Thoughts.

Allow me to open with the most important aspect, the party.

‘Twas good times! They had it in one of their dining halls, apparently? Nice venue, live band.

Highlights include:

-At one point the band wasn’t playing anything (they stopped for long pauses between songs) and we got an “ole, ole ole ole” chant going, jumping, etc, and the band picked it up and segwayed it into a song. likewise for “build me up buttercup”

-Wheaties and Cabo in teletubby costumes

-Like half the team going around as a team cock encourage, encircling dancing couples and chanting “make out, make out, make out” until they capitulated or otherwise retreated. the first couple or two resisted, but it worked surprisingly (or perhaps not so surprisingly) well.

-Trying to cock encourage Phil (harvard captain) to make out with Pi (harvard sophomore)

-AnnE being AnnE, with special guest Jon Hopper

-Cabo brought a giant inflatable turtle (Trip Leader Trainer leftovers) and it went crowd surfing at multiple points over the night. early on it was pretty popular, to the point that they put people in the inflatable turtle raft for crowd surfing. Terrible idea. People nearly died.

-Apparently the Dartmouth women and the Williams women had a big pow-wow spurred by their cheer. Nora and APay were saying how they were making plans to do a winter Olympics-type event in lieu of the turf invite/having Williams come to Dartmouth for wintry fun.

No good hookup stories or drunken follies that this guy knows of. Though I think GW decided to landshark the party at one point–the offending shark was promptly hooked and captured by the security who were stationed in the party. In the meantime, somebody had stolen the shark’s clothes–his buddies came around asking, and at one point the band leader was all “so guys, you may have noticed our streaker, he kind of needs his clothes, he’s being detained by security right now…”

Games went well. We brought a good number of tryouts, and played them liberally, adhering to a loose subbing rotation–we had 3-4 returners every point, and the rest were non-returners. We wound up losing all of our games, but it’s said that you learn more from failure, so by that logic we learned the most out of any team there. We certainly identified some good things to focus on for the course of the season, and so far our team dynamic and leadership is looking solid.

I’m obviously biased, having spent the last 3 years growing with these guys, but I feel like things were remarkably process-oriented–I don’t think we ever mentioned the score in huddles, and rarely checked in-game unless we were concerned for when half was, etc.

Yeah, we only had 5 at the fields 10 minutes after our first game against Boston was supposed ot start. Yeah, we technically lost 17-2, since they assessed two points and that third point we scored came back on a travel call. But we 9 came to Devens and fought against the 20-something, and our names will go down in the SRT.

We had a great day, though. With a skeleton crew we persevered through three games, in what were ultimately losing efforts but were a lot more fulfilling than that. There are few things better than playing a full, hard day of ultimate with your friends.
Highlights of the Boston game:
-Dorner following the play on a huck to Grahm and picking up the mac’d disc just before it hit the ground, before getting up to throw our first score.
-Crew making a jump to grab the upline pass from the dump, in double-coverage, and just toe it in inside the endzone for our second score.
-Me making a beautiful IO forehand huck in flow to Graham going deep, who proceeds to catch it in the endzone and then send it back when Seig calls a travel.
-Crew going deep on a Boston player after I catch a poach on an upline dump and huck it to him, making the read and getting his hand on the disc above him, almost completing the sky for the goal (instead he just mac’d it away and almost got the layout grab

Our second game was against Colt .45 after a bye. Best game of the weekend. Highlights include Socks playing like a rockstar on O and D for them, along with the fist ’05, the bursts of points where Dartmouth would really get working and a ragtag collection of 10 took it to a team of 20+ that’s been practicing all summmer (we were more or less even for the first half, and went on a good run at the end of the game as well), and a multitude of sweet plays by just about every Dartmouth player there. We had hucks and skys and Ds and a few sweet grabs to boot. It was pretty apparent to us, at least, that had we so chosen we could have played to our studs and REALLY given them a good game and possibly won, but we kept things loose and sassy and lost by 6ish.

We finished up with a game against Rebelles, who we played to finish sectionals as well. We lost to them again, but we also had a much better time this time, again playing loose and punishing their lazy D when we had the disc. Had they not assessed three points on us due to our late arrival at the fields (we had to drive over after going into cap time in our previous game–by all accounts, the Canadians hadn’t even put 7 on the line but merely told us they had assessed when we arrived, but we let it go), it would have been a tight game and we might have decided to make a late push for the win–instead, we really opened the game up and Nick Root ’11 (who took some great pictures jumped in along with Ana ’11 to give us a couple extra bodies and we lost by 4 or 5 as I recall.

