Friday, November 5, 2010

Small Rosters

Every year people bring up the idea that smaller rosters will either make it easier for other teams to compete in the "elite" field, or make it somehow more exciting by not watering down teams.

And every year after nationals i think, those people are idiots. maybe they didn't see the same open finals i saw, but i saw two teams of pretty equal talent play each other. Only one of those teams used ~18 people (not by design, but by injuries and about 24 on their roster) and the other used 27. At the end of the game, the team that used 18 literally had players walking on the field. they could not keep up with the steady stream of hockey style balanced lines that revolver kept rolling out.

I don't know about you, but seeing players walk on the field due to exhaustion isn't very entertaining. If you moved to smaller rosters, you wouldn't have players getting down on the pull, you wouldn't have hard marks, you wouldn't have most of the things that separate club from college ultimate, you would just have the best college players playing a college style game.

Maybe if nationals wasn't as long, you had more times in between byes, and you had less games that had fewer points, then, yes, smaller rosters would be ideal. But, until the day that nationals isn't in sarasota, played over 4 days, with focus on intense and physical D, then there shouldn't be rosters of 18-20.

i would call myself a role player on good teams, a very good role player, but a role player. When i went to the finals at nationals with ironside i played well over 1/2 of the D points in the finals and the tourney. My legs were very tired, we had 27 men, and all of them played. i wonder sometimes if people who want smaller rosters have gotten to the semi's at nationals and know how intense of a game it is, or even in a close quarters game.

when i played on twisted metal, there were probably around 16-18 players who could play at a national level. i just remember being so gassed by the time we reached the pre-quarters that there was little hope of winning it.

I also don't understand how it would increase competition. In the MA region, a shortened truck, southpaw, and ring roster of players would still beat everyone else. just look at ring's split squad results to see that.

some people argue that they see teams play tight rotations at nationals for justification. I counter that with, that team probably didnt' win that game. and if they did, shame on the other team.

anyway, back to creating graphs.

-josh

Tuesday, November 2, 2010

Nationals in Review

This was the first year I didn't stay at Siesta Key, we stayed at the tourney hotel 10 minutes from the fields. I loved it.

For the past so many years going to nationals, I always hated leaving about an hour before cleat on warm-up time, to drive in traffic, to get to the fields. This was a huge load off everyone's shoulders in the morning, and made it very easy to refuel after games were done.

I highly recommend it to teams with high maintenance players, younger teams, and teams that just want to concentrate on performing their best without the distractions of siesta key.

Anyway, onward to the recap. Wednesday, half the team drove (read: the young, dumb guys), they had a car break down in savannah and had to get a rental. I flew in with the over 30 crew on the first flight out in the morning. We went to the beach and threw around, after some time, we then left and went to the fields to cleat up and throw around to get use to the wind. There is little to no wind in NC where we practice, so acclimating to a crosswind is important.

Thursday, we wake up, get to the fields, have a great warm-up. It is super hot and humid, and the dew stays for almost all of the first game. We start off against Doublewide.

They are missing the two Gibsons, but they are still jacking it deep mostly to a really tall dude named krich or something like that. He made some great grabs in double coverage.

Doublewide gave the disc up too much, but we could not convert anything in the first half (yeah, i get that if we couldn't convert then they weren't giving the disc up too much, what I mean is that they were not playing #3 seed ultimate and we were not capitalizing on it).

Our offense was atrocious on thursday. We held the disc to long, didn't swing it, and then hucked late into the count to a backed man. When we actually had a guy wide open deep, we floated the huck and 3 defenders would smother him.

The observers were possibly the worst observers I have ever played with. All season long, I had really been impressed with the quality of observing, and then when we got to nationals, none of the people who worked at ECC, Chesapeake, and Regionals seemed to be observing any open games near me. The only time I felt the observers were high level were during the Furious game, machine game, and ironside game, but I guess that is what you get when you are the 11 seed.

Anyway, back to the game. Basically doublewide took half off of static hucking 8-5. Our D line starts converting all of the doublewide miscues and we bring it to 12-11 us, receiving the disc. The O line then starts to malfunction again with drops, throw aways, botched dump throws, etc until we lose 15-13. Painful loss.

