Thoughts.

I felt good going in to Brown, and I felt pretty damn good leaving it, too. Dartmouth rolled to a second-place finish at Brown’s Huck-a-Hunk-a Burning Pumpkin tournament after losing to the home team in the finals.

Game Recaps:
Vs Brown B
Do I really need to say anything? We put up a bagel on them. I think they had one time where a huck was almost caught in the endzone by Brown B…but they dropped it. 13-0. We used the game to get ourselves set to play, things already looked fairly solid in this game.

Vs BU
We came into the game with BU expecting to be challenged, and we stepped up our game accordingly. BU couldn’t keep up with us, and we took half up 7-3, I think. We came out of half committed to the idea of not letting up, and continued to roll to a 13-5 victory. Probably the highlight of this game was BU’s main handler (Nate?) who had the most convincing backhand huck fake I’ve seen (though he apparently never actually throws from that position). At one point Socks and I were in a clam on their handlers and he goes with this fake–not only does Socks leap to get in the way on the mark, but I, poaching off my open-side handler mark, also jump to try and stop the throw, which is just a fake. Ironically enough, Nate then passes to his now-poached handler compatriot, who proceeds to drop the pass. I don’t have any other real memories of highlights, just general dominance on both sides of the disc from us.

Vs UMass
After a bye we lined up against UMass, not really knowing what to expect but anticipating better competition than the last two games. The game started off tight, I think, but we rattled off a few unanswered breaks to take half on a seemingly out of it UMass, 7-3 or 4. I may be remembering this incorrectly but I think UMass breaks us right out of half to pull themselves right back into it, and we trade points for a bit, UMass slowly chipping away to bring it to 11-10, the cap meaning Dartmouth needs to score the next point or face a universe point. We take care of business to get the 12-10 win. Again I’m at a loss for highlights–my memory is a bit fuzzy on Saturday right now–but we ran hard, and frustrated UMass with a couple different defensive looks.

Sunday!

Vs Harvard
Somehow the seedings and format had us playing Harvard in quarters. It only sort of made sense in the format. Anyways, we start this game off VERY strong, throwing clam, zone, and man in succession and getting breaks with each to take a 3-0 lead as Harvard calls a timeout. They come out of their TO better able to deal with our D, not sure what the halftime score is but we take half by a couple points. At some point Harvard starts throwing zone against us with good success, getting enough breaks to force a universe point. We work it down and score on a floaty huck from Poohface that Dermott reels in (not the first or last time he does that Sunday) for the score. Despite it coming to universe the game had a more relaxed feel for me than I’d have expected. Maybe it’s just playing Harvard and being unable to feel intimidated by players you’ve given nicknames such as “Dreamboat” and “Uncle Moneybags” to. We win 10-9, in any case.

Vs Tufts (semis)
(semi-)Finally, a rematch with our season-enders from the past year. Compared to the relative tightness of the last game (or at least the second half of the last game), we do a pretty good job of running Tufts around and rebound from an early deficit to win 13-8. We had some early easy turns due in part to yours truly with a drop and an ill-executed jugular pass, but Tufts’ early lead was more endemic of our own mistakes than Tufts overmatching us (a theme of all of our games), and that we came back to win so commandingly is proof of that. This was probably my worst game of the tournament, I got off to a slow start, but I moved on and kept playing my ass off and did my part to make up for my errors instead of getting into my own head. Definitely played solid D this game, and apparently Tufts earmarked me as one of Dartmouth’s “studs” and matched me up accordingly. I also got a few pats on the back during the postgame handshakes after this game from Tufts players, which was really cool. I’m kind of a big deal!

Vs Brown (finals)
This ain’t yo’ Purple’s Brown. The addition of C-Mo meant we’d have a whole new factor to reckon with in this game, though he wound up being less of a factor, relatively speaking, than anticipated. Mahoney got several D’s against us and did flex a bit of deep game muscle, but by and large we did a good job of limiting his impact as far as simply being a deep target in every point. The relative difference in his impact may also be due to the fact that Brown hosed us fairly decently, 15-9. The early goings were at least somewhat close, we were broken a couple times to start, but we got one back and I think were only down one or two at half. Brown continued to roll and we couldn’t keep up, however. It wasn’t so much that we were overmatched, but we gave Brown the disc a fair bit and had mixed success getting it back as Brown did a good job converting. This was probably my second-worst game of the tournament, relatively speaking. I got off to another bad start, getting the force mixed up on the first point and twice getting beating by Brown’s fast guy to the cone in the endzone. I was pretty pissed with myself for letting myself be beaten, I was starting to feel the fatigue from playing so much and wasn’t capable or willing to go as full-tilt for as long as I expected. I wound up sitting out more points this game in part due to that fatigue and in part because we decided to open things up in the rotation to get fresh legs, a decision I definitely endorse and think we should try and do earlier and more often (without sacrificing team capability) in the future.

