Thoughts.

We spent the first weekend playing at Southerns, in Statesboro, GA, the intervening week chilling in beach houses/playing (“exhibition games” was the term I heard used) teams in the Charleston area, and the final weekend playing at Ultimax. Short recaps below:

Southerns
We got off to a bit of a slow start. We had a couple easy wins against College of
Charleston and Yale in pool play to start, but then we ran up against Wake Forest and dropped a game to them after being up something like 8-4 or 5 at half. Wake proved to be a very streaky, emotional team, and while we took advantage when they were down, we couldn’t keep the pressure up and let them creep back into it and fire themselves up as they rolled over us 15-12. After that we played a pickup team (!) of Georgia Southern and Florida B players. At this point we were apparently not capable of playing with any intensity as we dropped this game to drop out of the winner’s bracket on Sunday. We resolved to continue to work and make progress throughout spring break (we had already resolved to do so, but now did so with gusto) and also agreed that we needed to get lunch, after 1 player out of 21 had eaten over the course of our 4 games.

Day 2, we rolled with some pretty convincing wins over Georgia Southern and Viginia Tech, carried that same momentum into our game against Duke, and beat them pretty handily (we were in control the whole game), and finally rolled up against Richmond in the Chumpionship finals. We played hard, and really (I think) out-played Richmond, but unfortunately they were coming off a 2-hour bye-by-forfeit while we had rushed over from our Duke game, and they were able to make the plays on O and D that we couldn’t. We wound up losing by 2 or 3 cap time. A disappointing end, but we were definitely happy with the progress we’d made. Our O had definitely begun to run more smoothly, a trend that would continue throughout the week.

Charleston
Amazing, quite simply. We had two beach houses that were literally right on the beach–from either house you could look out the window and see the beach and ocean, unobstructed. Beautiful.

The week opened with a hat tourney–there were maybe 6 schools staying in Charleston that weekend, so the teams had a decent mix. I wound up playing on team “Mongoose,” which (out of 9 men) had 6 players named Matt. It’s always great to know the TD and find you’ve been a victim of their whims. And by great, I mean it was so-so. Of the Matts (of the team), I was definitely the most capable–I was also definitely the most sore/achy from the preceding weekend. I played a fair bit, handled mostly. I was disappointed with one particular Matt on my team, however, who despite having a 10-20% success rate (success meaning the throw went the way he wanted it, to say nothing of his decision making) on his hucks saw it fit to keep putting them up there after I’d just looked off the same guy deep to dump it to him. Kept me from doing a lot of the playmaking I wanted to. My team didn’t do so well as a result, though we weren’t terrible.

The rest of the week, I spent on the sidelines. I overdid it a bit in the hat tourney–our last game in the chumpionship bracket I refused to sub myself out (or more like, my team refused to sub themselves in) and I wound up throwing my body around a fair bit. I spent the rest of the week icing my knee and taking ibuprofen to get the swelling down. While I stood and cheered/helped from the sidelines, we got a lot of scrimmaging in, worked on our defense and transition O and D, and “exhibitioned” and beat GOP (Carleton’s less-intense ultimate team) and College of Charleston (with a limited roster due to injury) on Tuesday, and Georgia Tech (handily) and Cornell (a bit less handily, but still in control) on Thursday. Wednesday was an off day for us, and we spent part of it doing yoga and working on throwing in the wind on the beach–the throwing work in particular made a significant difference through the rest of the week, as we definitely needed to make adjustements after a winter of little throwing for some of us and only indoor throwing for the rest of us.

Friday was a get-away day, and my car (I wound up driving maybe 1000 miles over the course of spring break; we covered 2800 or so total with three drivers) spent much of the day wandering the streets of Charleston. Beautiful. I’m sure we’ll be back there next year.

Ultimax
Saturday and Sunday saw us at Ultimax in Greensboro, NC. This is where it all came together.

Strangely, the tournament format had a “power pool” with the top five seeds at the tournament in it–one of the top five seeds, by the way, was Duke, whom we’d trounced the weekend before. We were the 7 seed, and out to prove ourselves better than that.

Started off Saturday strong, hosing Drexel without much trouble (they loved to work the around break, but sadly didn’t have the personnel to consistently execute on it) to open, and rolling over Penn without a ton of difficulty–they were just coming off a tight win over Northwestern, 16-14 (games were to 15), and we had more energy to run them into the ground with.

After that we played Northwestern. Looking at the score reporter, apparently our pool was played out-of-order–we should’ve played Penn first and Drexel second. The general consensus was that the TD was “not with it.” Anyhow, we opened up an early lead on NUT, but they closed late in the first half. Second half we wound up basically trading points–we had difficulty stopping NUT’s loose, but effective, deep game on defense, but they were equally incapable of stopping our flow. The game proved pretty frustrating for our D, but we won 15-13 thanks to a consistent O.

I was back to playing on Saturday with a healthy ibuprofen regimen, and was I ever glad to be back on the field! I played mostly O-line, for whatever reason, which worked out really well since my knee was not 100% and I could dictate my own pace more often.

We rounded out Saturday with a crossover game against Penn State, whom we rolled without too much trouble.

Sunday saw us beginning the winner’s bracket as the #6 seed after our crossover win, and we opened up with a fairly crisp game against William and Mary, as we cruised to a 13-6 victory (games on Sunday were to 13 so teams could get on the road home sooner). We then ran up against Northwestern again after they upset Duke first-round (by the way, the so-called “power pool” worked out to a five-way tie, each team going 2-2 and reseeding being based on point diffy). The game was a lot tighter than the 13-7 final score would indicate–the long and short of it, though, is that our O was pretty much unstoppable (Watson and I as 3-4, every single O point, nonetheless managed to always get open) and our D put a lot of pressure on their handlers to force turns and capitalized to convert.

After putting Northwestern down again, we came up against Delaware, and had a very strange game. It was a strange game in that, while we were subjectively out-playing them, forcing lots of high-stall turns, pressuring their handlers, etc, we were utterly unable to convert for the break. Del applied strong pressure to our resets, and the lack of experience of a number of our D-line cutters showed itself in a startling lack of flow. We had the disc on the endline to break more than once and turned it there more than once. we did get one or two breaks, as I recall, but while our O had some easy points (for example, the three points I threw backhand break hucks for the score in) we also had enough miscommunication and the occasional mis-executed huck to let them creep into the lead. We wound up losing 13-10 feeling like we had handed them the game. Delaware went on to beat UMichigan in the finals 13-7.