The captains and team did a great job of keeping spirits high and bouncing back for the big game against Sockeye. We come out, put a lot of pressure on Sockeye's O line, and get a few breaks. I think we might be up 2 breaks or so, and then the sockeye loose man / junk D starts to give our O line fits because they are holding it too long and are unwilling to take the easy pass. They get around 8 breaks on our O line during the game, maybe more. There were a lot in a row going into and out of half. I get to play 3 D Line O points that game and we score all three effortlessly.

In general, I think it is a good thing to stick in a D line on O when you can't stop the bleeding, but in practice, during that game, it just sort of made me angry at the O line for not being able to do what we, the D line, could do with ease.

After the game, a lot of people were dejected. The low road is very long and hard to get to the quarters, and now we essentially had elimination games ahead of us. Dave Snoke rallied the team to get ready to play good ultimate and salvage the day, and we did just that against Madison, although the O line did have some troubles late in the game against them, but the D line got on the field again and closed the door on them.

I had never played on a team who's O Line had an entire bad day. Ironside's O would sometimes have a bad half, or get too excited and have a bad game, but never 3 games in a row that were sub-par.

Friday found us in the bottom pool with Tanasi and Machine. We started off playing Tanasi and it was chippy with ticky-tack calls. Our O Line struggled again a little, but we pulled it out and started to have great momentum in the second half going into the Machine game. We played machine, and started off a little slow and then just wore them down and ran away with the game. Their talented handler core was playing both ways a lot of the time, and it was noticeable that they got slower and slower as the game wore on. We were able to keep our lines mostly open and our key players fresh for the prequarters.

As we were walking over to play in the prequarters, it seemed as though every ring player was stopped by players on other teams for them to give us advice on how to beat furious. i was left wondering if players root for ring, or if we just were the lesser of two evils at that point.

Anyway, the common theme of the tips was that there were exhausted. We took advantage of this and ran them to the ground on D. I think we take half 8-2 or 3 or something big like that. Furious then mounts their own comeback halfway through the second half as our O Line starts to get rattled and starts chucking it deep to double coverage at high stall counts. Their D line really outplayed our O line in the second but thankfully we punched it in to stop the bleeding.

This set up the quarters matchup that ring was hoping to not have this year. Ironside in the quarters for the 4th straight year (technically, the first year was the prequarters, but still...). We had a game plan that we were going to use, we had the match-ups set, we even had a good O strategy, but we got down 5-0 to start, and never really recovered. We didn't give up fighting, and we even clawed our way back in it, but d'ed discs were finding their way back into the hands of non-intended ironside receivers and we were not getting the chances we needed to win.

The finals were tough to watch. Ironside had about 5 injuries on a 24 man team. I was worried a little before halftime when ironsides O line started to look gassed everytime they came off the field. Their D line was still playing hard, but they were just making tired mistakes. Last year, Chain did a great job of using everyone all tourney to stay fresh and have the most legs, and this year, Revolver seemed to have learned their lesson and used more of their deep team all tourney. Jeff and Will who are normally indefatigable showed signs of being exhausted towards the end of the game.

It seemed as if ironside handlers became gun shy and would not throw it deep to jeff when he was being fronted. This made jeff have to work too hard to get the disc underneath, and then he stayed back and handled after the handlers were having trouble getting the disc off the line. I have never won a game that jeff handled more than cut (he might be the best cutter in the game), and i knew they were in trouble when it was happening.

but, it was very, very painful to watch a championship slip away from my friends. I know how hard they worked for it.

in reflecting on the year, it was a very interesting playing for a small market team. I was asked to do a lot more for them in both PT and throws. I think I played well, but there were times when I was absolutely gassed after a turn because I was playing so much.

the feel of the team is very unique. you don't have ringers moving to town to look for a championship, you don't have a town where all the top college players migrate to, you don't have 90 people on your tryout list, you just have a group of dudes who grew up in the area, went to college in the area, and learned to play a brand of ultimate that gives them a fighting chance against the big market teams. It is really fun to be an underdog, to just go out there and give it hell.

i am already looking forward to next season.

