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.

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.