Finally, we finished up with a 7v7 (or 8v8, I can’t remember) Cat-Microwave-Tinfoil showdown with UVM, as both of our teams were undermanned and too tired to play another full game. UVM pulled off the win, 4-3 or 5-3, I think.

Saturday evening saw the Wagon boys and the Sugar Shack girls and myself and Crew, along with Dai and Ludi, heading out for dinner–which wound up being remarkably hilarious for remarkably un-hilarious reasons, in retrospect. Watson could not figure out how to reconcile cash and credit payments on the check with tipping, and everyone was a bit high on life or something. Remarkably entertaining. Dinner was followed by a prompt passing out of everyone at Pooh place.

We sure as heck didn’t see them coming. They had just the right combination of players , defense, and deep game to take us out of our element and play to their strengths, and they took the second bid to Nationals after Brown., beating us in semis and the game to go.

Brief game-by-game recaps below.

Saturday
Vs Yale (pre-quarters)
Nothing too out of the ordinary here, we rolled to a 15-7 or so win. We got off to a bit of a slow start, and Yale got away with enough deep looks to keep us from getting too comfortable (though I think they would’ve done a lot better if they had opened up their deep game further–they more or less were trying to play good, fundamental ultimate against us, which is all well and good except for the fact that we play better fundamental ultimate and they had no chance without mixing it up somehow).

Vs Tufts (quarters)
Tufts had just come off a tough win over Amherst, who was surprising to watch–somehow they came out of nowhere to upset UMass last year, and they did it again this year, too. They’ve got a couple of guys who aren’t quite ballers but watching them play, they worked their asses off out there against Tufts.

At any rate, we’re playing Tufts. Tufts ended our season in backdoor semis last year, but this year we hadn’t lost to them once, with a blowout win at Yale coming off of a 9-0 run on our end there (as well as we did at regionals, Yale may have been our best tournament thsi season). We go into this game completely unintimidated by the elephant men, and after some early points shredding their zone D our own zone forces ill-fated hammers (and good hammers, too, that were dropped–for a team that threw so many hammers, you’d really think Tufts would have caught more of them) and we take a pretty decent lead. Tufts, to their own credit, did not go quietly into the night, giving us a bit of a scare with a late run–Skip, their stud cutter, was getting open at will on all of us and really put the team on his back for a bit. We had some hotly debated calls in this game–we haven’t really gotten on in good terms with Tufts for a couple years at least, and similarly in this game we had an instance where the coach just exploded over an up/down call. Unprecedented, he just completely flipped his shit. I couldn’t help but laugh watching a grown man go red in the face while nobody, and I mean nobody else, was anywhere near as fired up over it, not even the players involved with the play.

We wound up putting them away late to win a close one by a few points–by this point the wind had picked up enough that zone D was difficult to beat over-the top, and with Tufts playing tight we had to set up and take our shots deep to stay on top.

vs Williams (semis)
Our first of two meetings with Williams. The field had a pretty well-pronounced crosswind with just enough upwind/downwind to make the direction important. Williams had beaten MIT in the previous round, who had improved a ton over last year to surprise with the 3 seed this year. I was surprised Williams beat MIT, but in contrast to Tufts, Dartmouth and Williams get along as well as any two teams possibly could. Must be the shared sympathy for another small, but athletic, New England school trying to keep up with the big boys.

We came out hot; Williams was trying to work the deep game but couldn’t gel, and we opened up an 8-3 lead going into half. We were feeling good, but Williams adjusted out of half, giving up entirely on trying to throw man D against us–our straight stack man O was utterly unstoppable all weekend–and instead forcing us to trade in considerations of how to set up and beat our defenders for considerations of how to set up and hit our poppers and wings in a windy zone. I’d say Williams was around as successful with its deep game as it was previously, but our zone O was not as efficient and gave them many more chances to end their possession on one throw. If there’s one thing Dartmouth has never done well in my time here, it’s consistently make the play on deep looks defensively–you can chalk it up in part to us just being a smaller team, or whatever, but Williams would take their shots, many perhaps ill-judged, but wind up getting away with them anyways. Our zone D was stifling, but they could stall for long enough to set up the deep looks and they started to fight their way back.

