Sectionals.

I'm sorry that I haven't posted in a couple of weeks. I kept meaning to get on this thing, but my life has been pretty hectic and time has (as usual) gotten away from me to some extent. I'm going to skip a lot of that period in this post, but hopefully I will be able to backtrack and better document that time when/if I get around to throwing together an end of the year summary.

I guess I should start my Sectionals recap by talking about our Series Staches. This year, at Robin's behest, nearly all of Zoodisc is attempting to grow out playoff mustaches. The one problem with this plan is that it wasn't officially announced to the team until the Tuesday evening before Sectionals. Since our team mostly consists of prepubescent schoolgirls, very few of our members were able to rock full and noticable mustaches for this weekend. Only Henry, Josh (who already had a mustache), and I, to be specific. Several other people displayed some ragged peach fuzz, though I hope that the two weeks between Sectionals and Regionals will give them enough time to grow full and manly mustaches. Robin and Ryan bought Just For Men beard dye, which they thought that they could use to accentuate the fuzz on their upper lips, but they experienced mild allergic reactions and only succeeded in dying brown streaks of skin. It was hilarious.

As per the schedule, Saturday of Sectionals pitted us against three easy teams before we ended the day against Middlebury. I believe that these were wins against Williams C (15-1), Westfield State (15-5), and Amherst College B (15-1). While I was happy that our team managed to remain (somewhat) focused and intense throughout these beatings, they really didn't say much about our team. We played with completely open defensive lines and managed to get turns and score at will, even when we didn't exactly play good offense or defense.

Our final game of Saturday was against Middlebury. Based on their past results this season, we knew that Middlebury was going to be a tough opponent. They have a lot of height and a lot of speed, which helps to make up for their high-risk offense. Middlebury has always had a knack for completing big throws to covered receivers, and this year is absolutely no exception. They came out fired up for this game, but so did we. For the first couple points, we basically traded. I think that we might have given up a break on our first offensive possession, but we held fast and got a break back few points later. Maybe we gave up another break, but I think that we were only down a point or so - and very much in the game - when tragedy struck. Josh lobbed a pass into the middle of the field to Mitch, not seeing that another cutter's man had poached out into the lane. Though it looked like the Middlebury defender tried to duck away from the contact, his head smashed directly into Mitch's leg just above the knee. The next thing we knew, Mitch was writhing and moaning on the ground. We probably spent the next ten minutes or so trying to figure out the extent of Mitch's injury before we finally sent him to the emergency room and resumed the game. I believe that the doctor's still don't know exactly what sort of injury that Mitch sustained, but one theory is that a bone chip lodged itself into one of the ligaments in his knee. Whether or not this is actually the injury is incidental, however; my main thought and hope is that Mitch can recover from his injury quickly and without complication.

The team was visably shaken after Mitch left the field. In retrospect, we should have taken a little extra time to have a team huddle and to try to recover some of our intensity, but I didn't really think of it at the time. Mitch has been a huge part of our team all year, both as a cutter on the O Line and as a leader on and off of the field. His loss has a tremendous impact on the team, but we should be able to fill the void left by his presence. I mean, we wouldn't really be much of a Team if we collapsed at the loss of any single player. Mitch's loss, however, impacted our performance more than if he (as a player) merely wasn't there. In watching us play, it was obvious that everybody on our team was thinking about him as much as they were thinking about the game. Our cutting looked timid, as people seemed afraid to be injured in a similar manner. Defense was less physical and less intense than it was at the beginning of the game. Our throwing decisions and our overall level of concentration lapsed, and we had a number of uncharacteristic turnovers and blown defensive assignments that lead to easy goals. Middlebury easily scored the point after Mitch's injury and then went on to break three or so times to take half. After half, Middlebury continued their run. They broke time after time when they pulled to us, and they either worked it down the field or hucked for a score whenever they got the disc. We continued to look timid and unfocused, and Middlebury capitalized on our mistakes. I think that we only scored three times after Mitch left the field, giving up a crushing 15-7 loss.

On the bright side, our loss to Middlebury came at the best possible time in our Series run. We didn't have any games after this loss on Saturday, which gave us plenty of time to go home that night and forget about our frustrations. Instead of having to bounce back immediately from such a tough loss, we were given the opportunity to forget about it and move forward into Sunday with minimal consequences.

Sunday's play kicked off against Vermont B. Vermont B is a pretty good B team, but they are still a B team and we walked to a 15-2 win. This brought us to our semifinal matchup against Williams College.

Williams, as a team, is rather similar to Middlebury. While they have the ability to work the disc under and move the disc among their handlers, they usually rely on height and speed in an impatient and high risk offense that takes a lot of chances and moves the disc quickly down the field. Traditionally, there is a lot of animosity between our two teams, and both of us started this game hard and fast.

We began the game with a lot of desire and emotion, though this sometimes seemed to work against us offensively. We had a couple of early turnovers when a thrower tried to do too much with the disc, squeezing a throw to a tightly covered man or overthrowing a receiver on a difficult throw. Defensively, we surged past our men on several different occassions to nail spectacular layout d's, but we were not often able to convert these defensive efforts into goals. I think that we went down three breaks before our offense really got going and started working the way that they should. Our defense was able to get a break back, and Williams took half 8-6. We were down a couple of points, but we felt as if we had the momentum to come out and take control of the game in the second half.

Boy, were we wrong. Williams came out flying after halftime, and we weren't able to stop their O Line from scoring its first point. Our O Line, however, was quick to show its mortality. Throwaways and drops characterized our offensive effort as Williams broke us several times in rapid succession. These mistakes seemed to worsen as the game went on, as our players were clearly rattled. On several occassions, a cutter pulled up on a cut as if to make sure that he wouldn't drop the disc, only to be layout d'ed by a Williams defender. These instances demoralized our team and pumped up Williams. In a scene that was eerily reminiscent to the end of our game against Middlebury, we were only able to score once in the second half, yeilding a 15-6 loss.

This devistating loss made it impossible for us to obtain our Section's first or second bid to Regionals, but the third (and final) bid was still within our grasp. Luckily for us, our capitulation to Williams left us with plenty of time to relax before our semifinal game in the third place bracket, which was to be against Vermont. Each of us, in our own way, had the task of forgetting about Williams and getting ready for our first game. We warmed up as a team as if this would be our first game of the day, and managed to get pretty fired up to play Vermont.

Zoodisc came out flying against Vermont. We played some of our best defense of the year against them in the early going and then played good offense against them once we got the turn. I think that we broke to take the first three points of the game, scored, and then broke again to burst out to a 5-1 lead. Our O Line was not to be outdone, however. Though they never fully allowed UVM to tie or take a lead, they seemed determined to give back any break that we wrested from Vermont's hands. We refused to let this happen, however, and took more breaks than our Offense managed to surrender. In our 15-12 game against Vermont, the D Line managed to score 7 or 8 points, which is highly unusual (to say the least). It was clear that the Offense still wasn't playing to their full potential.

Our final game of Sectionals matched us against Amherst College, our hometown rivals, for the third bid to Regionals. While Amherst doesn't have the depth and athleticism that we enjoy, they have a couple of exceptional players and a fantastic zone defense that gives a lot of trouble to a lot of quality teams. On Saturday, Amherst managed to beat Vermont 13-10, and they lost 17-13 to Williams after being up 14-13 or so. Furthermore, Amherst College had strolled to a win over Westfield State while we battled against Vermont. Amherst is a dangerous team that was better rested than we were, and we knew that we would have to bring our best to secure a victory - and a berth in Regionals - over them.

As with the start of the Vermont game, we came out flying against Amherst College. We went up a couple of breaks early, with exhilerating defensive stops and tight offensive performances after we got the turn. Unlike the Vermont game, however, our O Line didn't demonstrate any desire to blow the show. They cut hard downfield, made good throwing decisions, and executed well. I don't believe that we gave up a single break the entire game. While we had to work for every goal that we scored against Amherst College, they were unable to hang with us and we pulled ahead to a fairly substantial lead. I believe that we finally ended up winning to the tune of 15-8, earning our way to Regionals.

While we didn't always play the way that we expected, I am pretty happy with our performance this past weekend. It's difficult for a team to recover from a demoralizing loss, and we managed to recover from two of them. Many teams, including past Zoodisc teams that I have been a part of, would have struggled to pull themselves together mentally and prepare for success in these circumstances. I am very proud of our team. While we certainly aren't where we need to be in order to be successful at Regionals, I know that we are going to continue keeping a positive attitude and continue moving towards our goals. Most of our team's improvements this year occurred within two weeks of Sectionals, and I expect to see similar improvements in the period leading up to Regionals. Nobody expects us to win our Region, but I Know that we are going to give a game to anybody that we encounter.

The travesty called Roll Call, and other Events.

We headed down to D.C. last weekend for the Roll Call tournament. It took us about 7 hours to get there, but this drive seemed insignificant compared to distances we covered for spring break. We finally got to our motel in Southern Maryland at about 1am, planning to wake up at 6:50am to get ready for the first round. This was about the last thing that went as expected.

I woke up at 6:40 to the sound of my phone ringing. It was one of the tournament directors, who was calling to let me know that Saturday's play had been "suspended" due to the torrential downpour that had apparently struck the area just after we went to sleep. It was still raining, but only slightly, so I asked if that meant that the tournament was officially canceled. The guy refused to say anything more conclusive than "games have been suspended", a phrase that he repeated as an answer to all of the follow-up questions that I thought to ask. We went back to sleep.