I hope we can work on getting our offense a little crisper, a bit more patient, and a little better at decision making. I also hope we get better at mental toughness, I feel that people played scared in big games, or worried too much about uncontrollables and not enough about stomping on the other team. I feel if we can both become more fundamentally sound and mentally sound, we will continue building upon a good season.

For any college players reading this: Ring is a great, young team that is on the rise. The triangle area has good tech jobs, super cheap cost of living, and you can play league games outside in the winter time. If you are looking into cool places to live after college, become an immediate impact player, and part of building upon 21 years of grittiness, send me an email, and we can help you find a job.

-josh

Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Nationals....

I will post after nationals this year to give a recap, but needless to say I am pretty excited about getting back to nationals. it is fun to be an underdog again.

I haven't been in a tougher pool since my twisted metal days, and honestly, those pools make thursday really, really exciting. if I was awesome and wasn't pulling together a report right now (the joys of the downtime of huge web queries and macros), i would find the clip of metal upsetting the condors on dgp the thursday of my first nationals.

ring had some great practices after the egg we laid at regionals (aside: if you think you can make it to a sunday of a tourney by taking a redeye across the country the night before to get there as the game starts, don't. you just can't function. your legs are lead, your mind is asleep, and your D will suck.)

We spent the last couple of practices refocusing on our fundamentals (sideline talk, marking, Defense, Defense, Defense). after all, nationals is about who can execute and play a team game the best, especially quarters onward. I think thursday and friday are about who can remain the freshest and still get a favourable quarters matchup.

the teams that stick to their fundamentals and their strategy (patterns) and executes their game plan will beat the other team that has flown off the radar with the game plan and has just become lone wolves out on the field.

it should be no surprise that the majority of teams run the same "plays" as other teams, only under a different name. the better teams just execute them better and recognize the patterns on Defense as well to make it harder for other teams to run their plays.

the older i get the more i realize that the line between a winning team and a losing team is about confidence and trust. you have to have the confidence in yourself to play at your fullest, confidence in your system so you use it and rely on it, and trust in your teammates to do the same.

three car loads of ring is taking the road shortly. the older guys are flying. we are all very excited, and looking forward to having a slugfest of a thursday.

I have no crystal ball and have no clue how thursday will go for us, but if we bring the energy and focus we had at the last couple of practices we can run with anyone.

-josh

Wednesday, September 1, 2010

Chesapeake

So, Chesapeake came and went and it wasn't blazingly hot or humid this year. I didn't even put ice in my cooler (note: I have started to take an ice water cooler with me to practices down here). If teams don't do that for nationals, they should. Putting an ice water towel on your neck and head is awesome in the florida heat.

anyway, so this was the first year playing chesapeake that i haven't stayed 5 minutes from the fields with danny clark's awesome parents' house. instead I stayed with the team at the sheraton in the sprawl that is outside of the dc beltway. the 30 minute drive to the fields just meant that we would have a looooong day ahead of us before we could get back to sleep.

Ring's saturday had a grueling format of game, bye, game, game, mini bye, game. The first game was against NYC's replicants. They hucked it a lot and tried to force the disc to the center cutters in the ho. we countered this with poaching off the sideline handlers and making sure we didn't get beat deep. they still completed a good amount of hucks on us. although, that is what they do and they seemed to do that on everyone all weekend long.

We won with a good margin, and then we had a bye where we hydrated, ate food, got out of the sun, and tried to get prepared for a long day.

The second game was against Tanasi and they have some talented handlers and cutters. they break the mark well, give-n-go well, and huck well, but they had some execution errors and forced a couple deep looks to covered men that ring capitalized on. We win in a good hard running game. they are a team that no team should overlook at regionals. especially early since they don't have a very large team.

the third game was important because if truckstop and ring win their sections, the winner of this game would have the #1 seed at regionals. we had the same record at ecc, so i was kind of curious how this game would play out.

there were a couple things to keep in mind: 1.) brian stout was injured and was not playing. he was injured by a revolver player at ecc and will be out until regionals. 2.) i think Ryan Todd has gone to about 2 practices with truck, so he wasn't what you would call seemlessly integrated into their O yet.

