Thoughts.

Two weeks ’til finals; no guarantees on posting schedule until Thanksgiving.

In the meantime, ultitraining has gotten a spate of new writers, Atlanta‘s blog is still rolling strong, and even Match has a new post up in the blogosphere.

Lots of words devoted to open previews; haven’t seen as much on the other divisions (feel free to chime in in the comments if you’ve found other material). Check:

UCatch (Open)
Pool A
Pool B
Pool C
Pool D
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Simple cue, significant results.

Get your weight set on your throwing (non-pivot) foot before you throw.

To put it a little differently, you should be balanced with your weight on your throwing foot during your release. I like to cue a balanced “finish” position (stepped-out, at full extension or what-have-you) on the follow-through, as it encourages stability throughout the whole throwing motion.
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Some of you might have had trouble getting to the site yesterday; sorry. I’m contemplating moving the site domain to a www instead of a blogger address, and potentially a shift away from blogger as a content manager, though that’s a secondary concern.

In some of my initial testing yesterday I neglected to turn off Blogger’s forwarding service–hence the temporary lack of access. Again, my apologies.

I’m not planning on having any significant down time when the move does happen, and I’ll be sure to make a note of it as it occurs so there aren’t any surprises. Still have a lot of research to do before I go ahead with all of it (most importantly, trying to arrange for link forwarding so old links here aren’t broken and my own internal links aren’t shat on either).

It’ll likely be a project for my Thanksgiving and Christmas breaks. I may make some minor adjustments going forward (I’ve been keeping the top 10 sidebar list updated every couple weeks), but that’s the biggie.

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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I’ll try and get some kind of retrospective up before week’s end–we have Friday off from classes for whatever reason (reverse Columbus day?) but a ton of class to make up for it in the first four.

I’ve been limping around since halftime of our backdoor loss to Puppet Saturday. Bursitis of the right knee, methinks. Baller?

More to come later.

Some quality content on the Atlanta Ultimate blog in the wake of South Regionals, namely two pieces on Using Your Top Seven (and when you should ease up) and When Losing is the Way to Go. (Relatedly, a bit on Changing It Up On Offense corroborating Jim P’s original post on the matter).

Good food for thought for those of us who’ve yet to play in Regionals–from my experience playing in New England College Regionals, at least, aside from the rare case (Brown ’05) where one team was clearly the class of the region, ultimately who emerged from the muddle victorious depended as much on smart subbing and use of depth as it did on whose “top seven” or whatever comparison you want to make was better on paper.