Here I am again, four hours before I set out for an ultimate tournament and still not asleep. Slave to some sort of quasi-karmic law prevents any ultimate player from sleeping the night before. Or maybe it's that 4 hour nap I took earlier today.
Tomorrow's some sort of Hat Tournament hosted by Prion Ultimate, a mixed team based out of Illinois that got 3rd in Mad-isc-on. Due to funding problems we had to sacrifice a tournament in either the spring or the fall. Naturally we chose the fall, thus a hat tournament rather than a full team one (for 15$ + gas is a pretty good deal I thought, although the 5 hour drive is a bit much). Roughly six of our players are going, three of our better ones, so hopefully this will help them get over the plateaus we've gotten ourselves into.
It occurs to me that I never updated about Glory Days, I should probably do so. I'm thinking I'm going keep this short, quasi-karmic laws be damned, I'm going to get at least 2 hours tonight.
Our pool consisted of Loyola, Missouri B, Western Kentucky and Northwestern. My pre-tournament predictions were something like 13-15 Loyola, 15-6 over Mizz B, 15-10 over Western Kentucky, and 7-15 Northwestern. Unfortunately these were based upon UPA rankings, turns out are much more fluid than I expected. Overall we came in thinking we could put in a solid bid for the champion's pool, but we were missing our key defensive freshman for a wedding, and our third best player (Cartier) due to a lacerated kidney. The kidney thing was a bit of a bummer.
We got to the fields before most of the teams, but for some reason our warm-ups continue to leave something to be desired. I was planning on starting with a scrimmage to erase some of our first point dropsies, but I got caught up in the captain's meeting, and by the time I got back we only had about 5 minutes until game time. Hindsight tells me that I probably could've delegated or gone to the captain's meeting late to meet the slightly higher priority of winning. Unfortunately I find it hard to delegate, due in great part to a severe lack of leadership after myself, Terp (who was with me) and Cartier (injured). B-Long's been trying to step up, but unfortunately he doesn't command the sort of respect needed, and everyone else...just kinda stands there.
Either way, we didn't scrimmage, just did some paired throwing and Endzone O, cheer and then hooray playing. The entire Loyola game was characterized by an incredible amount of drops, throwing errors, pretty much every turnover imaginable actually. They were ranked 101st so I was expecting a pretty rough match up, but we ended up taking half 7-2. They staged a comeback during the second half, but ended up unable to convert for the most part, even with the help of some of our players. Us 11-7.
Missouri B. I was expecting some rest after the Loyola game, playing a B-team and all. Unfortunately the team just kinda died, and continued to die for the first 4 or so points. This was a drastic and somewhat scary change; at Grinnell the team did fine when I subbed out, but this time around we ended up completely losing our focus. I ended up coming in on point 5 (1-4), and managed to help spark a comeback just in time for the hard cap. Us 9-7.
The Mizz-B team did help highlight some of our flaws as a team, hopefully ones that I can address in the future. They essentially had two handlers and then a team full of rookies, but even with this they still managed to keep some nice flow going, something that we lacked the entire tournament. I especially noticed when I watched the ISUC-Truman State game, we're playing more of an Ames ToP ho-stack: rely on two or three good cutters to advance it up the field, then rely on Greg to bomb it deep (it's much less deadly without Greg). Glory Days was just further proof of our inability to create an offense with in-cuts, especially when I was handling. It's actually pretty humorous, we have most of our games on tape, and every first point I have it's like dump throw, swing, Iain huck. Luckily for me we have a lot of track burn-outs on our team.
Western Kentucky: probably the more interesting of the games in pool play, we started the game by going down 0-6. Kentucky had been running a cup in their earlier games, but we still were unready for it. At 0-5 we finally got our zone-o clicking, I just remember looking at Terp and B-Long after we worked it full field until an ill-fated strike cut; they looked back at me with faces beaming, a mutual epiphany that we could break a cup, as opposed to being crushed by it a la IFUC at Grinnell. We then went on a 6-0 run until they utilized the girl-guy mismatch to score for half.
They subbed in their all-star after half, although he was slightly injured after Kentucky's game against Northwestern. He proved to be too much for us, even injured, unfortunately, hard cap is called at 8-10.