At about 9:15, I received a second phone call. This call told me that the first round was set to start at 10:35, with a mandatory captain's meeting at 10:15. Since our hotel was a little under half an hour away from the fields, this meant that we needed to get up and on the road pretty much immediately. We rushed the the fields, arriving at about 10:15 only to learn that the captain's meeting had been pushed back to 10:45, that the first round would start after that, and that our team had received a first round bye. Since the first round of play would be an exploratory round, after which they would assess the damage the the fields and determine whether the tournament could continue, it was far from assured that we would get the opportunity to play at all. We found a small area next to our designated field and warmed up.

The mud was intense. In spots, your feet would sink three inches into the gloppy mess. In other spots, you weren't so lucky and five or six inches of mud would suck at your shoes. Not playing (due to my ankle tendonitis), I was wearing jeans and sandals. My sandals were sucked off of my feet every few steps or so (in a particularly painful manner), and my jeans might be ruined, imbued with the clay-like soil of our nation's capitol.

Nevertheless, the tournament directors decided that the first round was successful enough to allow for games to continue. Our first game matched us up against George Mason, a small college that went deep into the March Madness tournament a couple years ago. They weren't the most experienced or athletic team, but they worked hard and didn't let the conditions get to them. They also had a girl, but she was certainly not the worst player on the field.

We, on the other hand, were absolutely affected by the elements. Our team struggles to forget about uncontrollable factors, and this game demonstrated this perfectly. The uncertainty over whether we would get to play hurt our warmup and shook our focus. The mud didn't just get in our cleats, it got in our heads and made people not want to play. Our team underestimated George Mason, writing them off as an easy victory that we could attain with limited effort. Additionally, a lot of our usual leaders on the field were absent (Babbitt, Ryan, Jeff Kelly, and I were all sidelined with injuries, Henry and Robin couldn't make it down that weekend, there were a few other people who were missing...), which made it more difficult for those who were playing to maintain their focus on the game at hand. And this all showed. We came out flat on offense and defense, throwing the disc away unnecessarily and playing lazy defense. In a game where we should have been able to stifle each and every one of George Mason's force side cuts, we let them cut all over us. We let them score force-side goal after force-side goal. It was utterly embarrassing. I think that we took half up one break and then finally gutted out a 13-9 win. Bah.

Our second game was against Cornell B. We started this game with a little more fire, but Cornell B was a little better than George Mason. We went up a break and then traded for the first couple points before a tournament director rolled by on a golf cart to let us know that the tournament was officially cancelled at the end of that point. Our final score was 5-4 over Cornell B. Hardly a commanding win but, well, hardly a game at all. We returned to our motel, muddy and dissatisfied.

After getting hopped up on vanilla lattes that the motel office was giving away for free, a bunch of us decided to go into D.C. for some evening sightseeing. We drove into the city, where we dropped Brandon off with his mother and his older brother for the night. We then continued on to a place called Jumbo Slices, where we each bought one of the biggest slices of pizza that I have ever seen. For five dollars, I was able to buy a slice of pepperoni pizza that was probably three and a half feet long, from crust to tip. It was enough pizza to last me for dinner that night as well as breakfast and lunch the next day. I didn't see the size of the pizza that this slice came out of, but it must have have a diameter of over seven feet. We then met up with one of Galen's friends, who goes to George Washington University. He seemed pretty cool, albeit a big stoner, and he agreed to show us around the monumental district of the city. We started at the Washington Monument - from which we could see the White House, Capitol Hill, a bunch of State Buildings, and all of the major memorial monuments - and then walked around the Potomac to the Jefferson Memorial, the FDR Memorial, and the Lincoln Memorial. We then walked through the Vietnam Memorial and back to the car. All told, it was a great walk. The monuments are all extremely moving, though for very different reasons (the Jefferson was grandois, the FDR was meditative and thought provoking, the Lincoln evoked thoughts of self-sacrifice and patriotism, the Vietnam was mind-bogglingly intense), and I'm glad that we made the effort to go see them. I was worried that people would be too bummed from the cancelled tournament to make the trip, but at least a handful of people remained upbeat enough to make something out of the trip.

We checked out and headed back to Massachusetts the next morning. I was in Nick's car, but he was complaining that his back was sore so I agreed to drive the entire way back to Massachusetts. Along the way, we learned that Nick is a heartless bastard (he has no sympathy for people who are born into lesser circumstances, and he would like to kill every human on earth but lacks the courage or conviction to do anything about it). Steve O. also peed in a bottle. Galen told Steve that he could produce a higher volume of urine, which prompted Steve to pour the bottle of piss out the window on the Jersey Turnpike and make Galen fill it with his own. I think that Galen didn't fill the bottle quite as high, but he did manage to piss all over himself and the back seat of Nick's car. Galen also made the mistake of putting a candy bar wrapper into the microwave at a gas station, causing the microwave to erupt in sparks after about a second or two. To the incredulity of the gas station employee, Galen had the gall to ask for a replacement candy bar. He didn't get it. I managed to make it all the way back to Northampton, and then promptly crashed Nick's car. We came to a part of the highway where the two lanes divided and were seperated by a jersey barier. Right at the beginning of this division, I almost ran into an enormous pot-hole in the road. Worried about blowing a tire, I tried to make a quick maneuver around the pot-hole, but the car fishtailed on the slippery road and headed straight towards the cement partition. I managed to regain some control over the vehicle, but still creamed through one of those big plastic barrels full of water that they place at the edge of the road in construction areas. It put a little dent in the side of Nick's car and scraped a white line of plastic down the passenger side, but no real harm was done.

Monday's practice was terrible. The rain had prevented our fields from opening quite yet, so we headed to Northampton for one final road practice. And only 8 people showed up for the start of practice. We decided to make lemons out of lemonade and play hot box. Little Steve showed up, decided that he didn't want to play hot box, and went home. He is a gigantic pussy and I hope he chokes on his own pubic hair. By the end of practice, we had enough to play 5 on 5, but I was still pissed about the whole thing. I sent an irate email, letting the team know that we would now have practice on Saturday since so many people had decided to take Monday off. I'm still pretty annoyed.

Practice on Tuesday was much better. Perhaps galvenized by my email, most of the team managed to come out to play. Additionally, our fields officially opened, which helped to bolster our spirits. We ran a ton of sprints and played a tough scrimmage. I was totally bushed by the end, and Wednesday morning I struggled to get out of bed.

Wednesday, we had a scrimmage against Amherst High. I don't want to talk too much about this scrimmage except to document that this was a loss. We played poorly on both sides of the disc, but especially on defense. Nobody on our team managed to lock down their man, and Amherst High cut pretty much wherever they wanted. We also turned the disc over more than we should have -through exexcution error as well as through bad decisions - and were completely unable to do anything to get it back once we turned it over. It was a disaster. Luckily, it happened now, so we can do something to prevent it from happening when things actually matter.

Yesterday's practice also went pretty well. We had enough players for two full teams with a couple subs, which is nice. We ended up practicing red zone offense and defense for a while and then settling into a nice long scrimmage. My team got off to a bit of a lead, but then we completely collapsed. We got a little too loose with our decision making and threw the disc away several times on really tragic looks. I think that we also got a little into our own heads, as we had a number of drops and turfed passes that should have not happened. I think that we - both teams - did a good job moving and staying upbeat, but our defense was still poor. We have to find some way of getting our team to play hard, lock down defense, but I don't know how we are going to start doing this. It is a puzzle, but hopefully we can find the solution in the next couple weeks of practice.

It's sort of a dreary day, but we are planning on practicing as usual. The addition of a practice on Saturday means that we are basically going two straight weeks without a day off. I know that this is sort of a precarious situation, since we certainly don't want to work people to the point of injury and we don't want people to become burnt out on too much ultimate, but we have much to work on and little time to work. I only ask that people stay strong and committed for the next couple weeks while we bang ourselves together as a team. A couple weeks isn't really all that much to ask, is it?

Southerns Sunday.

I'm sorry that I've been so slow to get these posts up. I've had a lot of work and I haven't really done a phenomenal job budgeting my time. We're leaving for Roll Call this afternoon, though, so I'm really trying to make sure that I at least get all of my tournament write-ups on here before the next tournament comes along....

Sunday morning was frustrating for me because my ankle wasn't feeling any better, in spite of the number of times that I iced it. It took us longer than it should have to check out of the hotel, but I suppose that this isn't all that surprising considering that this was the last stop of our long Spring Break trip. People seemed a bit worn down, and we weren't able to pack up and get through breakfast until later than I had wanted to get out of there. By the time we got the cars loaded and checked out of all of our rooms, it was already 8:15 for a 9am game. Not the optimal amount of time to warm up, but not horrible either.

The line to get my ankle taped was horrendous. So many people wanted their scrapes bandaged or their blisters covered that it took almost twenty minutes for me to get to the front of the line. By the time that I was taped and ready to go, our team was finished with warmups and about to start our first game, which was against Georgia Tech. I had to warm up on my own, which required the first several points of the game. Even though I eventually did get in for a couple points, my mobility was questionable so I played sparingly.

Georgia is a pretty good program. Though they're never among the top couple teams in the country, they always have a player or two who is good enough to keep them in the game with anyone. This year seems to be no different. Georgia Tech had a couple of guys who could really ball, including this one fairly short guy who ran their whole show. He pretty much got open whenever he wanted (we forced him hard in, allowing him to get the easy first cut off of any stopped disc but preventing him from going deep), and he made a couple pretty spectacular throws and catches. On one occasion, he cut deep but his defender stayed close to his back hip. The throw went up anyway, an outside-in backhand that looped over their shoulders. Babbitt poached off of his man and took position in front of the Georgia Tech player, who was now sandwiched between two of our defenders. It looked like an easy d, but the Georgia Tech guy layed out over Babbitt's shoulder, flipped onto his back in the air, and made the catch. It was a tremendous play.