Great tourney. We played very well, with solid D looks, our core of returners looking very good, and some solid play from our young’uns, too. Personally I was very happy with how I played–I don’t know if I could say any one game was my best–maybe the BU game–as I feel like I played very well in all of my games, playing a bunch of points and putting in a solid effort on O and D. I was very happy with my athleticism for the weekend–I took it easy the week/week and a half before Brown, in part due to being a little under the weather, and the recovery showed on the field. My knee even held up all weekend (though I did take a fair bit of ibuprofen), which was a very encouraging sign going into my next training cycle. Seigs showed up and offered guidance for much of the tournament, which was greatly aprpeciated (though it would’ve been real nice if he hadn’t claimed a couch and not slept in it, as I slept on the floor nearby unknowingly…). Personal highlight of the tournament was off the field; I think it was me, Chimpo, and Downtown who ran into some UMass guys who were apparently already drunk at 9:30 (we were getting stuff from Will’s car), and one of them was all “hey, great game Dartmouth…see you at the party tonight?” and I was all “uh…maybe” and he just goes “That’s a no from Dartmouth’s fastest man.” Hehe. “Dartmouth’s Fastest Man!” I like it. Though I don’t know if it’s actually warranted just yet, it’s a nice indicator of the effect on other teams I have on the field (and plan to continue to have).

We finished tied for fifth, I think. The only two teams we lost to were alumni teams from Williams and Midd, so overall I think we did quite well.

On Saturday, we wound up beating Amherst (in a tight game), Bufo (in a decidedly not-tight game), and Brown (that’s right, Seigs, we–beat–Brown, in universe-point style), and lost to the Williams alums by a few. Keep in mind that in maybe all but the end of the Brown game we had a fairly loose rotation, getting all the new guys PT with no more than maybe 3-5 returners on a given line.

Saturday was muddy as hell though, and we were playing on a field that was essentially a layer of grass above two inches of mud–by the end of the day, there was decidedly more mud than grass. Also, the field had an approximate 1′ height difference between one endzone and the other, creating an uphill/downhill dynamic in addition to the upwind/downwind one. As such, some adjustments needed to be made on O and D, and with time, cutters fell over less, defenders got a better sense of how easy or hard a time they might have closing on a man given the poor traction, and by the time we played Brown in our third game, people were getting ho all over the place (layout practice on a damp Wednesday and continued on the green on a rainy Friday beforehand seems to have paid off!). We worked our switch/help deep game very well, I thought, but I think that was primarily returner synergy at work there. Highlights include lots of bids–specifically, one of our freshmen, Robin, aka the Boy Wonder, aka Robino (think Brazilian soccer player pronunciation), aka “Holy layouts/scores/cuts/etc, Robin!” had what was basically a perfect bid to stop a score in I think the Amherst game (edit: the bid was against the Williams alums at the end of the day. I didn’t actually see the bid, sadly). Continuing the trend of surprising bids, Lamar had a layout D, against Brown, I think, and Socks had a redonkulous chest-height bid to stop a score in the Brown game too (naturally, he needed to take an injury after a typically terrible landing. But he’s making progress!).

Our last game against the Williams alums we had a very free rotation going, we wound up losing by maybe 3-4 but we definitely could have put things away if we were so inclined. We decided to get our young guns lots of pt instead against some higher-level competition.

On Sunday, we shifted to the turf fields, a welcome change (my cleats are clean instead of caked with mud and dirt! Awesome!). We beat UNH (who beat Tufts [!] in pool play) pretty easily to start in pre-quarters, then lost to the Midd alums by 4–that was a fun game, those guys are swilly (by swilly I mean they like to take their shots and maybe make looks you wouldn’t expect) and backed it up with their athleticism, so they just tore shit up. Self-call time–I caught a callahan in that game, raising my career tourney callahan count to three (two if you discount the one I had in Mike’s Hat). It got to like 12-6 or something like that with Midd scoring 4 straight out of half and we just decided, screw it, let’s mix it up–clam? feels right? We went with a clam-like feels-right defense and went on a 5-2 run before they put it away. I caught my callahan on the second of our feels-right D points, a high floaty swing in their endzone to a guy who was of C-Mo proportions–I had position to get to the disc first, and leapt to catch it. As opposed to the skirt-shaking run off the field after my callahan against Ohio at Southerns last year, it’s really not as exciting your third time. I opted instead for a simple place the disc and look around confused at all my teammates making a big deal out of it.

