The ENB EliteCup 2017 is a football tournament between the master programs of the Elite Network of Bavaria that takes place every year. This year, we jumped at the opportunity to participate and assembled a neuroengineering team, called ‘The Neuruns’.
Despite the odds of being still a very small program and some of us not being able to play due to Ramadan, we managed to form a team of sufficiently many players. Our thanks goes to Lukas, a PhD student at the NST, and Davide, a Neuroscience student at LMU, for reinforcing our team. We were furthermore very happy to have Prof. Conradt in our team who brought some structure into our otherwise chaotic strategy.
Besides having by far the highest participation rate of all master programs, we also had the highest number of female players with Pooja and Auguste who were doing an amazing job in our defense.
The tournament started with a group phase, where we had a stellar performance and qualified without problems for the elimination rounds.
Well, not really… ;) One of our opponents had dropped out of the tournament and therefore we had a bye to the elimination round even without winning any games.
In the quarter final we had the bad luck of facing the CDTM1 team which later on won the tournament. The game against them was a fierce battle with them playing, admittedly, beautiful football and us trying our hardest to defend against their onslaught. Especially our goalkeeper, Bashiri, was an absolute beast in this game and even defended a penalty kick. Even though we did our best and our team play had improved tremendously since the first game, team CDMT1 bested us and we were eliminated from the tournament. But at least we didn’t loose as high against them as other teams ;)
We then spent the rest of the afternoon relaxing on the grass next to the football fields, having some cold beer while watching the remaining games.
So, if you are a great football player, we encourage you to apply to the MSNE program. We can use back up in the coming tournaments. :)
We would like to thank the organizers for the great tournament as well as TNG Technology Consulting for sponsoring lunch.
Nicolas Berberich