Even though I would say that our team largely dominated the pace of the game, Georgia Tech kept the score close by making spectacular grabs and taking advantage of mistakes that we made close to our own endzone. I think that we were also shaking off some of our early morning laziness, as we struggled to challenge their offensive cutters and we let them break us over and over and over again. We also made an effort at the beginning of this game to sub more equally, which resulted in the presence of some sub-optimal defensive matchups. Georgia Tech, to their credit, did a pretty good job of identifying and exploiting these matchups, and we struggled for the first half of this game. The talent on our team, however, was certainly deeper than Georgia Tech's and we gradually wore them down (they only had about ten players). We gave up a break after the soft cap, but held on to win 16-15. It was a tough win, and we looked sloppy at times, but we finally ground it out for the victory.

Our second game was against Luther, who (like us) had started their season with a bit of momentum. We decided to tighten up our lines against them until we had built a comfortable lead, but this point never happened. Luther fought us, point for point, for the entire game. Although I would say that we did a better job controlling the game than they did, our excessive throwaways made it difficult to sustain any sort of lasting lead against them.

We began the game trading points. Luther dropped the disc several times, but we were unable to convert on our first few opportunities. At the end of the first half, we broke several times to win the half 8-4, and it appeared as it momentum was on our side. Luther rallied at the beginning of the second half, scoring the first point and then breaking until they led 9-8. This was largely due to our massive number of throwaways. Our handlers seemed too eager to look for the home run throw; rather than working the disc down the field, they were trying to win points on one throw. This often happens as our team tires and players want to win points quickly without having to do too much running. However, Luther had a couple athletes who were pretty good in the air, and we stuggled to complete our hucks, especially when the throw floated or was a little off-target.

Once Luther took the lead, our team pulled together and got back on track. Our starters were tired but determined, and they outran and outworked their opponents for the rest of the game. We also limited our turnovers and our offense started to look good. As a result, we broke through the last several points of the game, winning 15-13.

Luther was a frustrating team to play against because they loved to make ticky-tack calls. During portions of the game, it felt as though we could hardly throw up field without one of the Luther players calling a travel on us, even if the call didn't serve to benefit their team; they were just looking to get in our heads. One Luther player called a travel on Alden when he had his back to Alden's pivot foot. I called this player out on the sideline, and he later apologized for the call. He seemed like a reasonable guy, I think that he was just a young player on their team and he was excited to make a call. At another point, Babbitt clearly thwacked a huck about a foot before it reached a Luther player, and the disc skimmed off of his fingertips. The Luther player called a strip, which was not even remotely true, and I called him a pussy. Good times.

Our win against Luther earned us a spot in the semifinals against the University of Virginia. Our starters were exhausted after nail-biting come from behind victories against Geogia Tech and Luther, and we weren't exactly looking peppy at the beginning of the game. Our offense tried to get rolling against Virginia, but our foes were in much better shape than we were at that time. We scored, let them score, and then allowed them to break us until we were down 5-1. We scored again, but then gave up half 8-2. It was a little demoralizing.

At halftime, I tried to remind people why we were playing in this tournament. Oftentimes, in the heat of a tough game, our competitive nature blinds us to our true goals. It's fun to win games, and it hurts to lose, but we really need to maintain our focus on our team goal: success at Sectionals and Regionals. Everything up until Sectionals is just practice. I implored our team to continue trying to improve, even if we couldn't beat Virginia. I reminded them that the Virginia team had probably been on fields all semester. They were about as good as they were going to get, while we are going to improve in the next few weeks of field practice. Virginia also hadn't played in tournaments all week, so they were significantly fresher than we were. I asked our team to play as if the score didn't matter. I asked them to play offense the Right way (working it down the field and making good decisions rather than trying to complete desperation hucks) because that is how we could grow together as a team. Team growth is important in games like this. The outcome of the game is not. People seemed a little happier at the end of halftime, and we resolved to open up the lines and get more people in the game for the second half.

In the second half of the Virginia game, we played looser and happier. Some of our more fatigued players moved to the sideline while our fresher (and less experienced) players saw the field. This got our team moving a bit more, on offense and defense, even if it meant that we were a little less savvy. Keenen scored a couple goals, Jeff Steeves looked pretty good on offense, Sam and Tim tried to take control of cutting, Rob looked good with the disc in his hand.... Though we still looked a little sloppy on both sides of the disc, we got running and looked Acceptable. At the very least, we didn't look Beaten, and that's the important part. We have to keep things in perspective and keep working so that we will be ready for the trials that await us in Sectionals and Regionals. The final score was Virginia 15, Zoodisc 6, but I think that our team's character really showed in the second half of this game.

Anyway, I have a lot more to say about Southerns but I think that I'm just going to pass on that. We're leaving for roll call in under three hours, and it's time for me to move on to that challenge. My ankle is still bothering me, so I am not planning on playing in this tournament (even though that half kills me). I need to heal so that I can contribute in practice. Participation in practice is as or more important than participation in these pre-series tournaments, and I wish that more players on our team understood that. Expect a tersely worded post to that effect next week if our team's effort in practice doesn't improve from this week. Until then....

Southerns Continued.

Anyway, some wrap-up thoughts about Saturday:

We made a concerted effort at Southerns to get more playing time for some of the players who hadn't seen much action during the first two tournaments at Spring Break. I met with Babbitt on Thursday night, when we first got to Statesboro, and we talked about the fact that our team could not meet its full potential if we only played 10 people in every game of the season. I feel this very strongly. We need to sub early in games and early in tournaments because it saves legs for our star players and it boosts team morale. It sucks to travel to a tournament, warm up with the team and get excited, and then stand on the sideline for four games. I know this from experience. And coming into a game in the third to last point, when you've been standing on the sideline getting cold and stiff for the last hour and a half, sets you up for failure. Frankly, I am not a bit surprised when somebody comes into the game in that sort of situation and immediatly drops a pass or gets burned deep. It's almost impossible to be ready to play when you've spent such a long time on the bench. And this scenerio breeds quit in our teammates.

We need everybody on our team this season. Even if there are some players who won't see the field in our biggest games (that's just the way that sports work, sometimes), these players are intrinsically important to the team's success. It's these players who need to show up to practice every day and work their asses off to make the depth of the team better, so that we can afford to play more people in the earlier games of tournaments without risking the entire season. It's these players who need to work their asses off to challenge the team's veterans so that the veterans don't get complacent. I understand that it's hard to feel worthwhile when you spend an entire tournament on the sideline. You get down on yourself, you start questioning your decision to commit fully to the team. But you need to man up and push through that feeling and realize that everything that the starters do - every layout d, every score, every single fucking cut - is only possible because the bench players at practice pushed the starters to work a little harder and get into a little better shape. Without the work of the bench players, practice deteriorates and the team cannot improve.

Anyway, my talk with Babbitt reached the conclussion that we would have to sub a lot more (though certainly not equal subbing - this isn't a fucking communist state) so that everybody comes back from Spring Break in good spirits and ready to work and improve. We devised a system of lines, which we didn't stick to during Southerns but which sort of formed the framework of our subbing system. Put a couple people together who are going to work well, let them learn each other, rotate through other players to fill out the lines.

Subbing in the first three games on Saturday was easy. The first couple teams that we faced were just bad. Even our weakest lines had a pretty good chance of winning against either GOP or Wisconsin B. The third team, South Florida, took such a drubbing right at the beginning of the game that we were never really worried about losing that game either, so it was easy to open up the lines and let the bench players into the game. It's not tough to distribute PT in a 15-7 victory.

The problem, however, arises when we get into games that are a little more difficult to win. Every point seems to take on so much importance that it's hard to get yourself not to put in the best possible line at any given moment, even if this means that some of your teammates aren't going to see the field much or at all. This is just the nature of being a competitive person - you want to win every. single. point. You have to step back, though, and realize that winning points at Southerns has absolutely no intrinsic value. Our games don't start to count at all until Sectionals; until then, all of our games are just practice. We can lose every single game from here until Sectionals, and if we win out from there we are still National Champions. That's just the way that our goofy-assed sport works. Sometimes, in the interest of making our entire team better, we have to concede a point or two so that everybody can improve and so that everybody can feel like they are a part of the team.

It seemed to me that Central Florida was a game where subbing could easily fall by the wayside. They are a pretty good team that has had some pretty decent wins in the last couple of years. They also ran roughshod over their own pool, winning out for the opportunity to face us in the crossover game. We knew that we were in for a tough game, and the aura of competition was rising over our team as we prepared to match up against them.

Before we started the game, I pulled Babbitt aside and reminded him that subbing was important. He seemed a little hesitant, clearly he cared about winning the game, but what really was the point of gunning for a win? I made it clear that I wasn't talking about subbing to lose. I recognize that we always need to have a line on the field that has enough throwers, cutters, and defenders to at least have the possibility of success. Additionally, winning games in tournaments can be important because it gives us the opportunity to play against better teams, whereas a loss might force us to play consolation games against other losing teams. In order to improve, I understand that we need to challenge ourselves by playing quality opponents. The outcome of this crossover, however, didn't make any difference in terms of the caliber of teams that we would face. The winner of the crossover would be the sixth seed in the Championship Bracket, while the loser of the crossover would become the eighth seed. Big whoop. I told Babbitt that we needed to get everybody in the game, even if it meant that we lost.