Anyway, we start out on D and go up 2 breaks on them. We take the half with momentum and maybe one more break. we are making sure all our players are fresh and keeping their legs in the game because it is hot, and there is a lot of tourney left. anyway, we are in firm control of the game until late in the second half when truck breaks us twice to make it 11-10. We then punch it in on O to win.

Truckstop seems to be running spread a lot on O this year. there are a lot of teams that seem to be moving away from ho and moving towards different looks on O. it will be interesting to see how stout affects the cutting patterns of the other players if he is playing O this year. on metal he definitely ate up a lot of the deep cutting space by the way he "cuts" (read cherry picks), but man, you can toss up some meatballs to him and he will bring 95% down or more.

We then have a mini-bye to play in the showcase game against chain. it looks like chain lost tall joel wooten, jay hammond, rob barrett, cricket, and one or two more. of course they replaced them all with very competent players.

anyway, we start out on D. i get down on the pull and mark PV. he proceeds to launch an 80 yard backhand to zip. yep. it isn't like i used to see that one before.... man, PV is ON this game. the rest of the handlers are missing their mark. we give up two breaks early in the game, and then claw our way back into the game with some gritty D. I think they take half either up 1 break or we are even. We are close to on serve at 8s or 9s and then they pull away right at the end.

i left that game thinking that chain didn't look as "on" as they did at this time last year. They looked more like the chain of two years ago that could be forced to give the disc up if you put enough pressure on them.

On sunday, we were supposed to play the winner of goat/machine. when we get to the fields and are warming up, goat and machine are in a heated game. the last couple of points take a long time and have a few turns by each team. goat ends up winning by one.

we start to play goat. I don't recognize any of their normal O handlers. the russian handler tolly? and their european handler joel aren't there and in their place are significantly younger players. The cutting core is their usual crew of andy, hassel, inian, keanu look alike, and #20 who is a blazingly fast goal scorer.

i forgot what it was like to play goat when it gets ticky-tack. it was physical on both sides and the calls were contested a lot. we go down early and try to claw our way back in the game.

it seemed like every break we got the offense would then go out and promptly get broken. this would have crushed some teams, but ring's D line just kept going out and doing work. we eventually go out on double game point on D and manage to get a coverage D ending with tuba stalling out hassel near their own goal. It was awesome.

a great win for Ring. every tight game that we have and we can pull out a victory is well worth it. good teams play in tight games and lose; great teams find a way to win.

We are coming off of a big victory, feeling good, and the ring guys from last year want a shot at ironside. they seem to hold a special place in their hearts for boston as they (we) ended Ring's season for the past 3 years.

It was a little weird playing against everyone. i guard jeff a few points and i pretty much could have just stuck a pylon out there and done just about as well.

it was hard watching boston get up so many breaks in the first half. too many. 7-2 or 3 is crushing. we trade out point for point in the second half.

So, Ring finishes our regular season with only 3 losses. We have had some good victories, and in our losses I would say a large percent of the reasons for those loses begin and end with confidence and not realizing we can hang with any team if we just go out and play our game. out of the 3 teams we lost to, we by far have the most room for growth, the most area for rapid improvement, and the best potential for player development before nationals. we have A LOT of work to do before now and then if we want to have a chance of beating these and similar tiered teams at nationals.

ironside looked really good. their O was very clean. goldstein tore his right thumb ligament or something in the finals and that will hurt them, but man, it is kind of a blow to the ego that they could be so good after losing 10 players. They were by far the strongest team we played this season. I would equate them to how much head and shoulders chain was above everyone last year at this time.

i'm tired. that's all i got for right now. i am going to spend the next couple posts on confidence, progressive marks, and why the death of the vert stack means no one can score near the endzone anymore.

