New Sheriff in Town

So, I haven't posted in quite some time. I've had a lot of schoolwork and I haven't been feeling well, so I've let myself get a little lazy with regards to posting. There were also some big changes occuring with regards to the team, and I wanted to see how everything worked out before I made any comment.

The biggest change, of course, is that I am now a captain.

Henry decided that he was too busy with various aspects of his life to pay due attention to his duties as a captain. Credit him for being able to eventually see this and step down for the good of the team. I am replacing Henry as captain of Zoodisc for the remainder of the year. And a stiff responsibility this will be. I need to find a time in the coming period to sit down and sort out workout schedules for everybody on the team, follow up on individuals to work out and get in shape, decide which tournaments we will be attending in the spring and figure out how much money the spring is going to cost everybody so that we can get money up front, and do all of the other things that need to happen to get the spring season off to the right start. Whoof.

I'm not going to talk too much about the last week of practice for the fall season. It was pretty similar to a lot of the other weeks that we had this year, and I want to devote more time giving an overview of the Brown Trournament that we attended this past weekend.

As the number one seed in our pool, we were given a first round bye on Saturday. This gave us the opportunity to sleep in (we didn't have to leave until 7:15) and still arrive in time for our first game in spite of the fact that most of the team lost their way (the final road had no street sign and appeared to be the entrance to a cemetary). We had a quick and lackadasical warmup, jumping right into our first game against Wesleyan. Our O line played alright against Wesleyan, though our D line struggled to convert their turnovers. This was partially because we started this game playing a stacked O line and weak D lines. When we kept a couple strong D lines in the game, Wesleyan started to crack and we ended with a solid win. I think the score was 13-9 or so.

Babbitt started playing in the Wesleyan game even though he had not been expecting to play at all this weekend. He had recently come back from the seriously sprained ankle that he suffered at Club Sectionals, but he strained his rotator cuff on a routine layout in a practice drill last week. Kasarah made Babbitt promise that he would not play this weekend and boasted that he would not be able to lie to her if he did play. Babbitt played the vast majority of the points that our team played this weekend - and played rather well - after swearing our entire team to silence. However, Babbitt accidentally let his secret slip to Kasarah less than fifteen minutes after we got home Sunday night. I guess Kasarah was right about Babbitt's inability to lie to her, but at least it doesn't seem as though a weekend of playing caused Babbitt any physical harm.

We went on to play Brown Y, one of the two tryout B teams that Brown entered into their own tournament. As expected, this was an easy win in spite of our team's lack of focus. We turned out a 15-3 win, I believe. No problems. In the first point of this game, one of the Brown kids stomped on the side of my ankle. This wouldn't have been so bad if it weren't the same ankle that I messed up last fall, so it hurt quite a bit. I don't think it limited me much on Saturday, but I woke up Sunday morning with a bad bruise right where my cleat brushes my ankle. It was also pretty stiff, which limited my mobility, so I pulled myself off of the O line for Sunday and only played D points. I was dissappointed to have to do this, but I would have been a liability on Sunday if I'd logged the number of points that I played on Saturday.

Our third game was against WPI, and it should have been an easy win. The weather, however, disagreed. A stiff wind came in off the ocean (which we could see from the fields) and, at times, the sky opened into a monsoon. Due largely to my own poor playing, we gave up an early lead to WPI. I dropped the very first two passes that came my way, both of which were in our own endzone and got shoved in for easy WPI scores, and probably played the worst first five points that I can ever remember playing. It felt like things were spiralling rapidly out of control, but I somehow managed to pull it together and ended up playing relatively well for the rest of the game. This was a very frustrating game, but we dug it out for the win.

The wind calmed down a little bit (though it was still rather imposing) for our final game of Saturday against MIT. Our win against WPI had already sealed our status as the number one team in our pool, but we wanted to end with a win. We got off to a pretty nice start against MIT, taking half 7-4 or 5. However, we waned a little after half and gave up the lead. We pulled ourselves together, stormed for a comeback, and won by two after the soft cap. I think that fatigue was a big reason for our near-collapse in the middle of the game. I played every single point in the WPI game and every single point of the MIT game up until four or five points before the end when I started to cramp. Several other experienced players on our team (Babbitt, Henry, John, Mitch, Ryan) were in very similar situations. We pretty much ran out of gas during the MIT game. Our subs, however, did a fantastic job filling in and putting fresh legs on the field. This allowed us to run through the end of the game and gave us the spark we needed to win.

I really do not believe that we would have won the MIT game without the players who came off of our bench. They say that the pinch hitter is the toughest position in baseball. Pinch hitters spend an entire game getting tight and out of focus, entering only at the biggest moment. They are set up to fail, and the situation is not much different for ultimate players. Playing off the bench in an ultimate game is really hard. Believe me, I have been there many times, it sucks. I am very proud of our young players for being able to come in at the end of the MIT game and contribute.

As soon as our MIT game ended, the skies opened into pouring rain. We drove to the Brown campus and set up in a lounge for the night, using dorm showers and "borrowed" shampoo to wash up after an extermely muddy day. Zach, Josh and I bought some beer at a liquer store, and they gave us free frozen drinks ("It has Alcohol in it!") because they hadn't been selling. Awesome. Each team was given two party pizzas, we got pretty drunk, and then we went to the tournament party. It was an alright night. During the walk home from the tournament party it rained incredibly hard, but it was warm out so it was actually kind of fun. Brown was having some sort of gay orgy/dance called "SexPowerGod", and a lot of guys and girls were walking around campus wearing nothing but the most revealing and provokative of undergarments. SO that was fun, too.

Sunday morning, we started against Dartmouth, who had shared our lounge the previous night. We got off to an early lead against Dartmouth and never looked back, beating them from both sides of the disc. This was an easy win, but we maintained intensity, which was nice, and stuck it to a frustrated Misha (who transfered from UMass to Dartmouth a couple years ago), which was even nicer.

We switched to a field that was running in the same direction as the wind for our next game, against URI. This sucked, because the wind picked up significantly at this time, making this an almost entirely upwind/downwind game. We got a break early on and were scoring easily on our downwind points, so it appeared as though we would trade for the win, when a tipped disc and a sloppy grab allowed URI to break back late in the game. With the cap on, we buckled down and broke back to assert our dominance and take the win.

Bringing us to the finals, against Harvard. The wind was really screaming for this game, so it took on similar upwind/downwind characteristics as the URI game. Playing in these conditions really isn't very fun. The offense fires the disc into the endzone, usually for a turn, and sets up a zone defense to get a short turn for an easy score. No matter how well or how poorly you play, it is so difficult to work the disc upwind that it is hardly even worth trying. Games like that are pretty worthless, and both teams understood that this was not an indication of the matchup that our teams will be in the future.

I broke my nose at the beginning of the Harvard game, which is one of the only longstanding results of this farce of a final game. I was covering my man in the endzone when George Stubbs tossed a scoober over my head. I turned and sprinted towards the back of the endzone to try and make a play on the disc when I ran full on into a Harvard player cutting towards the front cone who seemed not to have seen the disc go up. He did, however, see my in time to lower his shoulder and smash the bridge of my nose. I don't really hold it against him, accidents happen, but it does really suck for me. I spent most of yesterday laying in bed, as the injury just exacerbates the illness that has bothered me for a little over a week, and I still feel pretty hard off.

Anyway, I'll try to post more detailed thoughts about the fall season and the work that will be necessary as we head toward the spring. Sorry about being silent for so long. Hopefully it won't happen again.