And I think that we did a pretty good job with this. We weren't keeping strict count of how many points people played, but I'm pretty sure that everybody hit the field for at least a couple. What felt even better was that we won this game. If we had gotten everybody in the game and been blown out, I would have been afraid that some people would have gotten down on themselves, thinking that their playing time lost the game for the whole team. But we Won. We won, even though everybody had the opportunity to contribute, and I think that wins like this are important to our team chemistry. Our less experienced players need the opportunity to get on the field while the team is succeeding. It helps them to build the confidence necessary to keep working and improving as players and it makes them believe that they really are a part of our team, no matter what.

Our win over Central Florida was a big win because it was a total Team Win. Nobody should feel left out of any of our victories as a team - everybody contributes in their own way - but this sort of win just feels different. This sort of win lets every player know that we value their contribution and that they are on the team because we believe that they can be winners on the ultimate field.

Southerns Saturday.

I went to Health Services yesterday and spoke to a doctor. He confirmed Tim's diagnosis of tendonitis in my ankle, and told me that I shouldn't play through the injury. The doctor basically said that I would probably be able to run on the ankle for another four weeks, but that it wouldn't support any weight after that point and I would be out for the rest of the season trying to recover. This means that I would be able to play right up to the point where the season starts to matter (Sectionals) and then would be done. I think I'd rather sit this week out and play when we need to win. But it is Very frustrating, to put it mildly.

Southerns started with more of a gasp than a bang, as we arrived at the fields to discover that there had been some sort of mix-up with our tournament check. I had thought that we had mailed them our payment weeks earlier (it seems that I may have been wrong?), but they had us on record as having not yet paid. By the time that I had waited around to have that straightened out (the tournament directors were unable to find their treasurer, so they took my phone number and told me that they would talk to me later if they weren't able to sort it out on their own - since they didn't try to contact me after that point, I guess that the issue solved itself) and then had my ankle taped, our team was already through with warmups and we were set to begin our game against Carleton GOP.

Now, don't let their name fool you. Carleton GOP is in no way affiliated with CUT, the excellent ultimate program that is always mentioned amongst the top teams in the nation. No, GOP is a rival program based out of Carleton College, the kids who want to play ultimate but don't want to take it as seriously as CUT. They're sort of a subversive hippy movement at an otherwise respectable ultimate school. And they are almost the polar opposite of the National Republican Party.

Though they have some pretty good players - a decent handler, a couple kids with some athleticism - GOP couldn't hang with us, and the game quickly grew unbalanced. As we demonstrated in High Tide, however, our team currently lacks the mental fortitude to bear down and play our own game when we aren't faced with any sort of adversity. I think that we may have taken half 8-2 or 3, but we lost a bit of our focus and intensity in the second half and let them score a few more goals than they deserved. We finally limped out a frustrating 15-10 victory against a team that was inferior to us in every way.

The final point of this game was notable in my memory, even if most of the game was characterised by sloppiness and lack of intensity on our part. Babbitt was annoyed (rightfully) that we weren't getting many d's on GOP, and he put himself in to show us how it's done. I was covering a handler who was standing off to the side for a dump. Deciding that I didn't need to pay too much attention to him, I poached into the lane and would have had a pretty easy block if not for my hesitation. I saw Babbitt flying past his man for the layout d and pulled back just to take the crown of his head directly to my testicles with enough force to knock me flat on my ass. I groaned and slowly stood up while the rest of the players on the field raced past me to the endzone. "Fast break!" somebody yelled from the sideline, and I replied, "No, slow break," as I limped over to the disc. I allowed the stack to set and threw a force side throw to the first cutter who punched it in for the winning score. It was a ridiculous way to end the game.

Our second game was against Wisconsin B. There isn't much to say about them except that they are a B team, even if they are a B team in a fantastic program. They had a couple fat kids, a couple slow kids, a couple pretty athletic kids with absolutely no field sense... the usual. Our intensity dropped a notch further this game, as our play was characterized by drops, stupid throwaways, stagnant cutting, and lazy d. Our team knew that we would ultimately prevail over Wisconsin's B team, and we let our play get sloppy and lazy. The final score was 15-5, but it was a much uglier win than the score would suggest. I was truly worried that these first two games would prevent us from building the energy we would need to dominate our third opponent, South Florida, who was much better than the first two teams combined.

Well, I was wrong. Zoodisc came out flying against South Florida. We stuck it to them early, we stuck it to them hard, and we stuck it to them for pretty much the entire game. This was a heartening victory, since South Florida had a lot of height and athleticism and a couple pretty good throwers. This really was a team that could have given us some problems, but we outworked and outran them from start to finish. The result was a satisfying 15-7 win in which we dominated South Florida in every facet of the game. This was also a pleasant game because the guys on South Florida seemed to be fine, upstanding gentlemen. There was never really a point in the game (except, maybe, when Steve O. got tangled up with a South Florida guy after layout d'ing him and the South Florida player pushed up hard on Steve's back to get himself back up - something that you would see from a dirty football player, for instance, at the end of a play) that I felt angry at the other team or that it felt like they were trying to cheat to win. They were pleasant and gracious in defeat, which is not something that can be said about many ultimate teams. I truly respect South Florida, and I wish them the best of luck in the remainder of the season.

Our fourth and final game of Saturday was against Central Florida. Like South Florida, they had a number of tall, athletic players and a handful of pretty decent throwers. Unlike South Florida, they were not a terribly pleasant group of guys to play against, and I often felt that they were trying to cheat to gain an advantage. Which isn't to say that we didn't respond with a chippiness of our own - about two thirds of the way through, the game threatened to devolve into a call-fest of borderline egregious bullshit.

The high point of this animosity occurred when Steve O. tried to tell the Central Florida sideline to calm down. I think that this was shortly after Nick made a particularly questionable pick call that put an end to a Cental Florida offensive attack, and a Central Florida coach was livid. Standing on the line before the next point started, Steve merely said that everybody just needed to take a deep breath and relax. This coach resorted to schoolboy name calling, asking Steve if he was even old enough to play college ultimate. He repeated this several times, clearly trying to rile up our unflappable Steven Oleski. There wasn't a chance of this succeeding. I then asked this coach (I didn't know he was a coach at the time, he looked like an injured player on their team or something) what the fuck was wrong with him, why didn't he cleat up and get in the game if he was so upset. He then said that he wished he could be on the field but that he was out of eligibility. He told us that he would teach us a lesson if we ever played him "on the club circuit". The funny part was, he was proudly wearing a Ronin jersey. Ronin is a perenially mediocre club team, the sort of team that I have little to no respect for. Last year, for instance, they took seventh at Regionals. Nice work, Ronin. Maybe, if we do meet this guy "on the club circuit", it won't be him doing the teaching. But whatever, I just thought that this was an interesting happenstance.

We traded breaks with Central Florida for most of the game. First we went up a couple, then they battled back and went up a few, then we rallied and scored the final few points to win 13-11 at the cap. Though it was a contentious game, it really was a ton of fun. To Central Florida's credit, they understood this (especially after they realized that the outcome of the game only meant the difference between two seeding spots in the Championship Bracket) and we shared a laugh with a few of their players after the handshake. This was a good note to end Saturday on.

I have to go now, but I'll try to do a write-up of Sunday's play and some closing Spring Break thoughts soon. Sorry, but I'm being booted from the Calipari Room in the Library, which has apparently been booked by a class....

High Tide Begins.

We got to bed nice and early Monday night and got a good amount of rest for Tuesday's games. High Tide was set up so that half of the teams played their first games at 8am and half of the teams played their first games at noon. We drew the 8 o'clock start, so we were at the fields by 7 to warm up. It was a pretty early start, so it was lucky that our campsite was so close to the field complex.

Our first game was against F&M, which is apparently some crappy school from Pennsylvania that I had never heard of. Tom Georgavitz transferred there last year after spending one semester on the Umass B team, and now he is their captain. Nice life, F&M. Tom is a Stage 5 clinger and probably a Stage 3 creepo, so it wasn't too much fun having to deal with him at the captains' meeting or on the field. In our game against F&M, he actually wore a Zoodisc jersey instead of his own team's. Ridiculous. On the way down to Jekyl Island, Babbitt had invented lines for the team, hoping to equalize playing time after a tight-lined Terminus. We stuck to these lines with decent success. Everybody played pretty well against F&M, though not fabulously. I think that was the game where I had a gorgeous forehand huck to Brandon, who was really deep when I finally released the disc. It travelled from our own endzone line deep into the attacking endzone. There was essentially no mark, which detracts from the impressiveness of the throw, but it did feel really nice. I haven't had much opportunity to throw deep so far this season, and it's encouraging to succeed when I make the attempt.

We played like a team that knew that victory was imminent, and this made it difficult for us to maintain our intensity. We were emotionally flat, as we were in every game that day, but it didn't much matter - Zoodisc vanquished F&M 13-4. On a side note, F&M had a girl on their team who Tom refused to put in the game. I had watched her during their warmup drills, and she appeared to be their best thrower. Not that it would have made much difference in the game's outcome, but I still felt bad. That's just one more instance of Tom Georgavitz' douchebaggery.

Our next game was Macalester. This team was not so great. Like F&M, we came into the game really flat, playing as if we knew the outcome before it had been determined. We let them score some points towards the beginning of the game, but we buckled down and played a strong second half against them. I think that they may have scored only one point in the second half, but it may have been two. The game itself was not very notable. I, and a few other players on Zoodisc, had a bit of a disagreement with Macalester regarding the score. I was pretty sure that it was 7-4 at one point, but the Macalester players insisted that it was actually only 5-4. An argument ensued. I quickly conceded, deciding that it was better to play a longer game because that meant more playing time for everybody and a bit more practice for our team, but it turns out that I was incorrect anyway. Oh well. My mistake actually seemed to motivate us a little, though, and we shut them down hard for the rest of the game. Macalester seemed to resent us a little for this, but I really wasn't trying to cheat - I'm just bad at adding up the score. Let them resent, so long as they fear. Zoodisc 13, Macalester 5.

