponge (US)	NWSL	2	9	3	5	-	19	4.8
Rank	Rookie		K,H,C	B,N,P	L,M,D	G,Q,O	J,A,H	Total	Avg
1	Yeah Team (US)	NWSL	5	4	2	2	5	18	3.6
2	Synergy (US)	NWSL	0	2	3	3	8	16	3.2
3	Sloppy Joes (US)	NWSL	0	1	0	2	2	5	1.0
4	Last Minute (US)	NWSL	0	1	0	-	-	1	0.3

A total of five teams attended the meet. Fun Sponge, with NWSL Director and player coach Deb Coreia in the lineup, competed in the A Class, and the other four teams, Last Minute, Sloppy Joe's, Yeah, Team, and Synergy all competed in the Rookie Class. Deb Coreia said that the biggest challenge was the exit: "While many of the competitors have done tunnel time since iFLY Seattle opened late last summer, the scores make it obvious that our next step is to work on exits. The teams did a great job once they got together...!"

Rookie Class team Last Minute had its own story how to complete the lineup for the meet:

"Two dedicated team members, Jonathan Clark and Ryan Lashbrook, showed up for the draw on Friday knowing they needed two other team mates. No one filled the open slots on Friday, so they creeped the dives with the two of them and two empty creepers. On Saturday morning, they pulled in Trent Buys and Brandon Mikesell, but neither of them was available for the entire day, so the team ended up using four different alternates: Matt Mayberry, Dustin Walbon, Jay Alspach (Fun Sponge) and Derek Sabella, to complete three rounds. Way to persevere...!!"

NWSL Director Deb Correia also applied the NSL handicap system that was created many years ago by Dr. Joel Shugar. She said that Yeah Team's success early in the day proved to be the team's downfall in the end:

"Synergy won the Rookie Class competition once the handicap was applied. The raw scores had Yeah Team on top of the leaderboard with 18 points, Synergy in 2nd with 16, then Sloppy Joe's and Last Minute. After handicap, Synergy was in 1st place with 24 points and Yeah Team 2nd with 18." Monkey Business member of 2011, Carolyn Chow, was the meet judge and helped the teams with engineering the sequences and coaching.

Fun Sponge was the only team in the A Class and was waiting for the overall leaderboard on Monday where other A Class teams would post their scores. Deb Coreia finished up her report with a happy experience: "It was great to see how much the teams learned throughout the day, and everyone is excited for the next meet on August 4th." The Northwest Skydiving League is back.