Thoughts.

Short summary: We did very, very well, winning close games, winning big over good opponents, and we took care of business for most of the weekend, even with injuries to key players. We made a finals appearance at Yale for the first time since ’05 (and the second time since ever, if I’m not mistaken), and are on track for a #3 seed and a good run at regionals this year.

On to the game recaps:

vs. Brown
We started off against the #1 seed of the tournament. Warming up for the game, a certain captain decided that we needed to get pumped up to play in the cold weather of New Haven with a good old-fashioned layout drill. Now, I’m not going to say that this was a bad idea, because we did have a pretty noticeable horizontal presence during the day, but yours truly wound up injuring his neck making a high bid. You know that thing where you turn your neck and it hurts, but it kind of feels like you’ll be able to get your neck to “pop” back into place if you just torque it right? Yeah, well that was me, only it never really popped back into place. At first I was still going to play, but after coming in for the first O point, and more or less just setting the stack the entire point because I was too tentative to cut, I decided to play safe instead of worthless and manned the sidelines all game. We had the game solidly in hand for most of the way, leading by a break or two for much of the game, but we choked it away at the end, Brown’s comeback capped off by a callahan on a disc that sailed over the 2 after the pull (evidence against the “short people should be handlers” theory) to win it. We played a very good game, though, and despite the finish we came away more than confident in our ability to run with Brown–and if we can run with the 1 seed, who can’t we run with? (Nobody, it turns out) 12-11 loss, or something to that effect?

Vs. Tufts
After a bye round and watching the women, we came up against Tufts. After stewing on my not playing the past game, and knowing (or rather, thinking) that the two games after Tufts were going to be relatively easier, I got up to play for Tufts, and, while not feeling 100%, I was well enough to play at this point. I think I even had a bid somewhere in this game, where it was one of those no-thought bids so I didn’t have time to psych myself out of it for health’s sake–and I was just fine afterwards, which gave me more confidence for the rest of the weekend.
Anyhow, we just slaughtered Tufts, for lack of a better word–I played almost exclusively O-line, and didn’t play much because our D-line was on a tear. At one point we went on a 9-0 run, scoring 8 consecutive breaks. In a game to 13 that means we won handily, finishing up 13-5. This was an especially gratifying victory after Tufts was seeded higher than us at Ultimax.

Vs. MIT
This was a challenging game to start–MIT (coached by recent Princess Layout alum and a top-5 finisher in the Callahan voting last year, our lovely Lakshmi Narayan ’06) threw some strange version of a zone against us, and they got some turns on us early while we adjusted. They didn’t have much to answer our man D–we had some trouble with their handlers, but their cutters generally were not big threats. As such, we got enough turns to regain our lead, and eked out a fairly close one 10-8 (we won on them scoring in hard cap. Always strange to win without scoring the final goal).

Vs. Northeastern
This one was never really all that close. Will Neff, sure, whatever, we didn’t have much trouble getting the turns and converting. Another 13-5 win to cap off our day.

Interlude: the Routhier residence was great as always. I’m still amazed that they put up something like 40+ people twice a year without trouble or complaint. Also, we had a chartered bus this weekend thanks to a sizable donation from the Raines’, and traveled everywhere in comfort and style. Having never done the chartered team bus thing before I can tell you that it’s definitely THE way to travel. You can chat with everyone, nobody’s gassed from driving to/from games, and you get to watch sweet flicks en route to everywhere–we had Disc 4 to get us into an ultimate mood on the way to the fields each day, Casino Royale + Drum Line highlights on the way down from Dartmouth, Stick it, Batman Begins (at the Routhier’s on Saturday), and the Prestige. Quality lineup.