Macalester's cheer was really sweet. I don't usually go in for that sort of thing, but they had some sort of chant that went "Ooh, Ah, Macalester" and something about a "blue monkey superdope crew what, blue monkey smokin' on a crack rock". It was really catchy! A bunch of our guys went over to them after the game and asked them for the words of the cheer, which seemed a little crass considering the resentful looks that the entire Macalester team had given us during our handshake, and their cheer has been stuck in my head since then.

Our third, and final, game of the day was against SUNY Geneseo. SUNY was a little taller and more athletic than the other two teams that we played Tuesday, and we entered this game flatter than any of the others. If I remember correctly, we went down two breaks right from the onset and had to battle back to take the first half. They weren't a good team, but we played down to their level and really struggled to get our shit together. This game was marked by a massive number of egregious turnovers on our part, but it still wasn't enough to throw away the game. We finally ground it out, 12-9.

After we finished playing, most of our team went to a pub up the street that offered a St. Patrick's Day (which it was on Tuesday) special for $.15 wings, $.50 potato skins, and $2 green beers. We ate our way through a massive pile of wings and then picked up a bunch of beer. Drunkenness ensued. I can't actually say that I remember too much of the afternoon after that, but there were a lot of hilarious moment. Ryan and I tag team disc raced against John and Jeff Steeves (I think we won, but it was too close to call). Ryan and Jeff Steeves went punch for punch for about fifteen minutes and both ended with bruised shoulders. Alden and Nick went punch for punch for a minute or so, but then Ryan kicked an empty beer bottle and it flew into the side of Alden's head. Alden then got one free shot on Ryan and slapped him in the face. We played a bunch of disc golf, putting on Josh's portable hole, and then we all drank out of Josh's bottles of liquor (one was tequilla, the other was this orange shit that was manufactured by Patron but tasted sort of like triple sec - Citronge?) and headed down to the beach. Groups of us grabbed individuals and dragged them down to the water, giving them one chance to empty their pockets before we threw them in. I think we called it "Zoodisc Baptism" and telling people we were heckling them. The situation grew increasingly violent. We talked to a dude who was posing for wedding pictures with his nineteen year old bride to be and their five week old child - he seemed to be a twenty-one year old who had impregnated his girlfriend when she was seventeen, and now they had to get married. I wished him luck. As dusk fell, most of the group started to head back to the campsite, but Josh and I swam out into the deeper water. We wanted to swim out far enough so that the waves would conceal us from the people on the beach. Our plan was to let them worry about us for a while, only to emerge from the water a ways down the beach to surprise them. Sadly, this did not work, as the people on the beach could see us the entire time. We cooked burgers and hotdogs on the campfire, and then I took a shower. I somehow lost my clothes after the shower, and ended up wandering around in the woods wearing nothing but a tiny travel-towel that I was unsuccessfully trying to hold around my waist. Ryan ended up helping me with his headlamp, and I was able to recover my clothes. We bought some weed from SUNY and smoked a giant joint. Then we went to the girls' house, which I realized as soon as we pulled away was a bad idea. We smoked another joint, I wandered around talking to people, the girls slaughtered us at flip cup, Josh wet his pants, and then Nick came back and picked us up to go to bed. I managed to get all this done by 11:45.

The next morning, we had a 9am game. After such a long day of drinking, we weren't looking so hot for warmups. Scratch that - we looked downright Terrible. A bunch of people didn't want to play, Sam wrapped himself up in my blanket and laid down on the sideline, and those of us who were ready to go just looked mentally inept. To make matters worse, a strong wind was coming off of the ocean, making throws and catches more difficult and a strong focus even more crucial. We decided to move away from the previous day's lines in order to make sure that we always had decent throwers on the field and cutters who could focus through their hangovers and make the necessary catches, though we still wanted to keep the subbing fairly open.

Our first game of the day was against Colgate. We had a rough first few points against them, maybe giving up a break and then taking a couple back to win the half 7-5. Like the games our previous day, we really buckled down in the second half and put the screws to them. We didn't let them score at all in the second half, breaking for the rest of the game. After this tremendous run of breaks, we finally ended the game at the cap, 11-5. Towards the end of this game, we tried to sub in players who hadn't gotten as much playing time at its outset, but this was still difficult to do without putting together lines that wouldn't have been able to deal with the wind. Subbing on a windy day is especially difficult, and I hope that all of the players on the team understand this.

Our second game was against Grinnel. Grinnel is actually a pretty decent team, though they aren't as experienced or athletic as we are. During last year's High Tide debacle, Grinnel ended up beating us in a tight game. I don't remember much about that game, but I Do remember that one of their better players made an absolutely unjustifiably terrible foul call against one of our own players. My brother and I gave him such shit that it looked like he almost started crying. He took off his jersey and told his captain that he wouldn't be able to play any more, but his captain didn't allow him to leave the game. In his emotional state, he made several egregious turnovers soon thereafter, and I continued to give him shit. It was excellent.

I recognized the kid when we played against them on Wednesday, but I'm not sure that he recognized me. Either way, we didn't talk to one another.

Grinnel played us tightly at the beginning of the game. Once again, we came out flat and gave up a first half break, but we again took took back to win half 7-5. Grinnel really didn't have the experienced throwers to work the disc through the strong wind. They opted instead to huck at every opportunity - and sometimes when they didn't really have the opportunity - and set their zone. We lowered ourselves to their style of play and ended up with a Lot of turnovers. This resulted in a lot of very long, mentally exhausting points that caused some unnecessary focus errors. When these errors happened close to our own endzone, Grinnel was sometimes able to steal an easy score. This allowed them to stay in the game with us through the second half, even though we were outgunning them whenever we focused and played our own game. In the pattern of the weekend, we ground out the second half and only allowed them to score one single point. With the cap, our game ended 12-6. I am happy to say that this was a very spirited game and that Grinnel played honestly and honorably.

Our final game of the day was against the University of Minnesota at Duluth. With the four bids allocated to the Central Region this year, Minnesota is almost certainly going to Nationals. They are tall, fast, and athletic, and they have a couple of players who are rather good. They have a lot of good throwers, and a lot of people who can catch the disc. To start the game, we were a bit (do I even have to keep saying this?) flat. They hucked a lot, but they were smarter and their matchups were better then Grinnel's. We had a few bad turnovers and we were beaten by some floaty throws that we should have eaten up. We finally took half 7-5 after a series of long points rife with layout d's and coverage sacks by both teams. In the second half, we again managed to stop our opposition from finding the goal even once. With the cap coming soon after halftime, we won this game 9-5.

We played with very tight lines in that last game, which I kind of wish we hadn't done. At the time, the roaring wind and the close Minnesota defense made it seem imperative that we always have a strong line out there, but I think that we could have afforded to put out slightly weaker lines, especially as our lead lengthened. It never felt as though we were in true command of the game, though, which made it hard to know when we could afford to take that chance, but that isn't a very good excuse. We need to figure out how to sub so that we don't compromise our team's chance of success but still get more people into the game.

After our final game on Wednesday, we decided to take that afternoon and evening easy. We sat around the campsite, playing with the fire and talking. Ryan and I split a two-pack of frozen pizzas, which we cooked on the campfire, and I drank a six-pack of Yoohoo's. Everybody went to bed early, excited to be playing against Iowa State in the Quarterfinals the next day.

Incidentally, I woke up Thursday morning to find my right ankle badly swollen and the arch of that foot in pretty brutal pain. I don't know what I could have done, since I don't remember rolling my ankle or getting stepped on or anything, but I must have done something to it during Wednesday's games. I hope that it isn't serious, but it's still bothering me to the point that I cannot even walk without a pronounced limp.

Our quarterfinal matchup was set for one o'clock Thursday, so we got to the fields at about 12:45 for warmups. Though we seemed a bit unfocused when we started warming up, we were all fired up by the time that the game started. Our team got off to a tough start, giving up a break with our first possession, but we were running hard and getting turns on defense. It seemed inevitable that we would break back. We did, putting the game back on serve, but then Iowa State broke and took half 7-5. It was the first half of our season that we did not win. After half, Iowa scored the first point to bring it to 8-5, but we went on a little run and tied it 8-8. Iowa State scored and then broke, bringing it to 10-8, and we scored back right before the cap horn went off to make it 10-9. Under High Tide cap rules, you add one point to the leading score and play hard to that point. This meant that the game was now hard to eleven, with Zoodisc pulling. We got the first break, to tie it at 10-10 with us pulling again, but then Iowa State scored on a jump ball to win the game on universe point.

It was a shame that we lost that game, but there is no point in being too upset by it. Our team needs to maintain our focus on the things that matter, and the outcome of a single game at High Tide is not one of them. Until we reach Sectionals, nothing that we do is anything other than a team practice. Through these games, we can learn how to play together, how to be mentally strong, how to push through pain and maintain our fundamentals. I would be overjoyed if we lost every single game from now until Sectionals and then got our shit together and won the Northeast Region. That would be an excellent season. Right now, we need to concentrate on staying together, united in our goals, and learn from our mistakes so that we won't make them again when the games start to count.

After the Iowa State game, we headed straight to Statesboro for our Southerns hotel. Henry's car decided to stay behind without telling anybody and watch the finals, which was too bad because Henry and Mitch (who was in his car) were both names that we registered for hotel rooms. Nobody could get into those rooms until they arrived to sign in, which meant that two rooms full of players couldn't get in and get settled until they finally rolled up. A few of us went to a chinese food buffet, which was a delicious mistake that gave me a bit of a stomach ache, and then Ryan and I took an ice bath. The bath tubs at this hotel are outrageous. They are extra wide and extra deep with jacuzzi jets, which meant that Ryan and I could take our ice baths at the same time to offer each other support and distraction. It made the ice bath much more bearable. Then we hung out for a while and went to bed early. It was a pretty good night.

