posted Apr 11th, 2006 - The third meet weekend of the NSL 2006 season brought together the Southwest Skydiving League and the Colorado Skydiving League on the same date. Brazil was supposed to compete at the same time. Unfortunately, bad weather on site in South America did not allow the present four teams to get in the air. The meet has been re-scheduled.

Both the Southwest Skydiving League and the Colorado Skydiving League completed the 6-round events. The Southwest Skydiving League had a small participation, however, the quality of the competition was on a very high level, even without the Airspeed line-ups not competing on their home turf in Eloy.

The NSL News story on March 11 had already introduced the AAA/Open Class team Elsinore Gravity and its plans for the 2006 season. Gravity with Lou Ascione (Inside Center), Melanie Curtis (Point), John Hamilton (Outside Center), Steve Simar (Tail) and Bryan Harrell (Video) followed through and attended the team's first meet this year.

The Elsinore team did not only compete in Eloy as planned, Gravity also posted scores on the expected level. The 17.7 meet average in Eloy last weekend was far above last year's 14.2 average at the USPA Nationals and is in the team records as the new highest 6-round result.

Another NSL News story on February 27 followed up on the SSL Valentine's Meet 2006 and covered the performance of two other teams at that time: Perris Fury and Thunder.

The Perris team did not make it to Eloy this time. However, Thunder used the next meet opportunity and offered Elsinore Gravity the tough competition both teams needed to push forward. Thunder with Kelley Fredrickson (Point), Scott Latinis (Inside Center), Lou Massie (Tail) and Chad Smith (Outside Center) improved the meet average exactly by one point and finished with a 17.5 average and one single point behind Elsinore Gravity in second place.

Elsinore Gravity and Thunder had a horse race from the beginning to the end. Both teams tied their scores in the first two rounds, and Thunder took a 1-point lead with the 26-pointer in the fastest round of the meet (H-N-9-K). Elsinore Gravity came right back in the technically challenging round four and beat Thunder by two points.

The 2-team competition for the first place went back to the deadlock situation when again Thunder took advantage of the faster sequence in round five (J-P-C-3). This round ended 22-21 to Thunder's advantage, and both teams were now tied going into the final round six of the meet.

As in round four, Elsinore Gravity turned out to be the slightly better team in the 3-block sequence (19-11-18) and won the first place by one single point over Thunder. Congratulations to both teams for an exciting competition. The jumps will soon be shown on NSL-TV, the videos are on the way from Eloy to DeLand.

The US national team in the Women's Class for this year's World Meet, Elsinore Select, competed in Eloy last weekend, as well. Arizona Divewerkz attended the team's second 2006 meet and gave the all-female team a good race. This competition and AZ Fourplay's performance in the AA Class will be covered next. Stay tuned.