-josh

Monday, August 16, 2010

ECC Wrap-Up

I guess I need to get a new name for this blog. Crap.

Anyway, I went to ECC with Ring this past weekend. Going into the tourney I was a bit curious to see where I stood on a fitness front compared to last year, how our team was going to handle expectations, and how our team was going to stack up against other teams having only played in two split squad tourneys and minimal scrimmaging because we have been covering a lot of old and new Ring concepts and strategies at practices.

We get to the fields and are cleated up by around 8 and the first game of the day is at 9. We do our plyos, active warm-ups, throwing, and our ring warm-up. The ring warm-up is a pretty cool little warm-up that works on all your throws (dumps, short in passes, throws to slashing horizontal-ish ho cuts, and hucks).

One thing that I am getting used to this year is that Ring doesn't scrimmage before the game. I liked that ironside would do that because I felt it got the blood flowing, the mind seeing D and O patterns, and got you throwing real game throws so you are already a few points into a game by the time the real game starts.

Before we started against Wolf, a team with some of the younger players from last years Jam team on it and other hard running college kids, the captains told us that for this game we were going to run 3 equal lines of 7 players the entire game. We split off into those groups for 2 mintues and discussed who would do what and to go over D sets.

Wolf never got out of the gates unfortunately. They had a bunch of nervous drops, turfs, and throw aways, and we were very stingy with the disc after the turn. When they did score, it was normally off of Tommy Hendrickson pulling some crazy throws out of his sleeve.

I think after half, Wolf got a few breaks back, and we may have traded out until the very end to finish up 15-10 or so. Our D legs never got up to speed because they were producing the turns themselves. I think that hurt us a bit for the next game.

We play Revolver next. For this game, we tried having 2 O lines, and about 10 D only players (that's me!). The O players were supposed to hop on a D line 2 or 3 times a game to keep the D lines legs fresh.

I remember it being if O1 and O2 got broken, the D line would come in and play O. I came in at least two times that game for O, so that should be an indicator to how clean our O was working, especially in the first half when I think we got broken twice to start.

Unfortunately, our D wasn't any better. There was no sign of life in our team, and we were just quietly conceding to Revolver which made me a little upset. After half, we got a little bit of life back into our legs and got a few turns and a break or two, but we never recovered from the four point run we let them get on us somewhere near the start of the first half. We lose 15-11. Our first true test of the season, we got punched in the face, and we didn't even hit back until we were in the second half.

Revolver was missing Cahill and maybe 1 or 2 more players for them, or maybe some of their typical O guys played D this weekend. We didn't give them much of a challenge, so I don't know if I saw what they are going to be like this year.

Aside: the only thing that might be worth mentioning about that game for Ring is that KP had one of the filthiest over chest high layout grabs I have ever seen in my life. I think he did it right in front of cameras, so that will probably be a clip of the day soon.

We then play ECU. We heard they beat sockeye in the showcase game the night before so we didn't know what to expect.

They apparently are comprised of retired sockeye guys and just out of college carleton players. Their team is based around a really cool concept of hosting free clinics for kids and just seeming to be a great team to play on and enjoy your teammates.

Unfortunately for them, in our game they just seemed tired or disinterested in winning. They have a couple of miscommunication turns, and we win 14-11, but it felt not as close for some reason.

I view ECU as the bracket busters for NW regionals. They might not have the legs to win out to go to nationals, but they can spoil some contenders' season in the process. I would not want them first round on Sunday.

We then have sockeye for the fourth and final game of the day. Sockeye is not having the day they wanted to have: they lost to Truckstop after receiving on double game point, they lost to boston (or did they play and beat streetgang? ahhh cultimate, i hate you), beat Pony on DGP, and now were playing us.

It looked like they were missing at least their tall handler that played with them last year, one volume cutter (ray), and one goal scorer (mc). They also look and are much, much smaller size-wise than previous years and we had enough little squirrels to cover their squirrels effectively.