Even with them battling back, we still had the lead and the chances to end it, up 14-13, but it all changed on a single play–a pass upline to the open dump for the goal, caught by a last-second gust of wind, and the catch bonks. Williams immediately hucks it deep in transition to cover some 60 yards and scores to force overtime. One ill-fated scoober caught for a callahan and a tough last D point later, and Dartmouth goes from looking at the finals on Sunday to looking at 3 must-win games to try for the 2nd bid instead.

Sunday

vs. Northeastern (backdoor semis)
We came out strong in this game. Bolstered by solid sideline support in what seemed to be a battle of cheers as much as it was a battle of players on the field, our combined might outweighed the raw potential of Will Neff and Camden Kittredge. Our O was gelling very well in this game, we shredded their zone authoritatively (the wind was lower Sunday) and when they threw man there was little they could do to stop us. Neff and Kittredge had their moments of glory, both with some amazing plays on O and D, but our superior depth shone through in the end. 15…9? I’m not sure, but we won handily.

Vs. MIT (backdoor finals)
MIT had surprised this year, developing a couple rock-solid handlers to complement the pickup of DoG stud Kevin Albert (sic?) as a cutter. Add in some solid coaching (including Lakshmi Narayan ’06, a super-stud for the women last year) and you have a recipe for vaulting MIT from a regional afterthought to a force to be reckoned with. MIT had just come off of a hard-fought win over Harvard in the other backdoor semi, proving that their upset of Harvard in sectionals wasn’t a fluke.

We started out playing well enough, strategy-wise, we just had some early slip-ups–bonked throw here, ill-timed drop on our own line there–that put us in an early 4-1 hole. We took a timeout to regroup, and went out and kept playing the way we knew how–and we outplayed them the rest of the way. They ran their O almost entirely through one stud handler and one stud cutter, with a respective semi-stud for support handling and cutting, and as we continued to amp up the pressure on their studs and forced their role players to be playmakers, they began to fold and their studs began to tire. This was one of the best games of the weekend for us. the late-morning start time meant that it was convenient for everyone to come from campus to watch and cheer us on, and we fed off every bit of energy the crowd supplied as we battled back, took the lead, and sealed the deal along with another shot at Williams and a crack at Nationals.

vs. Williams, again (2nd finals)
So we ran up against Williams again, who had dropped the 1st finals to Brown 15-6 or so. We played our asses off. Less wind meant Williams was still more willing to chuck the disc, and they were reasonably more successful than the previous day–we didn’t jump out to an early lead this time. We had plenty of chances with the disc–their O was by no means unstoppable. Williams, to their credit, came out like a team on fire and D’d us up more than once. That said, there were definitely times in this game where we got away from our strengths–namely, valuing the disc, and more importantly, using the dump-swing to work both sides of the field, and it cost us. We were down 13-8 towards the end, and battled back to 14-11 before they got the final goal to end our season.

Much props to Williams for surprising everyone with a great run at the right time.

Going into the year, making nationals was not one of my goals for the team, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say it’s a bit depressing to think about now after all the progress we’d made. I had just started to briefly, maybe, just a little, entertain the thought of what it’d be like to make it. But man, Williams. Williams! Who knew? Anyway…it has been a great year.

My goals did include wanting Dartmouth to “kick ass” and wanting to personally “kick ass,” (yes, I know that such a broad, amorphous goal is not a prime example of good goal-setting) and while I wish I could’ve done the latter a little bit more–the dislocated finger was immensely frustrating for me this weekend in so many ways, physically and psychologically, and I couldn’t dominate like I wanted to (though playing at all was in itself hugely rewarding)–I can without a shadow of a doubt say that Dartmouth Ultimate kicked ass, and kicks ass, and I can’t wait for the Pain Train to leave still more teams with sore cabooses in the years to come.

The team is so much more than one player or one play. The notion of being a part of “something bigger than yourself” is readily apparent when I look at what we did this year. I love Dartmouth Ultimate.

Update: Pictures can be found here, among other places. Personal highlights include:

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.

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.

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.