Thoughts.

Given that Nationals is just a few short days away and I made vague promises to a few people personally that I’d “at least get a regionals recap up,” it’s high time I did a bit of blogging again, hey?

Long-windedness has been defeating my posts before they start these past months, so I’ll aim for brevity:

• I wound up playing coed with Ballometrics this summer and for the series after getting cut from Ironside after Boston Invite; had a lot of fun playing with them again, doing the coed thing (where skirt-wearing is par for the course) and being a primary cutter.  As such, all subsequent updates have a mixed bias.
• Speaking of mixed, Ballo had a long run clawing its way through the backdoor brackets to fifth place so I didn’t get to see a ton of games personally outside of the teams we played, so throw that in to my updates as well.
• Scuttlebutt has it that Slow White and District 5 both anticipated the outcome of their finals matchup being such, though I don’t think either anticipated such a large margin of victory for Slow.  Clearly both teams are very talented and deserving of the 1 & 2 seeds  in Sarasota.
• Snowbirds definitely surprised in taking the third bid, though they clearly earned it.  They rely on a solid core of handlers who are patient with the disc and content to dump regularly to maintain possession; they also tend to take fairly well-calculated risks deep, making them tough to force out and difficult to pressure under.  Pressuring their handler resets and generating turns around the disc is perhaps the best recipe for success against them; defensively they’re not overpowering, but generating turns can prove difficult given the consistency of their handlers.
• On the Open side, I didn’t get to see a ton but caught a bit of Ironside on Saturday and chatted with some of the guys briefly before games began.  Their undefeated season speaks for itself, and the talent on their roster corroborates.  McCarthy and Wicks, along with the team leadership have set the tone from day 1 for this team’s hard work toward the only goal worth working for, and they go into this weekend confident without taking their situation for granted, and in peak form are going to blow some very good teams out of the water.
• PoNY gutted out a tough win in the backdoor game against Bodhi; heard a lot of frustration from Bodhi’s side after that game – the feeling was that, rather than being outmatched by PoNY, Bodhi handed the game over with a number of unforced errors (drops and the like).  Tough breaks, but consistency remains the difference between best and second best (to say nothing of the rest).  More on that in a later post.
• Didn’t catch any of the women’s games.   Brute Squad clearly had a good run to their first-place finish, but Bent was disappointed to take third after upsetting #2 Capitals on Saturday and being unable to repeat the effort.
• Looking ahead to the college season, Dartmouth has a lot of enthusiasm this year with an actual head coach (who, unlike this author, actually knows what he’s doing), hailing from Sockeye circa 2004; he brings with him a West-coast style spread offense that has the boys running and gunning.  (Actual quote from a recent practice: “The problem now is that everyone is so open and they have so many options that everyone needs to re-learn how to make good decisions.” Hope springs eternal each season’s start, and hard work is already greasing the gears of this year’s Pain Train.  Hopefully more to come on that front as well in the coming months here…

I’m predicting a solid return to glory for Boston with Ironside and Slow White winning their respective titles – I’ll leave the women’s predictions to those more knowledgeable.  Happy watching!

Partially sunburnt: nose, ears, back of neck, potentially forearms & cheeks

Layout D’s made: 1

Times point blocked: 1 (This is why I should never make IO huck attempts)

Days of ultimate: 3

Total Games Played: 6
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Continuing from the last post:

Enough Monkeys (4): Story of the tournament (or at least, my favorite story of the tournament). Hailing from Hanover, my second home, the Monkeys are probably the chillest team in ultimate. On the strength of their practice style–no drills, just scrimmage–and their strategy–zone, zone, and, if that doesn’t work, more zone (but sometimes man)–they are perhaps one of the best examples of chemistry over ability. Not to say that they’re incapable in the slightest, as they have a number of very talented players, but more emphasis is placed on team function than any individual (they don’t, for instance, do track workouts), and their way can carry them pretty far in the right (windy) conditions.
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(I’ll leave commentary on the other divisions to those who saw more than I; Ballometrics had games for most of the time I was in Devens. Check U Catch and Josh Mullen.)

I’ll try and give impressions by order of finish:
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Really big*.

Seeded fourth, should’ve been seeded third, finished third. This weekend was an exercise in taking care of business.

Saturday was rainy and chilly. (I’ve forgotten how capricious New England weather gets). We started off fairly sluggishly in pool play, but used our early games as an opportunity to seek out and hone our offensive strategies, pressing on through miscues and bad-weather drops/throws.
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We came in seeded 13th, and left 11th. Broke seed, good weekend, right?

While Ballometrics had a decent showing this past weekend, we’re far from our full potential.
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Ballin’.

8-0 is a pretty solid return to competitive ultimate. Great squad to play with, too–true to form, Ballometrics is, in fact, full of ballers.

Game by game:
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Made a 2-hour trek (hey, a resonably close tournament!) to Tajima for the…perhaps 7th? iteration of the tournament.

Sadly, I could only stick around for part of the first day–myself and a few other Tottori JETs had to book it back home for our sayonara party that evening*–but in addition to being very nostalgic (I had been once before in 2005, when I was studying abroad near Tokyo), it was a lot of fun!
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