Regionals
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Loading ...No regular programming today–as you read this, I’m likely checking out the Terracotta soldiers or en route to/from the same.
That said, good luck to my boys in the green and (whatever other colors we’re wearing) up in Hanover this weekend. Especially after having played this past weekend, I’m nostalgic for just how great and wonderful a thing it is, to come together and culminate in pursuit of shared purpose. Brigs up a whole swell of emotion from last year.
I can’t be there myself, but I’m pulling for you in spirit on the other side of the world. Play without regret and go home content with the knowledge that everything you could give–on the field and off–you gave willingly and happily.
Mackey Day (long as you’d expect. but it’s my day, dammit!…)
(No Ratings Yet. Click to Rate!) Loading ...“Mackey, why DO you play ultimate?”
I thought for a second.
“…because what I get out of this sport is commensurate with what I put in to it.”
“Why don’t you do crew or something like that?”
“Are you kidding me!? It’s nowhere close…”
I’m not sure exactly what drew me to ultimate in the first place. I went to nerd camp where frisbee was the thing to do; we’d throw it around during breaks, play “ultimate” (good old amoeba play) during activities, and the like. I was (am) pretty athletic (yes, yes, self call, I know. Keep your shirt on), I jumped high and caught frisbees and boys and girls alike were impressed. I was smitten.
Going out of high school and looking at college, I knew I wanted to do SOMETHING with sports, but short of running/jumping on a track team (being a Division I fifth-stringer as a walk-on didn’t sit too well with me), ultimate was IT. I still remember going through the UPA rankings, trying to see if I could discern anything to distinguish the ivies I was looking at from one another. This school, Dartmouth, that my friend went to, they had just made it in 2003! Surely this was a team on the up-and-up, a team that I could jump on to and ride their ascention to the national stage with. And I had so much fun when I came and visited…such were my thoughts, among others, when I chose to come to Dartmouth.
I arrived a wide-eyed freshman, fancying myself the shit because I’d played in summer league–organized ultimate, man!–and showed up knowing what a stack was. I could throw a forehand (without a pivot). Sometimes my hammers went where I wanted them to! It made me really happy when I heard from Pete Gadomski at one point that he thought I was a ’06 because I looked so much like I knew what I was doing. Knowing as much as I did, and being in the shape I was, I had to be a shoo-in for the A-team, right? Right?
Not at all. The ’05s were the big dogs, Seigs and Agan explained to me in the backseat of a car (their “office” during practice), and they had a good feeling about this year–they didn’t have a lot of space to pull up new guys and train them up, taking just Cobbles and Pov from the ’08s. “We want you to work on your defense,” they said. “right now it just seems like you force guys out and try and run the disc down when it gets thrown (admittedly still my favorite thing in ultimate). Work on really sticking with your man and D’ing him up that way on the B-team.”
On the B-team? I put everything I had into getting better, into showing them how wrong they were to not take me on the A-team, to show them how committed I was. And it wasn’t just me. So many conditioning runs, so many wintry practices out at the turf fields, Dorner, Mackey, Crew, Socks, Watson, DeKrey…commitment. Hard work. If it wasn’t practice, it was Socks-Crew-Pov-Mackey doing marker drill on a Friday evening at the river dorms, playing boot, tossing.
My freshman summer, spent in the far East, I threw literally every day after class. I would spend hours perusing the internet for every last bit of information it held. I read the blogs. When I returned to Hanover, I started my own. I kept working, and kept improving, physically, mentally.
Sophomore year, Socks, Wats, and I made it (with a cameo by Crew). Junior year Crew returned, and DeKrey and Dorner came up. We’ve all continued to work through the years, and the fruits of our labor are evident to me every time we’re on the field, every time we toss. Every throw is a throwback. Turfed backhands, wobbly forehands, have become near certainties. Whereas I once dashed around haphazardly hoping for a floaty frisbee, I now cut with purpose for leading passes. While I used to wait and bait, I now dictate and dominate. My attachment to this sport, and the people I share it with, is the single most fulfilling component of my Dartmouth experience.