We finished up Sunday by hosing Harvard 13-9; we took half 7-6 and just rolled the second half. Harvard isn’t particularly intimidating to play against so far, but that doesn’t mean I’m counting them out by any means–everyone will definitely be getting better. Their relative inexperience showed on the field and a season of play will have them improving steadily over the coming weeks and months. Lots of great plays in the Harvard game though, highlighted by a solid hustle play on Watson’s part, running down (mind you, I was right there with him) and getting a layout D on Harvard’s first pass as the handler didn’t expect him to close or make a play so fast. Other highlights include some pretty hucks from Chimpo (counterbalanced by a really un-pretty IO huck attempt), Rembert teabagging a guy for a score (and getting some huge air on D), and Raines with some gnasty deep D and O, among many other great plays.

Personally, I played so-so–I think I was like 0 for 6 or 7 on the weekend for hucks, on Saturday because of conditions (really windy, my throws that usually have loft didn’t), on Sunday just due to mis-execution (I only had one huck attempt on Sunday I can remember, the decision was fine but I floated the disc a second too long, giving Midd’s giant opporutnity to swoop in for the poach D). Definitely have to get back to work on the hucks, because all of my throws were out of whack. Defensively I felt like my play was solid at most all instances, and great in some, though I need to learn to make better adjustments positioning-wise in the mud, because I tend to rely a lot on my explosiveness and ability to close, which are hindered with poor traction. Can’t feel too down about my play when we did so well as a team though–beating Brown and Harvard in one weekend will do wonders for one’s disposition.

Health-wise, I held up very well on the whole. I was definitely aware of my knee, and for most of Saturday/Sunday I had some form of strap/cover on it for support/extra warmth which I think helped. My leap (pretty much full height) for the callahan was off my right leg, which is the bad side, so there’s a good sign that things have improved since it didn’t give out during or after that play. Granted, copious ibuprofen was used to help–I’m planning to focus a fair bit on 1-legged work for the next couple weeks in an effort to keep ironing out the imbalances in my right leg and legs in general that lead to the knee pain.

Party recap: I don’t do party recaps. Let’s see, some people got makey-outey, not including me (never including me, really). Party was a pretty good time, though I don’t think Dartmouth really had a great party-dominating presence. I don’t think any of the Dartmouth guys wound up shacking up with a WUFO lady this year.

So, returning the lists:

Good
-Defense, 1-on-1, switching, helping, all pretty solid
-My callahan game. It took until spring break for #1 last year, and I’ve already got one and we’re still in the fall season. Up from here.

Needs Work
-Hucks, hucks, hucks. Especially downhill and downwind. Specifically, I need to work on setting up and executing IO hucks, as my default is a straight-up, step out and OI huck on either side. A bit of faking with the disc to get the mark off and set up space for a good IO huck will help my throws get more loft and better lead receivers, especially in windy conditions.

Game 2, v. GOaT, Wagon’s best game of the three. We go down 0-2 off the bat, but come out firing on all cylinders, get a couple short turns on D, and generally capitalize. Eventually GOaT gets their shit together and puts us away, but we ran a tight rotation and tight until a bit after half. I only played a few points, and wasn’t involved in much–all zone-man transition points.

Game 3, v. Gunslingers (aka McDermo’s squad). We come out weak again, both sides are playing sloppy early and middle. at 9-5 or something we open up our subbing rotation, and, surprise! we bring it back to 9′s. Funny what a difference fresh legs can make. We close the rotation up at this point and continue to suck it up and drop the game and any chance and progressing; McDermott and co go on to lose to Red Tide in their next game.

Good time, overall. Got to watch DoG hose Metal, Seigs threw and caught a score, I think. Good to watch some high-level ultimate, where receivers catch just about everything in their vicinity, throwers throw to space, and O generally looks pretty, nothing really forced. DoG looked really good. Keeps giving me something to aspire to. I remember specifically seeing Zip at one point as a wing in the zone; throw goes over the top, cross-field forehand to his man on his side–Zip closes something like 15 yards in the span of a couple seconds with his man, just in time to leap and get the D. Quite honestly, it was jaw-dropping how quickly he closed. Helps me realize that there is SO much benefit to be had simply from being more fit than your competition, helps me to know that if I keep working, by this time next year I could have 8-10 more lbs of muscle on me, and just be a monster. Motivates me to train hard, and train smart. I’m getting there–with flexibility and strengthening, the source of my knee woes is slowly coming into clear focus. Another month of strengthening and stretching, and I think I’ll be money–of course, then I’ll have all winter too…looking forward to being home without the distraction of classes this winter and continuing to whip myself into better and better shape. Wagon was a worthwhile experience for sure–it’s definitely enhanced my appreciation for some finer aspects of the game, and allowed me to look beyond simply how Dartmouth does ultimate to see hat there are many roads to the same destination (the endzone). though I can’t say it compares to the level of investment one feels in a college team.