We then lost to Northwestern 7-15. The team had been relying on myself and our main cutter to propel both our offense and defense, and by this point we were absolutely drained. This was probably the most tired I've ever been during an ultimate game, I could barely even play defense, blech.
Day 2, we missed the champion's bracket by 6 points. First game is against Chicago-B. Another example of why we need to scrimmage before the game, this time I was indisposed getting our water, why I didn't delegate I don't know. It's a pretty tough game, nothing exciting, we win 10ish-8ish.
Grinnell was next, and I don't know if they had a tough game against Lewis or if they were missing some star player, but they just played terribly. They threw this 20 ft. cup on us, I just stuck a permanent crash in the center and we just worked it up easily. Only thing they had going for them was a few tall guy mismatches, but our speed was able to overcome them. We ended crushing them, although not without two spirit fouls called on me for encouraging my team to take it easy for the next game. Us 13-7.
I once entertained ideas about going to Purdue for college. I expected their team to be much worse than they were. In reality they were probably the most solid and utterly average team I've ever played against. Also had a taller, slower, less accurate throwing version of me - we had a fun time guarding each other. I don't remember why we lost this game, probably due in part to a lot of fatigue, some mismatches that were never really resolved, I don't know. A tough game laden with Iain and Iain-clone layouts, but ultimately we lose 8-10.
Pros: Layouts from lots of people, spectacular deep catches, great d throughout the tournament, freshmen stepping up, cup ownage, bright future for UNIPUC(?!)
Cons: Really really hard ground, our handlers breaking under pressure, inability to utilize in-cuts for an offense, no Champion's bracket, lack of flow/movement, throwing problems for a lot of our cutters, last tournament of the fall
Showing posts with label Captain's Blog. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Captain's Blog. Show all posts
Friday, November 2, 2007
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
Iain and his forays into the realm of leadership
Being a blog christened after its author's attempts at captaincy, its author feels obligated to update. Also, the fact that a tournament, a location change and the return to the college lifestyle have all occurred way heavy on its author's shoulders. Unfortunately this post is about none of these.
UNIPUC's first practice occurred back on Sunday. We had some decent turnout, a lot of people that have played back in high school, a few people that "played some disc back in gym class and thought it was fun," and one or two tournament goers. Also present - an inconceivable amount of wind and rain. The latter was not well received by the team.
Due to those conditions we weren't able to get as much done on Sunday as I had hoped, the usual introductions were performed, a few basic explanations about the stack and force, nothing too fancy. I did discover though, that I'm really bad at explaining things. Really really bad. Abominable even. This isn't all that desirable of a trait for a captain to have.
Sunday practice also had very few of our old team present. We were missing our three main players at Cooler playing with the PaB team, while the rain probably drove off any of the other slightly less dedicated members. Two of the three members at Cooler were also former presidents, which somewhat left me at a loss for what to do. I worked with what I could.
Afterwards (with the addition of the three Cooler-ites) our first team meeting was held. It proceeded exquisitely. Chili red and marina blue are now our two jersey colors, although no input was given for a name change or a new insignia for that matter, mostly because I didn't have any of the drawings on my person.
Another no-ultimate Monday came and passed and then Tuesday practice arrived, hooray! This time around my explanations were much less of the abominable sort, quite the opposite in fact. With an official practice under my belt I was feeling confident, so my stack and force demonstrations flowed much more smoothly. Even with my peerless demonstrations though, the team still has a lot to work on. Unlike ISUC we don't have as solid of a core of veterans, so not only do we have to teach the newbies, but we have to reteach some of the team members as well. The newbies don't have that competitive ultimate atmosphere to learn in yet, I'd like to try to cultivate that, but I don't know how.
It's hard for the new players to learn how to play correctly when a lot of the older members don't quite know when to make a continue or how to make a proper cut. It also worries me that none of the older players really understood the necessity of the stack moving upfield when the disc moves upfield. Whenever the disc is caught a lot of people just panic and sprint wildly away from the stack in these dazzling circular continue cuts, which although I'm sure look absolutely scintillating on paper, lose something in translation to the field.
I should probably stress a bit more the necessity of the stack moving as a group, but I'm still trying to feel out when exactly it's proper to give advice, and when it's not. People tend to misinterpret what I say into something a lot more harsh than I intended, so I'm somewhat hesitant to tell people what to do. With this being only our second practice as well, I don't want to put people off by having them think they're doing absolutely everything wrong, but I also don't want them to build bad tendencies that we'll have to overcome later in the year. I'm sure the happy medium is what I should aim for, but those happy mediums tend to have a lot in common with sublime circular continue cuts.