Riding back from a practice at Radcliffe with Dorner, DeKrey, and Crew, joking at an intersection, I was struck with the thought of just how perfect it all was, how there’s absolutely nothing else I’d prefer doing. I could’ve ridden forever, but these moments are fleeting. We’ve invested so much time in this sport, and in each other, and for what?…
“Are you kidding me!? It’s nowhere close.” With crew, what do you do? Pull strokes on the erg? With ultimate, there is SO MUCH you can do to improve. It’s not just the physical work, but the strategy, the teamwork…spending time together with my teammates makes us all better players. And not just better players, better people. I have gotten SO MUCH out of my time here at Dartmouth, and with the team…I’m an entirely different person now than I was before I got here, and it all stems from this singular obsession of mine, born of some nonchalant tossing and an innocent fascination with a piece of plastic.
So we come to Regionals. Whenever somebody who doesn’t really follow ultimate/somebody I don’t talk to about it regularly asks about my season, I refer to Regionals as “Pretty much the culmination of my four years here at Dartmouth.” Like Nate said, though, the results are not what define us. For me, going into this weekend with the strength and certainty of years of commitment and work and, why lie, obsession, with this sport, with this group, with Our Team, I am, simply, exhilarated. There is no greater feeling than the rush that comes with a hard-fought game, win or lose. The flow of the moment, the unaldulteated joy of letting it all go…it is for precisely these moments that I work so hard. To be able to give my best, alongside my best friends, there is nothing more than this that I can ask for.
I have to confess that I’ve actually been tearing up, if not crying, a fair bit reading some of these blitzes. The meaning that this team, that Our Team, has taken on, cannot be captured in words (despite my liberal use of them in attempt here). I see it when we play, though. Every time I hear a “hoo ungawa!” Every time Owen demands better from somebody, be it himself, his teammates, or his opponent. Every sprint down on every pull, every goal caught, every joyous celebration…every time we huddle up. It’s always there, that desire to give more, to become less a collection of 23 and more a team of one, united will.
I love each and every one of you. As I sit here typing this I feel a surge of energy–that energy doesn’t come from me; it comes from you. Our investment in one another is our truest strength. As we play this weekend, never forget that. Put everything you have into the moment at hand, into supporting your teammates, with your play, with your attitude, with your energy, with your HEART, and our united will will be put on display for all to see.
I don’t play for myself. I don’t play for Dartmouth. I play for Mike Zargham, Carson Thomas, Nate Raines, Watson Sallay, Alex Crew, Zach Dorner, Sam Haynor, Pete Bonanno, Will DeKrey, Dermott McHugh, Owen Roberts, Dave Schmidt, Nick Brown, Billy McCarthy, Graham Baecher, Misha Sidorsky, Robin Meyers, Alex Kell, Nathaniel Obler, Chase Raines, Lars Osterberg, and Alex Taylor. I play for YOU.
-Mackey
Obligatory Regionals Writeup
(No Ratings Yet. Click to Rate!) Loading ...Williams. Williams! Who knew?
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:
This catch (I still don’t know how I managed to hang on to that with just three fingers, much less catch it in the first place)
This
, if only for the hair effect
This, as it’s the most ultimate-y picture of me I saw. Just the right mix of focus, sass, and skill.
Regionals
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Culmination of our season (Nationals would’ve been icing on the cake if we’d made it, in my mind). The results of all of our work together, sweating together in the gym, in the field house, on the turf over the winter, and pushing each other on the field. All the training and conditioning was brought to bear in a single weekend’s time.
It was worth it.
I don’t know if I’ve ever been so excited to play or had so much fun. Started on D most every point in our two biggest games against Brown and Tufts, and ran my ass off, completely and utterly. I hated for it to be over, especially after only one game on Sunday, but I can honestly say I did the best I could.
As a general recap, Dartmouth:
-Beat Midd
-Lost to Brown, 12-14
-Beat MIT
-Rolled Amherst
-Lost to Tufts on Sunday on universe point
I’m only going to talk about the second and final games, since those were the ones that mattered most, for obvious reasons.
Brown. Great game, great, great game. I spent all but maybe two or three of my points in on D covering Brown’s Mike Vandenberg, which was a great challenge. Lots of O ran through him, and he was their primary hucker in the Colin Mahoney connection. I’d be lying if I said I shut him down–he’s got some solid, solid throws, the low-release flick for a huck to CMo their first point and later for a break score (that hovered 2-3 inches off the ground, where he’d released it under my hand) in particular stand out in my mind–but I feel like I did a pretty good job making things difficult for him getting the disc or otherwise moving it around. He runs hard, and covering him was a challenge, but that’s what made it so exciting for me. Overall the game was close the entire way.
