Canes on the Brain, etc.

Sorry that I neglected to write all this up earlier. Frankly, I just didn't feel like it.

Friday afternoon we played a scrimmage against Amherst High. Our vaunted O line started the game by giving up a few breaks, and our D line didn't have the firepower to break back in the first portion of the game. Rather than trying to break up the lines more equally, we put all of the experience on the O line and none of it on the D line. When we got turnovers, we just weren't prepared to set up a good offense and march it down the field against Amherst's zones. It was ugly. We finally put in a good number of the O line players on Defense with the rest of the D line spots being rotated, and we came back to win the game. As often happened, we gave ARHS a due opportunity to win and they simply refused to accept.

I didn't play too well in this game. My legs felt tight and weak for the second half of last week, after Purple Valley and a succession of hard, shorthanded practices in which I shouldered a lot of the D line's burden. I really, truly wish that we could get better numbers at practice so that I wouldn't have to run so damn much. I think that I was probably at about 75% of my meager speed, and I was pretty ginger on the field. I played alright on defense, not really getting burned anywhere in spite of my physical weaknesses. On offense, I had two turnovers. One was a poorly placed hammer that I threw at the beginning of the game when we couldn't get our D line offense out of our own endzone against the Amherst zone. The second was a poach D by Henry's man later in the game. I should have seen Henry and his man standing in the force-side lane and holstered it but, frankly, what the fuck was Henry doing there, anyway? It was an outrageously bad place for Henry to have placed himself. Even if I Had seen him, it would only have obstructed a completely open Ryan coming in on a twenty-yard in cut. For being one of the supposedly "best"players on our team, Henry sometimes sure does play poorly. I think he probably had ten or eleven turnovers during our ARHS game on Friday, and that isn't even an exaggeration. Henry makes some of the worst decisions that I have seen on an ultimate field; he makes them unapologetically and gets on his teammates for attempting to make significantly higher-percentage throws. I'm getting tired of Henry's bullshit.

Yesterday it rained pretty hard, so we didn't have practice. There was still standing water on our field today (and it is Fucking Cold) so we didn't play today either. We were told to all go to Boyden to lift or to play basketball, but only a handful of us seem to have done that. I question the devotion of almost everybody on our team right now. Day by day, frustrations grow and there doesn't seem to be anything to do about it. Like Josh, who claimed that he "had plans already" during practice time. He claimed to be sore from lifting legs yesterday, but couldn't give me an explanation as to why he couldn't go to the gym to lift arms. All I can say is that his committment level is not what I expect it to be. What I expect it to be for all of my teammates.

I don't expect perfection from my teammates. I merely expect that they try. And that is not what I'm seeing from a lot of people who supposedly "care" about Zoodisc.