This morning, I had to wake up at 6:15 to drive John to the airport shuttle, two hours away. I didn't really mind - it was nice getting to hang out with him during the drive, and there was no traffic to speak of. I just put the car on cruise control and hardly had to even touch the breaks. As long as there's no traffic, I don't much mind driving. It's going to suck not having John at Southerns, as both a player, a person, and a teammate, but we'll be alright without him and he's going to be back with the team next week for Roll Call.

Spring Break Update.

Things have been busy so I haven't had the time or inclination to write another update. I'll try to cover everything that's happened since last Saturday, but that seems unlikely since there has been so much that has happened, so I may have to stop at some point and fill in more details later.

Sunday of Terminus was canceled due to rain. There was a slight drizzle when we woke up, but I guess that it poured all night and flooded the fields. We were all pretty bummed, since we were seeded second for bracket play after a tremendous Saturday, but it was out of our control. Most of us went back to bed for a couple hours or watched trashy television. A group then went to Hooters to drink, since liquor stores are closed on Sunday in Georgia and that was the closest and cheapest place to buy beer. Those of us who were 21 bought pitchers. Those of us who were under 21 ordered glasses of water, drank their water and then refilled their cups from the pitchers. This worked for a while, but as we drank we grew less discrete and the manager eventually caught us in the act. He yelled at us, but was surprisingly civil considering the circumstances. We finished our meal and headed back to the hotel.

Back at the hotel, our drunkeness took on a rowdy nature. A group of us ended up marauding from room to room, finding specific teammates and tackling them to the floor. This resulted in several exciting wrestling matches, with combatants rolling across beds and getting wedged on top of one another in the space between the bed and the wall. Josh grabbed a hair buzzer and shaved a patch in the top of Allan's head. With my and a couple other people's help, Allan pinned Josh to the floor and stripped him of his vintage Amherst High jersey, which Allan claimed as retribution. Josh later tried (unsuccessfully) to choke Allan out, and Allan ended up punching Josh repeatedly on the chest and shoulder. Josh had horrendous bruises the next morning. I also opened a door into Jeff Kelly's face, giving him a small cut on his forehead. It was an interesting afternoon.

After a short nap, we had dinner (Sonic, after searching out a Cici's Pizza Buffet only to find that it had closed half an hour early). En route, we were pulled over by a police officer who clearly saw our Massachusetts plates and the youth of our driver. He claimed that we were wandering across the lane (we weren't) and wanted to see if our driver, Jeff Steeves, had been drinking (he hadn't). The officer was friendly, but it was still obnoxious.

After dinner, a few of us resumed drinking with the thirties that Henry had purchased the night before. Allan, Galen, and I went outside to sit in a gazebo and smoke a joint. After a couple minutes, two cop cars pulled up and the officers went inside. A minute later, two more patrol cars pulled up to our gazebo. I put the joint on the moist bench behind me and sat on it, extinguishing the flame. Apparently, somebody had called in a noise complaint about our group, and the officers just wanted to check in with us. We kept our cool, showing the officers our water bottles - which were full of actual water - and they left us without incident. On the way out, however, one of the officers asked me if Massachusetts ultimate was the same as Wisconsin ultimate. I explained that, while we played the same game, we were opposing teams at Terminus. He then asked me if I knew somebody named Evan Klane (sp?) laughing that he "had met him last night". He got back into his car and left without saying anything else.

I talked to Jake the next morning as we drove down to Jekyl Island, and he told me an absolutely absurd story about his teammate Evan. Somebody else in the hotel had been smoking, which precipitated the arrival of the Atlanta police. Evan and the other occupants of his room were asleep in bed, but they left their door unlatched so that their teammates could still get in. Because the door was not latched, the police reasoned that they could enter the room, and those poor Wisconsin players awoke to find a group of police officers standing over their beds with flashlights. The officers conducted some sort of vague test to see whether they had recently smoked. This test concluded that all of the room's occupants were high, even though none had smoked in the last twenty-four hours and one of them had never smoked in his entire life. Regardless, the officers searched the room and found that Evan had just under an ounce of marajuanna (about a gram short of being a felony), a bowl and a vaporizer. They confiscated it all and I believe that Evan is facing criminal charges. An absolute travesty of justice.

Anyway, back to Zoodisc. We packed our bags the next morning to head for Jekyl Island. As we were about to leave, I was accosted by a little old lady who came to my doorway. She told me that she was very upset at the banging of our room doors the night before, when we had been moving from room to room without latching any of the doors. I honestly had not been aware that this noise could have been heard from inside of the hotel rooms, which I told her and apologized sincerely. However, this apology only seemed to fuel her anger. She continued to berate me, saying that we were either idiots or immature "A-H's" (I think she meant "assholes"). I told her that, if she was so upset, she should have acted like an adult and come to talk to us. I reiterated that I had not been aware that we were making so much noise, and that we would have extended her the courtesy of being quieter if only she had given us the courtesy of communicating with us. The old bat then said, "You were warned by the cops, don't tell me you didn't know about the noise," thereby implying that She had been the one to phone in the noise complaint rather than simply asking us to be a little quieter. At this point, I wanted to take back my apology. I decided, however, to be the bigger man, so I curtly wished her a nice day and slammed the door behind her.

Jekyl Island was beautiful. Fucking. Beautiful. Our campground was on a National Park. Tall, majestic trees filled the entire campsite, and spanish moss formed a dense canopy. We had plenty of room to set up our tents and for a small fire, and they gave us a large white event tent just in case we hadn't brought enough tents for everybody. Henry set up his tent inside the event tent and we used the rest of it to store our clothes and gear.

The one potential problem was the proximity of our campsite and those of others. Instead of being an isolated site in the middle of the woods, as I had envisioned, the campgrounds was really more of an RV/tent lot. Every nature of campers, RV's, tents, and trailers stretched as far as the eye could see. Our campsite was probably visable, and audible, from twenty other sites. I was afraid that we would offend other campers through our juvenile fun. However, a few of the closer campsites were occupied by other ultimate teams, and the older campers who were nearest to us seemed very nice. Several of them approached us as we were setting up our tents and their tone was refreshingly friendly. A nice old lady told us to have fun and to not worry about being a little stupid on our spring break, but reminded us not to do anything Too stupid. She told us that another ultimate team had gotten drunk and wandered around the campground stealing signs from in front of people's sites. These signs announced the home states of some of the farther travelers. Stupid, pointless, petty theft. The real issue is that the campgrounds are on a National Park, so this theft constitutes a felony. The perpetrators were caught and, at that time, were sitting in a Georgia jail. I was amazed at her story, and promised to learn from their mistake. Talking to her was a really nice experience, and I noted how different it was from my conversation with that other old lady earlier that morning. It's amazing how big of a difference attitude makes. Had the first old lady been friendly and considerate in her attitude, I would have paid attention and come away from the conversation feeling quite bad for inconveniencing her. Instead, I just felt angry because she had been rude to me. Conversely, the second old lady had been friendly, so I felt obliged to honor her request and be quiet and considerate during my stay at the campground. Life has a funny way of presenting obvious little foils.

The beach was only a ten minute walk away, and it was an amazing beach at that. A row of trees had, long ago, fallen over and only webs of roots and portions of trunks looped from the sand dunes that slowly build above them. The water was perfect - refreshing but certainly not cold - and low waves licked the sand. I was a little unsure whether camping was the best idea, but it was absolutely the perfect way for us to approach High Tide.

Terminus Day One.

Before I give any specifics, I should write the outcome. In short, we won Pool B. Four wins, no losses. A great start to the Zoodisc tournament season. I'm pretty exhilarated right now.

Yesterday's drive wasn't bad, even though it took almost 17 hours. That isn't really terrible, though. 1,050 miles in 17 hours means that we didn't really hit any traffic whatsoever. We pretty much just got on the road and cruised. Even though it meant going a long time without sleep and many hours behind the wheel, it didn't feel as terrible as you would expect such a long car ride to feel. I wasn't in bad shape when we finally arrived, and that's especially nice considering the fact that my knees usually lock up after only a couple hours in a confined space. I ate at Waffle House twice yesterday - once in South Carolina and once two blocks from our hotel - and Sonic Burger once today, so we're rolling through the bouquet of southern fast food that lies ready for eating before us.

Last night was pretty sedate. We played a word game called Contact that Ryan taught us and then got to bed before eleven. I needed that, after getting almost no sleep for two nights before that, and our first round bye allowed us to sleep in. We finally left the hotel at about 9:45, with our first game at 11:40. It was a nice and relaxing morning. I felt good, especially since we gave ourselves plenty of time for a long and gradual warmup. Even though we ended up standing around for a bit before our first game, when I would have rather just rolled straight from warm up to game play, I think that we did a good job using the time and space that was available to us.

We had our first game against George Washington. We got off to 5-2 lead, but came off the gas a little and let them stay close to us for longer than they should have. I think that we took half 7-4. I wish that we had managed to do a better job keeping our intensity and had really stuck it to them, but we kept our heads enough to take control of the game through the home stretch. I'm not sure what the final score was, but I think that it might have been 11-5 or so. This game was really good because we were able to open up the rotation a little and were still successful. I definitely played with a couple of lines that didn't look like they were going to score, but we managed to get it done almost every time that this happened. It's a real confidence booster when a couple of inexperienced players can get onto the field, grab a d and then march it down for a score. I don't think that we gave some people enough opportunity to prove themselves today, but I'm pleased that some of our young guys took good advantage of the limited playing time that they were allocated.