We went down a break midway through the first half, but got it back to take half (I caught the score. self-call). Second half was without breaks until 12-12 and time cap, at which point Brown broke us twice to seal the deal.
We played pretty well. On O, we had a fair number of turns, but Brown’s D line O/our O line’s D kept the breaks from occuring. Generally I feel like our O line had a lot more turns than Brown’s, as we only got the disc on D maybe 3 times the whole game to my recollection, but at the same time, our D forced a lot of desperation hucks that CMo brought down, and likewise we were not so fortunate with our own desperation hucks for the same reason. Given that Mahoney caught the overwhelming majority of Brown’s scores, we can certainly come away from the game knowing that we outplayed a good team with a game-dominating (I use this term in a relative sense) tall guy.
One thing i do want to write about with regards to the Brown game was a line call in which I conceded a turn. I’m well aware that every posession the D-team can get is precious, but even so, the situation was ambiguous: I had bobbled the disc and when I had control of the disc was uncertain, as well as the exact positioning of the line with bunches of people crowding to watch the game. My reasoning in conceding the turn had a few justifications in my mind: 1, that there was ambiguity in whether the play was good or not, 2, that had I simply caught the disc properly instead of bobbling it to the line there would’ve been no question, and 3 (most importantly) I didn’t want us to be playing and winning on sketchy calls. Seigs later brought up a good point in that Brown had had another similar ambiguous up/down call go in their favor, and that there was thus good justification in us getting this call in our favor, which is a good arguement. Another player on the team simply said that we can’t let them “win it on the calls” or something to that effect, which is NOT something I feel comfortable engaging in. If another team is making questionably-spirited calls in a game against me and my team (I’m not saying this was the case with Brown, because I don’t think it was–on the whole, a great, intense, relatively well-spirited game), I’m not going to lower my game to their level and start arguing or making petty calls. If I had conclusively thought myself in, I would’ve stuck to my guns; as it was, I wasn’t certain if I was in or not. In retrospect the fact that Zip called for a line check from the sideline, when the line was obscured, is a bit questionable, but there’s no sense in living in the past about the decision.
The Tufts game was a bit harder loss to stomach. We came out fired up to play, ourselves conceived as the underdogs, and got two upwind breaks (and the accompanying downwind scores) right off the bat, putting Tufts in an early hole going into halftime. I think we had some jitters going into the game too–I had a turn early on, and a miscue when I was cutting cost us another turn–but we still got it done. After half, however, the tables turned, and our O struggled a bit to deal with Tufts’ zone in the windy weather. Tufts came back to even on breaks, and took an upwind break as cap went on. Needing two to win it, the O line battled to score going upwind to force a decisive universe D point. We ran a suffocating 1-3-3 in the wind, trapping on the sideline in the endzone and forcing a desperation huck for a turn, but we jumped the gun a little too soon off the turn and immediately gave Tufts the disc back on a wind-deflected huck up the sideline. We again set a tight zone and forced another throwaway; this time, however, Tufts came down the with the 50/50 disc, and worked the disc up the field to score and eliminate us.
Tough loss. Really, really tough loss. Unlike the Brown game, where both sides were battling at an even keel, this game was a much bigger roller-coaster ride of emotion, from the high of the early breaks, to the refocused intensity and excitement of playing, to concern when Tufts battled back, to doubt when they went up on us, to a do-or-die fire as I came in on the last point of our season.
I don’t need to say too much else about how I played–covered one of Tufts’ handlers mostly, got beaten more than I should’ve, but definitely shut him down on the dump and on the mark more than once, forcing throwaways or turns otherwise. We were much more in control of this game, which made it harder to bear the loss.
Mostly, though, it just sucks to be over.
On the one hand, I’m glad the season’s finished–no more having to put schoolwork and studies at risk/at late hours to accomodate practice, lifting, tourneys, etc. No more having to worry about eating right every day, taking care of my body 24/7 for the team (it’s still a concern, of course, but I’m better with breaking my usual rules).
On the other, it’s over. No more riding for hours and chatting with people about life. No more discussing x or y while we stretch down or warm up. No more taking comfort in knowing that I can always count on seeing the same group of people coming out to play and work together with. Without a unifying force, we return to our pedestrian, day-to-day lifestyles.
It’s not completely over, of course. Next Year has begun. New bonds will be formed. But that unique group of people will never be the same. Closed chapter.
It’ll be a while before I’m fully ready to re-commit to the sport. I’ll still play, sure, but my batteries need to recharge before I go full in again.
