Wow, good day on the weblogs for great training ideas on the rings:
P.S. I'll try to post something about Nationals soon. Tourneys give me "hangovers" (not the alcohol kind) where I can't really focus or get motivated, and it's worse for Nationals. And I'm swamped at work. But hey, while we have this quiet moment, maybe this'll be my Nationals post...
Best fields I've ever played on, all the games matter and are hard fought (which is what makes the tourney so special, IMO), and incidentally they get great food vendors, particularly the étouffée and the crepes (mmmm... Nutella and banana filling...).
We underperformed, going 3-4 on the weekend and losing the 9-10 game to Boneyard. Gotta give those guys their due, they took it to us, and their D was both the cleanest AND the most intense we saw all tourney. Losing sucks, but getting beat by clean, hard-nosed D is a pleasure compared with losing to a team whose D is supplemented by grabbing, hacking, the ol' stop-the-continuation-throw bump/tackle, etc. Anyway, nice game, Boneyard!
Interesting situation on Friday, playing our last two pool play games. We were tied with Miami and played them in what we assumed would be the game to advance to quarters, as they had perennial contender Old and In the Way in their final game. Tough game, but we pulled it out. Surprisingly though, Miami rolled Old, and we lost to Big Sky. Can't blame Old for conserving for quarters, and our fate was in our own hands, so no complaints, but it stung nonetheless.
Personally, I had pretty good tourney. Thursday was great. Handful of blocks, no errors. Friday was marred by a couple drops behind the disc in our loss to Big Sky. Saturday was somewhere between the two.
By the way, I was THRILLED to see a few of my old Salt teammates take home the title with DoG! Loved watching that game. Not as much as I would have loved playing in it, but still great vicarious Ultimate, and I couldn't be happier for those guys. If you're reading, congrats DoG!
Update: Speaking of DoG, Jim Parinella's writeup is a fun read, and covers their pool in much more depth than I covered ours.
(The extent of my pool play coverage being an oblique reference to how chippy some of our games were. I should add that while those games were no fun to play, I don't think it made the difference in any outcomes, and it takes two to tango.)
Apologies in advance for the brevity of this update. NE Masters Regionals, five teams, two bids. DoG (Boston), Tombstone (Toronto), and Above and Beyond (us, NY) look pretty well matched on paper. We have a rocky Saturday. Very hot. We beat Mt. Crushmore handily (15-4), but Not Dead Yet gives us a game (15-10), and we lose the big games to DoG (15-11) and Tombstone (14-10). Our D looked good, our O not so much. Lots of chances, few conversions. So that sets up the DoG/Tombstone final, with us playing Not Dead Yet in the backdoor bracket.
Sunday, cool and drizzly. DoG handles Tombstone. As expected, decent first half, but then Tombstone (I hear) starts looking towards seeing us in the backdoor game-to-go, and conserves. DoG rolls, 15-7. They look good. I'm always amazed at how they create space, both as individuals and as a team. We do a much better job with Not Dead Yet, winning 15-3. The offense starts to click, and we're running a pretty deep rotation with hard running D. We carry that energy and improved offensive efficiency into the back door game-to-go and take it! 15-11. Tough game, pretty contentious, but we're heading to FL, woo-hoo!
(There is an interesting discussion happening on RSD right now concerning the fairness of the five-team, two-advance format. Pretty common format in masters this year, and quite a few of the 2-3 matchups went one way in pool play, and then the other way in elimination play.)
Big bonus: after we qualified, we got to watch Jenn (one of our Berkshire locals) qualify with Bashing Pinatas! This got me all mushy over all the Nationals qualifiers who have played at least a season with our long-standing little hole-in-the-wall pickup game. Here's the list:
- Alec E.
- Blake H.
- Chris M. 2
- Christine L. 1
- Derk P. 1,2
- Jenn F. 2
- Jim B. 1
- Jon B.
- Josh B. 1,2
- Josh M. 1,2
- Lester B. 1,2
- Sam R. 2
- Steve H. 1,2
- Xavier L. 1,2
1 First contact with the game was with Berkshire.
2 Bulk of/most significant experience was with Berkshire.
Also, Rachel D. is knocking on the door with Nemesis (women's midwest team). They had two games-to-go this year, and lost a close one in the finals, and then the backdoor game in crappy weather to a team they'd beaten the day before. Damn! Next year, she promises.
Not bad, especially considering there are only something like 130,000 people in the entire county!
I really enjoyed browsing through Bil Elsinger's Nationals Open Division Finals photos. Lots of great shots, but I particularly liked teasing a story out of a couple sequences. Two examples:
Man, Nationals is a blast. It would have to be for me to remember it fondly despite losing all our games and badly spraining my ankle on the first point of Saturday play, prematurely ending my season (at least it didn't happen on the first point Thursday!). The fields, each one perfectly level and filled with fabulous Ultimate players, stretch a half-mile into the distance. The weather was heavenly, the on-site vendor makes a mean étouffée, and the beaches on Siesta Key are wonderful.
As for the games, of our seven losses I would say two teams were out of our league, two we should have beaten, and the rest we could have beaten. In all but the two blowouts, we were tied at nines or tens before our Nationals rookiedom took over, and we let the games get away from us (or had them taken away, depending on your point of view). Ah well, ya gotta start somewhere. Not bad for a bunch of small town players. Here was Salt's team bio:
Great Barrington, MA: population ~7,500
Brattleboro, VT: population: ~12,000
Spring, 2005. In a move that has all the makings of a bad bar bet, two guys—one from each "city"—get together and gamble that a Nationals-caliber team can be assembled from these two remote Ultimate scenes. Add a couple transients and precious few ringers to this briny mix of small town, home-grown players, and you end up with Salt!
I'm still impressed we could pull off such a season by combining these two small-town scenes. Everybody on our roster has played pickup in one of these two towns except for four players. Of those four, one missed pretty much all of the season (including Regionals) due to injuries, another was a Nationals rookie, the third had only made one late-career appearance on a mixed team, and the fourth was... well, he was a Masters National champ teammate of a brother-in-law of a Berkshire player, so I think I have to put him solidly in the "ringer" camp. The brother-in-law was on that same team, but he played pickup with us, so is not one of the four.
Anyway, never has the line between 0-7 and 5-2 felt so slim. Already looking forward to next year!
The training paid off! My team, "Salt", qualified in the Masters division. We have a couple studs, but mostly we are a team full of role players from small towns, and it was a true team effort to make the grade at Regionals (especially after an abysmal Saturday showing in equally abysmal weather). I couldn't be more proud of my teammates, so many of whom (myself included) have never qualified before. Heck, many of our players have only ever played small-town Ultimate, and have little or no college or club experience outside that afforded by the gradual evolution of their local game.
So one of our guys calls his wife (who, like all frisbee spouses, is a champ) and tells her we made it. Her response: "That's great. The basement is flooded."
Ah yes, such is the life of the non-professional athlete. :-) Did I mention three inches of rain fell on us during Saturday play?