The basics are what the team needs though and the basics are what I'm going to have to focus upon for the next few days. Whether or not the team understands the main nuances of the stack will make or break our play this year, it's what kept us from really playing all that well last year.
This brings in another issue though, our practices starting at 3:30, when about five or so people have classes until 4:45. If those five people miss out on Tuesday/Thursday explanations and drills, then they're going to be leagues behind the rest of the team in terms of understanding. I'd like to move practice times up to 5 or so, but then we'd start to encounter the problem of not eating dinner until 7:30. With the dining centers closing at 7:45, that probably wouldn't go over very well with the team.
This all sounds like these last few practices have been fruitless, but for the first two practices they've gone quite well. We converted a track athlete permanently to our heathen ways, as well as picking up a few other pretty athletic people. The older players seem almost excited, if not more excited about this year than I am. Additionally the intensity of our last practice was a pleasant surprise from what UNIPUC is usually like. I'm hoping to try to help foster this intensity by raising my intensity as well. Hopefully it will trickle down to the other players so they can try to learn from my example, as well as to help minimize any loss of skills that I might have (this I'm very worried about).
Getting used to teaching players that are completely unfamiliar with the game is new to me, although nothing I can't adapt to. It'll take time and I'm sure a lot of frustration, but when all these drills and explanations finally pay off and the team starts to click; it'll be worth the effort a thousand times over.
UNIPUC's first practice occurred back on Sunday. We had some decent turnout, a lot of people that have played back in high school, a few people that "played some disc back in gym class and thought it was fun," and one or two tournament goers. Also present - an inconceivable amount of wind and rain. The latter was not well received by the team.
Due to those conditions we weren't able to get as much done on Sunday as I had hoped, the usual introductions were performed, a few basic explanations about the stack and force, nothing too fancy. I did discover though, that I'm really bad at explaining things. Really really bad. Abominable even. This isn't all that desirable of a trait for a captain to have.
Sunday practice also had very few of our old team present. We were missing our three main players at Cooler playing with the PaB team, while the rain probably drove off any of the other slightly less dedicated members. Two of the three members at Cooler were also former presidents, which somewhat left me at a loss for what to do. I worked with what I could.
Afterwards (with the addition of the three Cooler-ites) our first team meeting was held. It proceeded exquisitely. Chili red and marina blue are now our two jersey colors, although no input was given for a name change or a new insignia for that matter, mostly because I didn't have any of the drawings on my person.
Another no-ultimate Monday came and passed and then Tuesday practice arrived, hooray! This time around my explanations were much less of the abominable sort, quite the opposite in fact. With an official practice under my belt I was feeling confident, so my stack and force demonstrations flowed much more smoothly. Even with my peerless demonstrations though, the team still has a lot to work on. Unlike ISUC we don't have as solid of a core of veterans, so not only do we have to teach the newbies, but we have to reteach some of the team members as well. The newbies don't have that competitive ultimate atmosphere to learn in yet, I'd like to try to cultivate that, but I don't know how.
It's hard for the new players to learn how to play correctly when a lot of the older members don't quite know when to make a continue or how to make a proper cut. It also worries me that none of the older players really understood the necessity of the stack moving upfield when the disc moves upfield. Whenever the disc is caught a lot of people just panic and sprint wildly away from the stack in these dazzling circular continue cuts, which although I'm sure look absolutely scintillating on paper, lose something in translation to the field.
I should probably stress a bit more the necessity of the stack moving as a group, but I'm still trying to feel out when exactly it's proper to give advice, and when it's not. People tend to misinterpret what I say into something a lot more harsh than I intended, so I'm somewhat hesitant to tell people what to do. With this being only our second practice as well, I don't want to put people off by having them think they're doing absolutely everything wrong, but I also don't want them to build bad tendencies that we'll have to overcome later in the year. I'm sure the happy medium is what I should aim for, but those happy mediums tend to have a lot in common with sublime circular continue cuts.
The basics are what the team needs though and the basics are what I'm going to have to focus upon for the next few days. Whether or not the team understands the main nuances of the stack will make or break our play this year, it's what kept us from really playing all that well last year.
