posted Aug 28th, 2019 - The busy European summer season continues with several national championships taking place at this time of the year. The Czech Outdoor Nationals were completed in two days, and HF Flying Circus defended the 4-way title successfully, while the German 4-way teams completed their first three rounds in Kassel, with AtomiX in the lead over Airbus.

The 8-way teams are in the air in Germany now, with two guest teams on the leaderboard: Qatar Falcons and Veloce QRF. The Qatar Falcons posted a new team and national record number for a single sequence (B,4,1) with the 24-pointer in Round 2, despite a recent change in the lineup.

The NSL News is going back to the aftermath of the Italian Outdoor Nationals, where Amnesya and eX3MO had their annual duel. The story on August 26th provided the details.

There was a new team in 3rd place who had never been on an outdoor leaderboard in the past. Sei Uno Zero (6.1.0.) had won the Italian bronze medals in 2017 and 2018 and was not back this year, with former member Alessandro Anderlucci filling slots first for eX3MO at the Italian Indoor Nationals, then for Amnesya at last week's outdoor championship.

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Italian Outdoor Nationals 2019		1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	Total	Avg
Rank	AAA Class	1,8,11	D,J,M,C,21	L,Q,P,A,7	15,O,K,E	14,F,22	17,18,16	13,N,12	H,10,4	5,9,6	G,19,B,20	Total	Avg
1	Marche in Volo Amnesya	17	26	29	23	16	14	16	17	19	20	197	19.7
2	eX3MO	15	25	28	21	16	8	16	17	19	20	185	18.5
3	Ketchup ADV	13	19	22	12	13	10	11	14	14	14	142	14.2
4	Ca' del Bosco	11	12	17	16	12	11	12	13	12	15	131	13.1
5	Oblvion	10	15	14	10	9	7	10	11	11	11	108	10.8
6	Slack	7	12	14	11	8	8	7	7	10	10	94	9.4

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KetchUP ADV is not new on NSL leaderboards though. The NSL News introduced the team on June 28th, after posting an impressive 22.1 average at the indoor championship. However, KetchUP ADV had only competed at indoor events until last week, first in the AA Class at the ISR Grand Prix 2018, then at the World Challenge 2019.

The Italian Indoor Nationals was the team's first competition in the AAA Class, now followed by the first outdoor competition in the same category.

The team members have plenty of outdoor experiences though. Fabrizio Alghisi won the Italian A Class title in 2017 with Sky Hard (12.9) and Nicola Fedeli won gold medals in the AA Class a few years ago. Andrea Berrini also competed at outdoor meets in the Rookie and A Class without winning any Italian medals.

However, player-coach Luca Stanga is one of the most experienced 4-way and 8-way competitors in Italy and has been guiding the team carefully to the 3rd place in the AAA Class last week.

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Luca Stanga said that he dedicated a lot of time to indoor training this year to get the team members familiar with the AAA Class dive pool. The step from the AA Class to the complete FAI/IPC dive pool is the most challenging part of the 4-way progression, as it adds the slot-switchers to the training agenda. All team members have to be able to perform the A- and B-slots of their respective pieces.

KetchUP ADV completed a total of 40 training jumps to apply the newly learned techniques in freefall. Luca Stanga said that he did not use any of the training jumps to practice different exits. KetchUP ADV applied only the Bow (Random Formation H) for exits, as many teams do who spend most of their time in the flying chambers of wind tunnels.

The size and shape of the right-hand door of the Pilatus Porter does not make it very easy to exit other formations, and the Bows were a solid and reliable start of the 35 seconds working time for KetchUP ADV.

The national championship was the end of the outdoor season for the team, and they re-start with indoor training now to prepare for this year's ISR Grand Prix, where they will post scores on the AAA Class leaderboard this time. In the meantime, they will begin to set goals and make plans for the 2020 season...