Our second game was against Indiana. We'd watched them play against Missouri while we warmed up for our first game, and they really didn't look that great. They gave us some trouble, however, as this proved to be a fairly difficult game. They had one handler who was pretty good, and he was able to break our marks with limited effort. Their entire offense was based out of a deep ho stack with one iso in the middle of the field, and this iso would cut into the force side. If we covered him to the force side, he just doubled back to the break side and took the pass from their one decent handler. It was almost worse to defend this iso to the force side, as this allowed him to catch it on the break side and take one quick look to the deeper cutters coming in or out on the break side. We gave up a couple breaks near the beginning of the game, which put us at a bit of a disadvantage, but we pulled out of that hole and took half 7-5. We didn't exactly trade for the rest of the game, with each team giving and taking a couple breaks, but we managed to pull out to 11-9 or so by the end. It would have been a slightly better win, but we came off them a little during the last few points of the game. The soft cap blew, we had a decent lead, and it seemed as if the people on our team decided that the game was already over. Well, it wasn't over, and Indiana pressured us enough to make me a little nervous by the end.

Our third game was against Missouri. We expected them to be a piece of cake, since they had just lost to George Washington 13-5 or something. However, we lost a lot of intensity during that game and the outcome remained closely contested until the end. Our sidelines really fell off during this game, as a lot of the team wasn't getting as much playing time as they would have liked and seemed to grow dispirited. I hate not playing everybody equally, but the truth is that not everybody has the same set of skills, talent, and experience. Had we pulled away from Missouri, we would have been able to open up the lines a little, but we never took clear possession of the game. We always had to make sure that we had at least one or two good handlers and at least one or two good cutters on each line. Once those positions were taken care of, there were very few spots left on the field to plug some of our younger players. Anyway, the point is that we really lagged during this game. Often, we had nobody cutting from downfield, which made our handlers make stupid, nervous, and impatient decisions. We turned the disc over more than we should have and played lazy defense after the turn, which kept Missouri with us until the end. We finally broke a couple times in a row to pull out a 12-10 win.

Our final game was against Georgia. I don't think that I need to write about how good Georgia has been the past few years. They have been in National contention every year that I have played College Ultimate. Season after season they have proven themselves to be a competent and competitive program. I knew that we would have to play our asses off to defeat Georgia.

We started hot against this game, scoring on our first several offensive possessions. We took two breaks, but then gave one back, to take half 7-6. Our sideline finally seemed excited to be in a game, rushing the field after every score and yelling their hearts out. Georgia seemed to have no answer for our deep game, which we used to score most of our points against them, and we struggled to stop Georgia from working the disc down the middle of the field on in cuts. We traded points for most of the second half, finally earning our first break to make the score 11-9. In the next couple of points, Georgia broke back but we broke again, ending our game at a score of 13-11. A solid win over an excellent team.

I think that we showed a lot of good things and a lot of bad things today. Our deep game was fairly dominant. The handlers made some great throws and the cutters got it done downfield. Most of our hucks were leading passes that the cutters had to sprint on to, rather then jump balls that would have required them to sky their opponents. On the other hand, our in cuts weren't clicking for most of the day. Our handlers often had to work the disc back and forth amongst themselves until one of them caught an up-line dump to throw it long from the power position. Had one of our opponents managed to challenge our deep game, we would have had a lot of trouble running our offense through in cuts.

We also had great defensive intensity. I don't know how many layout d's we got today, but it was way more than I ever would have thought we'd get in our first tournament. Lack of layout d's was something that struck me as a problem last year. So often, we got within a fingertip of a d block without forcing a turnover. This really wasn't a problem today. We had kids flying all over the field, thwacking the disc and bowling through the cutter. It was amazing. However, we struggled to shut down our opponents' offenses when we didn't get a block. Most of the scores against our team happened because we allowed our opponent to walk down the field with completely undefended force side in cuts. We're going to have to find a way to stop biting on fakes and letting our men cruise free on the force side. It often seemed as if we were either getting a huge block or letting the other team score as if there wasn't any defense at all. If we were able to stay with our men a little more consistantly, I think that we would cause even more turns than we already have. I hope that this is something that we can improve during this trip.

Finally, our focus was both good and bad. At times, our entire team would be totally in the game. Everybody would seem totally pumped when we scored, rushing the field and yelling their fucking heads off. They would yell encouragement and give up calls and all that other bullshit that really helps a team out. During those periods it felt like we were really part of a Team, working together towards a common Goal that was better than any single one of us. At other times, though, our focus seemed to flag. Players on the sideline had their hands in their pockets and a bored look on their faces, or they lazily tossed a frisbee back and forth, or they sat in a chair under our tarpaulin. During these points, play on the field seemed notably less focused as well. Throwing decisions worsened, cutting grew stagnant, defense was lazy. As a team, we need to work on being focused and in the game together. It's okay to lose our focus temporarily - it is impossible to stay completely focused for an entire day of gameplay. When it happens, though, we need to find a way to get our focus back, and quickly. Hopefully, in tomorrow's bracket play, the competition will always be difficult enough that we don't think that we are better than the teams that we will be playing. We won't get complacent, and we will manage to keep our focus. Hopefully. I want our team to develop a strong mental game, to be confident and focused in a way that Zoodisc has never been.

Like I said before, I really wish that we had done a better job getting playing time for the younger members of our team. There are a handful of people who got almost no opportunity to play at all, and that strikes me as a notable tragedy. I know that we were trying to sub competitively, and that makes it difficult to get everybody in, but I think that we could have done a better job of it all. It would have been, like I said before, good for our less experienced players to have gotten a bit more of an oppotunity to get into a rhythm and learn how to play with some of the better players. Our tight rotation also had a partially negative effect on our performance. A handful of our core players (John, Babbitt, Henry, Mitch, Ryan, Alden) played a zillion points over the course of the day. It tired them out and made them less effective at times, which I think helped contribute to closeness of each game. I wish that we'd played a little deeper into our roster during those first few games so that we could have been a little more fresh for that final game against Georgia. Subbing is really difficult, though, and while I understand that Babbitt and I struggled a little in finding the time to open up the lines, I need to cut us a little slack. It's rough having to focus on the entire team while I'm trying to focus on my own playing. I find that both suffer - my individual playing as well as my ability to lead the team - when I try to do both.

Personally, I think that I had a medium day. I made some decent plays on offense - throwing a few scores, including a hammer to Babbitt, a couple hucks, a couple to breakside endzone cuts - but I don't think that I was active enough offensively. There were definitely times where I stood in the stack, waiting to cut off of somebody else when I should have taken control and made the cut myself. I also think that there were times when I played really good defense, shutting down my man's cut or staying right in his hip pocket. I did, however, get beaten for four scores, which is an upsetting statistic. One of them was particularly frustrating, and it happened near the beginning of the Georgia game. They set up in a ho stack, and I was guarding the force side wing. He made a shitty cut that didn't really occupy me, so I wheeled into the lane right as the thrower released the disc. It was a perfect throw to me. I mean, perfect. It was as if he was throwing it to me on an in cut. All I needed to do was go to. Instead, I was so happy that the disc was coming to me that I stood flat-footed and waited for the disc to come to me. The man it was intended for sprinted right past me and made the reception. My man then cut deep and caught a huck for a score. So I went from getting an easy poach d to being scored on. Fan-fucking-tastic.

I marked in the zone a bit, but we mostly ran man and our zone wasn't so fantastic. I don't think that I did exceptionally well on the mark, though I don't think that I did exceptionally poorly either. I caused a couple throwaways, but I also had moments where I just wasn't as quick on my toes as I should have been and I allowed an easy throw to get the other team off the line. As a zone, we forced a few turns, some of which we were able to convert into scores. A lot of times, though, they just broke around our wall and worked it through the zone for an easy score. Before our zone becomes something that we can count on, it's going to take us a lot of time and practice, and we're going to have to make a few decisions as to what are going to be the wall's duties and what are going to be the wings'. But I'm sure that we'll work that out sooner rather than later.

Overall, a great day. Far better than I expected. I may be sounding a little negative in this post, but I really am ecstatic. I hope that we can continue this run during tomorrow's bracket play. I am, however, realistic about our team's performance. While there were plenty of things that we did properly, there were plenty of things things that we did improperly. Everybody is going to improve between now and Regionals. And, frankly, we are going to have to play better teams at Regionals than we did for most of today. If we are going to have a snowball's chance in hell of making it through our Regional competition, we need to close up the holes in our game and learn how to play like the champions we all know we are in our hearts. We can do it. But it's going to take a lot more work before we get there.

I'm fucking excited, whatever tomorrow might bring.

Spring Break Approaches

The plan is to meet at the Robsham Visitor Center Parking Lot at 8 o'clock this evening. That should get us on the road by 8:15 or 8:30 and in Atlanta by mid-day tomorrow. Barring anything unexpected.

It's been a tough couple days for me in terms of getting my shit done and getting ready for this trip. I met with Babbitt yesterday afternoon in the Student Union Center for Student Development to use the school credit cards to pay for our UPA memberships. This meant that we needed to sign in to every player's UPA account, one at a time, and reenter the credit card information for each individual's online payment. As arduous of a task as this was, it really wouldn't have been too much of a pain if it were not for the number of people who gave us incomplete or incorrect information. It really messed with our rhythm whenever we had to stop and call somebody to get their proper email address or whenever we had to find somebody's facebook page to enter their proper birth month and year. And so forth. The UPA requires our roster to be completed and sent in by March 20th, which is only 8 days away. Considering we are leaving for Georgia tonight and will be practically powerless to deal with any of this administrative junk, it really needs to be done today. And that's where the next wave of trouble started.