You know what fall in Hanover means? Dartmouth’s back in its full swing, with new ’10s to boot! Unchecked freshmen enthusiasm envelops the campus as ‘shmobs swarm the school. These same ‘shmen also come out in droves to ultimate practice, as the fall season opens with teaching, tossing, drilling, and an introduction (or re-introduction) to Dartmouth Ultimate. Good times.

But enough about the fall starting, this blog is about me. My fall’s shaping up nicely, with a couple of classes (neurobio and physics) that look very manageable and another (history of jazz) that is simply amazing giving me cause to hope for a solid academic term. Outside of academics, I’m feeling upbeat about this year’s team, though there’s still a lot to happen before the Pain Train has solidified its identity for the season.

Personally, as far as ultimate goes I’m feeling really good. Playing Chuck Wagon over the summer (and for this coming final week before regionals) has been a tremendous experience for me, as I’ve gotten to play with and learn from a number of pretty exceptional ultimate players. The various O-sets and D-sets Wagon throws are different in the sorts of skills they emphasize compared to Dartmouth, and it’s definitely taught me a lot about how I look at the game and how one can approach ultimate with different skillsets and still be successful.
My summer training has definitely paid off in terms of fitness, as I’ve been looking and feeling and playing better han I did all last year–though business due to Trips/coordinating sectionals/start-of-term hustle and bustle have thrown me out of whack and off-schedule with my workouts and I need to get back in the gym regularly again (which starts today). I’m not sure exactly how I’m going to structure my fall training, though in all likelihood it’s going to emphasize backing off in the few days leading up to tournaments to keep me fresh and able to play lots then.

As far as the fall season goes, I’ve played in a few tourneys already–or, played in a couple, and ran/played a few points in another. I was coordinating sectionals at Dartmouth on Sept 16-17, which ran pretty smoothly on the whole, I think, with only a couple minor water-cooler hiccups during play. We had 20 teams in our section, of which I think 16 or 17 were on-time, so we wound up with 5 bids to regionals, which has to be some sort of record. It wound up being a pretty big affair on saturdady, with 10 D1 and 10 D2 teams playing (D2 was only one day) on a total of 8 fields–with a little bribing I got the team numbers in each division to work out so that both divisions were two pools of five, meaning we made the most of every field available to us. Things really worked out exceptionally well. I only got to play a little bit as I was busy taking care of paperwork/traveling to garipay to check on teams/re-filling water/getting scores, etc, but I got to play with Wagon against Dartmouth (and posterize Drago with a bid that is easily the best picture that will ever be taken of me playing ultimate) on Saturday and against Mephisto on Sunday as well (we beat Mephisto by two, I think, to take top seed from the section). Chuck Wagon really came together as a team and as a “culture” as Daron would put it on this weekend.

The following weekend had Wagon going to Brunswick, Maine for Clambake, which was marked by a downpour for most of the first day and semi-windy conditions on the second. Day 1 was really pretty straightforward, we rolled most of our pool without trouble, with only Bowdoin’s alumni team giving us anything of a run. Highlight of the day was a CW 1-3-3 with a Dartmouth front wall more or less completely crippling Harvard’s O in a blowout win for us. Wagon’s Dartmouth contingent also got to know Harvard a bit better, as some good-natured heckling from us while they played the rest of the pool eventually resulted in us learning the names of, and then re-christening with nicknames, Harvard’s tri-captainship, whom I shall only refer to as Dreamboat, Quest, and Uncle Moneybags. Sunday we had a fairly easy quarters game, a surprising semis game in that an all-tournament savage Mephisto roster gave us a pretty tight game though we slowly chipped away, breaking away late and winning by several points. At more than one point we stopped for an injured mephisto player who got charlie horsed or messed up this or that, only to have to keep playing. We faced Red Tide in the finals, and they were noticably fresher, probably in part due to superior conditioning as a team (they struck me as a club team that was about as close to a college team in mentality and organization as you could get) and probably in part due to the fact that this was their home tournament and they seemingly had a 30-man roster at the fields. We went down a few breaks right off the bat and couldn’t make it up late in what was really a pretty un-exciting conclusion to Clambake, though it was definitely a worthwhile tournament to come and play in (and hangout/eat at the clambake itself on Saturday night).