Sunday, Sunday, Sunday…

vs. RPI
Our first game was against RPI. I think they scored twice? Maybe thrice on a fluke? Never in doubt. We were flat this game, but we could afford to be–but we did recognize and gear up for the quarters to follow…

vs. Williams
We were solidly in control of this game more or less from the get-go. Williams played extremely huck-happy, and thanks to a nice crosswind they were NOT getting anywhere with it. We simply refused to play the turnover game and progressively built up the breaks…I’m not sure what the final score was, but regardless of how close or far it was, the way it was played we simply out-played them.

vs. UMass
We moved on to semis pumped to play UMass, and played an awesome game. The game was pretty tight for much of the way, but we would always seem to bend without breaking whilst chipping away at UMass, forcing turns and Ds and taking advantage. This was another game that we won with a convincing, if not huge, margin.

I had a really great game, with a layout D on Henry, a tipped disc that got D’ed up on the endzone, a poach D in the horizontal stack, and a few scores caught besides. Something about playing UMass just brings out the all-region in me. Yes, I said it. I’m not calling it, I’m just saying, that’s what I played like. Having played mostly O up to this game, I was fresh enough to come in and play balls-out D on D points and when we turned it over on O as well–if I’m not mistaken my two D’s were to get the disc back on O points. Also, they both followed fairly involved discussions after plays that resulted in turns (these games were observed, and UMass didn’t hesitate to invoke the observer at any opportunity, making them more into a ref than an observer. At one point the observer even said, after a player immediately looked to him, “really guys, you can’t work it out on your own?”). It’s always nice to be able to make plays in that situation and keep people from focusing on the calls–if anything, it worked out better this way, as both of the D’s were short turns and we immediately scored after both to reclaim momentum. For all my talk about managing expectations and never getting too high or too low, it helps make that process a lot easier when you can take the uncontrollables bull by the horns and turn it around before it becomes a problem.

Vs. Harvard
It’s the final countdown! We need to make finals more often, so we can use the song as part of our cheer.

We came into this game excited to play hard after our win over UMass, and really came out firing on all four cylinders–despite Harvard having finished 15-20 minutes earlier than us in their upset victory over Brown (thanks to no cap horn and a delay in earlier games on our side of the bracket), we ran them around on O and D–our man D was fairly stifling, and combined with the wind we got a good number of turns early on forced bad looks or simply poor decisions, and went up a break or two in the early goings. As we approached halftime, however, Harvard mixed things up and came at us with a as-yet-unseen clam/zone that gave us fits on O. We managed to beat it once or twice but they got their breaks back and then some to take half 7-6. Out of half our struggles continued–we were making adjustments, but not quickly enough as they jumped out to a 10-8 lead. Rotating players in and out of their front few, where it seemed they had two handler coverers and two upfields who almost played like a front wall or cup, only had limited effectiveness, though whenever we could get a dump and swing around their front we had pretty easy going up the opposite sideline.

Getting to that swing always proved the most challenging, however–the problem was that Harvard could afford to fill the front field near the disc, and have their backfield and break not respect the long throws over the top, as the wind meant that those throws would hang or otherwise be off-target/low percentage. We continued to struggle on O, but our D proved solid–Harvard liked to work the dump-swing, but the way some of us (myself included) were shutting down their handlers they didn’t have much of a time at all doing it. My personal highlight was point blocking Phil (aka Dreamboat), one of Harvard’s captains and main handlers, trying to get an IO to the swing cut. I was a step and a half off on the mark, but he winged it–my hand was stinging for a couple points after that, but the pain of pointblocking is easily outweighed by the glory inherent in it (I never get pointblocks in games–it would seem that the Wiggins approach to marking is helping to make me a bit more effective. Something as simple as blocking back can make a huge difference).

We ended up losing 13-9, or something to that effect, but we came away confident. A bit of work figuring out how to beat Harvard’s clam and there’s nothing they can do to beat us.

We know we can run with Brown, too–though the stud factor of Vandenberg and Mahoney worries me more than Harvard, who have seemingly no true stud and a bunch of ok players that happen to play very well (credit is due to Josh McCarthy, Harvard’s coach)…so, as we go into regionals with a probable third seed, you might understand that we’re eagerly anticipating the opportunity to prove ourselves.