I had a ton of homework to do last night, but I wasn't feeling motivated to start. I had a bunch of spanish online assignments, a draft of a spanish composition, a philosophy take-home exam.... I ended up blowing off most of my work (I had done some spanish online assignments a couple nights ago, so that wasn't a total wash) and focusing solely on the philosophy exam. Jesse and I finally made it to the library, after a fun evening of sitting around the house, at about midnight. Off to a rough start already. We only had one copy of the exam between us, and Jesse wanted to have the text of the exam in front of her at all times (the professor gave us a two page case study and asked us questions about the study, which meant that we didn't really need to draw on any of the information covered by his lectures or by our class readings). She ended up typing the entire case study into a word document, which took about an hour. I was a little iritated at first, but this final delay probably saved our entire team.

While I waited for Jesse to finish so that I could actually start in on my exam, I messed around with our online roster. I knew that today was our last day to submit the roster before we left for spring break and I was, honestly, a bit nervous about the whole situation. It seemed imprudent to wait until just before we left to click "submit", as that would give us very little time to troubleshoot the problem. After some hesitation due to the fact that we have not been able to get Rob Brazile on to the roster - there is some problem with his UPA membership - I read the guidlines and realized that we could add players to our roster after the roster submission deadline. I decided to submit the roster, and that's when I realized our mistake.

For this entire process, I had been operating under the assumption that we just needed to submit our online application to the UPA. This is the process that you have to go through to submit a roster for Club Sectionals, and I believed that the process for submitting a roster to College Sectionals would be nearly identical. While I knew that the UPA needed to verify that every member of our team was enrolled at our university, I thought that the UPA was responsible for contacting the registrar after our roster submission. I was wrong.

Apparently, once you submit a roster, the website brings you to a document that you need to print out and give to the registrar. This document includes the names and identifying information of the members of your team, and the registrar has to go through the entire list, ascertain the validity of each player, sign the document, and mark it with the "seal of the registrar" (I'm assuming that this is some kind of stamp). It is then My responsibility to mail the document, with the registrar's approval, to the UPA headquarters. According to the UPA website, a roster submission is not considered complete until it has both been submitted online And the UPA receives the registrar approval document. And all of this is due March 20th.

Well, at this point I really started to freak out. The UPA website warned me to begin the process early, as some registrars can take several weeks to complete the necessary documents. I didn't have several weeks. I had one day.

I woke up at 8 this morning after not being able to fall asleep until about 5am. I was nervous. I got to the registar's office at about 8:45. While she didn't exactly seem thrilled to see me bustling in at the zero hour, the woman at the registrar's desk was very nice. She told me that she would be able to get my documents completed by 4 or 5 o'clock this afternoon, but I would need to get the UMass student id number's for every player on our team. So I called everybody. On the first run through the list, probably about half the team picked up and gave me their id numbers. The second run through woke up a few more people, and the third gained a few more numbers. After that, the phones went dead. There seemed to be about five members of this team who did not want to answer their phones this morning. I ended up calling, taking short breaks to send text messages and leave voice mail messages, from 8:45 until about 10:35. Without stopping. My incessent calling left me with a headache and killed half of my phone's battery. When I finally turned in the forms, I had the student id numbers for everybody on the team except Henry, Chase, and Galen. All three of them, thankfully, called me back within the next hour and I was able to return to the registrar's desk and add them to the list before it was too late. Phew.

Now I just have to hope that the lady at the registrar's desk keeps her word and finishes our forms this afternoon. If she gets it done in time I will be forever grateful. If she doesn't, well.... I don't want to even consider that possibility. I spent all last night lying in bed, wondering if our season was going to end before it even had the chance to begin. It was terrifying. I can't let that happen. I won't let that happen.

I'm set to meet Babbitt at the Student Union in a little while to finish paying for UPA memberships. Hopefully, that won't take very long and I will have plenty of time to take a nap with Jesse before I have to go back to the registrar's office and pick up those documents. Then, I need to mail the documents and our waivers, pack for the trip, and leave. Ugh. I am completely exhausted and I still need to drive through the night to get to Atlanta. I don't know how I'm going to feel when I finally get there, but I have to imagine that it will be better than this.

Amherst College Scrimmage.

Saturday's scrimmage against Amherst College went well. We won 16-14, which is a pretty solid way to start the season. We only won by a couple of points, but it still feels great to start the season with a win. Really, the game wasn't even as close as the score would suggest. Our team controlled the pace of the game, and we were winning until a couple miscues at the end put us down 14-13. We put in a halfway decent D line and broke our way to victory, establishing ourselves as the number one college ultimate team in Amherst. Whatever that means.

Honestly, I wasn't sure what to expect going into the scrimmage. We've been working pretty hard all semester, so I knew that we would be in pretty decent shape, but it's impossible to predict how that's going to translate when we finally get on to a field. It's one thing to be in great shape for running sprints or for jumping up flights of stairs or for doing sets of pushups. It's totally another thing to be in shape to make cuts or play defense or (gasp) to play lockdown defense and then make cuts after we get the turn (which is really difficult, mentally and physically). We have been doing the End Zone drill for a couple weeks now, setting up a single endzone in our parking lot and running the drill for sometimes hours at a time. These experiences really frustrated me; it is ridiculous how long it takes our team to successfully score twenty consecutive goals when there isn't even defense to get in the way. I walked away from each one of those practices baffled by the fact that a large portion of the team seems to lack simple throwing and catching skills. "It's okay," I told myself, "we're just going to have to be patient for the first couple games while we get our skills together." I pretty much wrote this first scrimmage off in advance, expecting it to be (win or lose) a sloppy mess.

But we really weren't that bad. We had some bad throwaways and some drops, but our throwing and catching mechanics were smoother than I ever would have expected. I was really surprised at first, but then it hit me: we don't need every player on this team to throw or catch very often. In a drill, where every single player throws and catches equally often, a few inconsistant players really bring down the completion percentage of the entire team. On the field, however, there are players who make a ton of throws and catches (handlers), players who make a lot of throws and catches (primary cutters), and players who only need to be counted on to make a couple easy throws and a couple catches each game (everybody else). Assuming that the handlers and the primary cutters really execute and minimize their mistakes, the team as a whole can succeed even if some of the players remain individually inconsistant. On our team, we need everybody to learn their roles and play according to those roles. If everybody can stay within their slot on the team, we are capable of some great playing.

Our organization in the Amherst College game actually looked pretty good. The cutters, by and large, did an exellent job staying in the stack (when we ran vert stack) or staying in their lanes (when we went horizontal). And, by and large, Amherst College couldn't stay with us when we stepped out and really made our cuts. Amherst College has a couple of guys who are pretty quick, but their overall athleticism and conditioning really couldn't hang with ours. There was no point of that game where I really felt winded at all, and Amherst College didn't make us have to work very hard to get open. While they aren't the most athletic team that we'll face this season, I think that this scrimmage demonstrated the success of our conditioning program thus far.

I was also impressed with our decision making in the scrimmage. We had very few throwaways and rarely did we gamble on a covered deep shot, both of which have been mistakes that our team has made constantly in the last few years. The few turnovers that we did have were on throws to open recievers that somehow went awry, either because of an execution error on the throwers part or because of a drop by the receiver. I had two turnovers myself: a forehand that slipped our of my hand and flew wide of Mitch, and a backhand that I didn't release quickly enough after crashing through the cup (resulting in an ignoble block - I was scored on by the dump going up line to end a bad point for me). I should have had one more, but Jeff Kelly made a nice play to save my ass. Our D Line's offense also looked pretty good, but at times they were a little stagnant. It was difficult on the D Line, because they often had to play on lines that didn't have an experienced handler and/or lacked a clearly defined primary cutter. In these situations, the D Line handlers dumped the disc backwards between themselves while the stack drifted deeper and deeper as the cutters figured out their shit. Sometimes this screwed us over, but often this bought us enough time to bang out a few up field passes on the breakside to put the disc in a position to score. Overall, I would say that our offense looked solid, even if it was a bit tentative.

Defensively, we could have used a bit more aggression. Most of Amherst College's goals were on hucks, which is unacceptable. We need to spend more time talking about bodying up and forcing our man in, and then taking position under the disc if the throw still goes up. Our deep defence was attrocious in the scrimmage, but at least it gives us a clear idea of the sorts of things we need to work on. We also need to work on staying with our man on the in cut and then going to get the D. Too often in that scrimmage the Amherst College players stood flat-footed and caught a pass on an incut while our defenders stood right behind them and set up a mark. That should be a D-block, every time. Our intensity and focus and desire just isn't quite there yet on defense. Hopefully we'll be able to pull it out next week.

My favorite play of the day: I'll bang it out quickly now, since I don't have much time, but I really wanted to document it. I had the disc and Amherst College was playing man defense. I was being marked by this kid named Monty, who is short but really quick, squirelly, and fast. Sort of the opposite of me. I dumped it to Jeff Kelly on the breakside and Monty made the mistake of laying out on the mark. I suddenly found myself with a good view of downfield (it was wide open) and my man was lying on the ground three yards behind me. I decided that this was the time to score. I sprinted downfield, waving my arms, but Jeff didn't throw it to me. He threw it to Mitch who, for some reason, didn't throw it to me. I kept running, and was pretty much on the goal line when Mitch threw it to John. By the time John threw it to me, I was already five yards deep and I wasn't wide open anymore (I already said that Monty was fast, and he had time to catch up by then). The throw came in high and outside in. I found my spot, bodied up, and skied him. It was great. I hardly ever do that!