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?