Last weekend I finally got to rejoin my Green brethren as Dartmouth rolled out to Yale for the Yale Coffee Cup/Ivy league championship. It’s already been recapped on the Pain Train blog (link on the sidebar forthcoming), so I won’t go too in-depth and instead just talk about me. I played pretty well when I was in, I think. One of my main goals for improvement right now is to work on my ability to read the defense–read my mark, read the thrower’s mark, read cuts when I’m on O, on D, etc. Basically improve my vision, and my ability to address my mark (and break it) when I’ve got the disc. To that end, I did pretty well, with a few IO break looks (and a couple IO break failures), and a pretty good huck success rate, I only had two turns on hucks, one of which was a bad decision, but I also had at least a few hucks for scores that were caught more or less uncontested, which is a good sign. Cutting was generally pretty good, defense I was very happy with–in our game vs. Princeton I wound up covering their primary give-n-go handler for much of the second half–I’d be lying if I said I shut him down, but I gave him a lot of headache on the dump (though in one point I got beat upline by him at least 3 times after staying with several jukes in the backfield–this is why it pays to look dump early in the count), and I noticed in later points they started running their offense through him less, which I took as a good sign. I was right on my man in most situations, got broken once off a wide swing pass that I can remember, had at least one sky on D as well. This sky during the Harvard game was a less-than-fortuitous event for yours truly, as after leaping and D-ing a huck to the tall, lanky Uncle Moneybags, the affluent athlete, who had leapt behind me, hit me in midair and sent me down in less-than-ideal landing conditions. I landed fairly well-crumpled (this was my second midair collision of the day, by the way–the first one still has me feeling my chest from the knee I received whilst jumping), but more importantly, I landed with my left ankle extended and a fair bit of weight on it, tweaking it, causing inflammation, and taking me out for the rest of the tourney. The swelling wasn’t particularly bad, it just happened in such a way that running was painful and the captains said it wasn’t worth injury to keep playing so early in the season.

So I was done after day 1. Probably for the best, as I was feeling pretty beat up/tired even before the ankle tweak. I definitely need to refocus on injury prevention and strengthening my posterior chain again, as these are what hold me back time and again. On the whole, I think Yale went pretty well for the team, as we got to play a bunch of B-team/new players and see what they could do. I do think some team members got a little too carried away with demanding solid fundamentals and execution at this early point in the season–considering that we’ve had 4 practices, all of which were focused on teaching, and that a fair bit of the team at Yale are still learning and improving, keeping the focus on having fun and on controling the things we can control instead of squaking at people to stay over throws, shut down the open side, etc, helps to keep things more enjoyable and I think more productive at this early point in the season. I think Yale proved to be a good diagnostic for where we stand right now–we’ve definitely got a nice core to build around, but I think it’s fairly clear that we’re going to need to at the very least develop some of the B-team or freshmen into solid role players for us to be very successful–something which we certainly can do with practice. I’m definitely excited to see who makes the cut for the A-team come the fall’s end, how people progress, and really I’m just generally excited to see the shape the team takes this year.

We won. Need I say more? Perhaps I should.

…yeah. It was a lot of fun, had a pretty good (but not great) turnout, several of the non-sophs (Dermo, Rem, Owen, Molly, Charlie) and alums (Pnut, Tommy Dickie, Orsi, Liz) came back up to play; definitely good to see people. My team was admittedly stacked, not in the sense that anybody cheated, but in the sense that we just had a pretty solid level of talent across the board, with a plethora of handler-capable folks who could chuck it upwind or down, and several people with legs to run.

We started off winning out our pool, our closest being a hard-capped game we won on universe point (we let them back into it); this game was also highlighted by s point that took a good 20-30 minutes; at one point a timeout was called and we took a good five minutes before we went back to it–and then it still took five turns before I ended the misery catching a callahan.

Finals was pretty exciting, there was a decent-sized crowd watching. I got to make some nice looks, some swilly looks that worked (that were not swilly in my book–I threw a blade for a score in transition at one point), and some other looks that didn’t work, in large part due to Rembert being within, you know, 30 yards of where I was throwing. Got to show off a bit, which was nice. Me and hat tourneys get along pretty well, if the High Tide hat and Mike’s hat are any indication–I have a lot of fun being able to run the show to an extent and work on my game.

Still adjusting to the different O Wagon runs. It’s in many ways the opposite of a Dartmouth O–based in large part on the ability of a cutter in isolation, the abilities of the throwers to break the mark, rather than the dump-swing-continue, flow O Dartmouth usually runs. Good experience, for sure.