Ring is pretty young, and so far we hadn't gotten fired up about D or winning, so I took it upon myself this game to lead the charge and be the emotional backbone of the D line. It was a bit exhausting. After they took half 8-7, we went on a D run that was pretty awesome. In my excitement of leading the D line, I played waaaaaaaaaay too many D points that game. I think I played close to all of them. It was the first time I got to see Ring dig in and see what they were made of, and it was awesome to behold. We stayed positive, we got each other's backs, and we fed off of each other's want of more and more blocks and scores. We win 14-11, when i released the game winning throw, i had such great feeling of looking forward to the season and what a an awesome force our D line could become on both D and D's O.

My only regret about the first day is that I wish we would have played revolver after we got the sockeye win. I would have loved to have given them a better game, and I think we would have been more confident and would have been playing tighter D after the sockeye game.

Sunday, Sunday, Sunday: holy crap I wake up sore. I played too much in the sockeye game for my own good, and I have to put on tights to get my legs loose. It is also uncharacteristically dry and sunny out, which makes it super easy to dehydrate quickly. I felt thirstier out there than I do down south.

On Sunday we would have Furious, Streetgang, and either whoever we hadn't played in the west coast bracket or in the finals if ironside loses horribly to someone.

We make sure to run Ds that will take furious out of their first, second, and third options (deep, deep, and deep again). It seems to work and we get a fairly easy win 15-9. Our D plays very well, and the D plays well after the turn. They are missing at least oscar and maybe a few more players.

We have streetgang next and never really get up for it. They crushed boston last year at nationals by having their bigger lefty guy jack great throws to their excellent deep receivers even when they were covered. Their lefty guy was a big factor this game as well. If he wasn't hucking it, he was either stepping into the lefty backhand drawing the foul and getting an i/o off, or he would step back and throw bendy hucks and breaks. Tuba has a couple big blocks this game as well as Brett, but I think we take that as a reason to continue to be up a break instead of wanting more and more and more.

We eventually eek out a win, but you don't want to keep a team like that (who catches waaay more than their share of 50/50 balls) around near the end of the second half. The 15-13 win leaves us tied with Truckstop for the team with the 2nd best record. Sockeye apparently crushed Revolver and proved that teams shouldn't just write them off for the season just yet.

We find out that only records within the pool counts, so we are playing Rhino. We change back to 3 equal strength lines, and we never get in a groove.

We trade the lead several times. We even get up by a lot after being down at half. I think it was 14-11 or so, and then they break us a lot to make it 15 all, us receiving. We call a real O line for this point, and we promptly have a drop close to our brick. Rhino picks up, moves it very well laterally across the field. They get up near an endzone corner and instead of hitting the wide open goal cuts, they send a bladey flick over the stack towards the back center of the endzone which thomas ward makes a great deep D on. We get the disc back, bang it around a few times, and then one of our handlers gets a break away deep run and makes a great catch for the win.

All in all a satisfying weekend.

Oh, I almost forgot about the rules:
Contact: this is pretty much awesome. Disc space was so awkward to say while you have a million things to do on the field at the same time, and it seemed very arbitrary to call and even to prove or disprove since it deals with planes of moving appendages. Contact simply is, if someone touches you while marking, you say contact, and they go down to 0. It is everything disc space wasn't.

20 yard endzones: This isn't really a big deal because it normally only is at tourneys that you have a truly regulation sized field. I wish though that they would have made the playing field proper be 80 yards instead of just chopping off 10 to the endzones and keeping it 70.

Travel, Up-Down, In-Out: Awesome. No ticky-tack bullshit travel calls, no disputes and stupid reenactments of where people perceive their feet to be at the time of a catch. It almost felt like a real sport out there. The games with observers go so much faster than without.

I will write more, but I am super tired.

-josh

Monday, July 12, 2010

I'm Back...

Wow,

Haven't posted since November. A college season without me coaching has gone by, a club season begins with me being a 30 year old rookie on Ring with new strategies, new teammates, and a new identity to learn and embrace. I am having a blast so far.

Some post topics I want to write about:
1.) Confidence
2.) Acclimating to heat
3.) Differences between top club team practices (without getting into the nitty gritty proprietary stuff)

-josh