This brings in another issue though, our practices starting at 3:30, when about five or so people have classes until 4:45. If those five people miss out on Tuesday/Thursday explanations and drills, then they're going to be leagues behind the rest of the team in terms of understanding. I'd like to move practice times up to 5 or so, but then we'd start to encounter the problem of not eating dinner until 7:30. With the dining centers closing at 7:45, that probably wouldn't go over very well with the team.
This all sounds like these last few practices have been fruitless, but for the first two practices they've gone quite well. We converted a track athlete permanently to our heathen ways, as well as picking up a few other pretty athletic people. The older players seem almost excited, if not more excited about this year than I am. Additionally the intensity of our last practice was a pleasant surprise from what UNIPUC is usually like. I'm hoping to try to help foster this intensity by raising my intensity as well. Hopefully it will trickle down to the other players so they can try to learn from my example, as well as to help minimize any loss of skills that I might have (this I'm very worried about).
Getting used to teaching players that are completely unfamiliar with the game is new to me, although nothing I can't adapt to. It'll take time and I'm sure a lot of frustration, but when all these drills and explanations finally pay off and the team starts to click; it'll be worth the effort a thousand times over.
Saturday, August 4, 2007
What I was really pulling for was more of a dark mauve actually
I was listening to NPR on the drive back from Cedar Falls the other day. It was during a short interlude bridging the gap from the soft jazz of the 1900s to a modern piano concerto that a thought occurred to me. The feeling that as long as those soft-spoken, slightly graying voices just kept on narrating, kept on carefully enunciating the names of countless foreign composers and their masterpieces; all would be right with the world.
It was the perfect capstone to an otherwise slightly aggravating journey. You see, I was freshly off of having tried to convince the rest of UNIPUC of the plethora of changes needed for the upcoming year. Feelings of serenity and peace were in short supply that night.
The change of insignia and name were accepted fairly quickly, but for some reason they firmly resisted any sort of change in the color scheme of our jerseys. Apparently purple is such a magical and awe-inspiring color that, given the choice, it will trump every single other color devised of by man, save a more brilliant form of it.
Luckily, after about 2-3 hours of discussion, light blue and dark red were finally accepted for our separate jersey colors, although not without the requisite wailing and gnashing of teeth. My only fear now is that I will soon have to do it all over again, during the actual team meeting. Curse purple and the sway it holds over my teammates!
Really all that was accomplished on my trip, other than the very fine dining given to us by our local Hu Hot, was the realization that I'm going to have to make every single decision on this team. From those minor jersey color decisions, to the choice of our offense, I'm really the only person on the team with enough experience to choose. It occurs to me that this is much more of a daunting task than I originally anticipated.
And I haven't even started the paperwork yet.
Edit: Although naturally all of my decisions/ideas would be given to the team for approval beforehand. What, you think I'm some sort of despot or somethin'?!
It was the perfect capstone to an otherwise slightly aggravating journey. You see, I was freshly off of having tried to convince the rest of UNIPUC of the plethora of changes needed for the upcoming year. Feelings of serenity and peace were in short supply that night.
The change of insignia and name were accepted fairly quickly, but for some reason they firmly resisted any sort of change in the color scheme of our jerseys. Apparently purple is such a magical and awe-inspiring color that, given the choice, it will trump every single other color devised of by man, save a more brilliant form of it.
Luckily, after about 2-3 hours of discussion, light blue and dark red were finally accepted for our separate jersey colors, although not without the requisite wailing and gnashing of teeth. My only fear now is that I will soon have to do it all over again, during the actual team meeting. Curse purple and the sway it holds over my teammates!
Really all that was accomplished on my trip, other than the very fine dining given to us by our local Hu Hot, was the realization that I'm going to have to make every single decision on this team. From those minor jersey color decisions, to the choice of our offense, I'm really the only person on the team with enough experience to choose. It occurs to me that this is much more of a daunting task than I originally anticipated.
And I haven't even started the paperwork yet.
Edit: Although naturally all of my decisions/ideas would be given to the team for approval beforehand. What, you think I'm some sort of despot or somethin'?!
Friday, July 27, 2007
UNI Ultimate, Codename: LEGUME
I've delayed committing these ideas down on paper for two days now, so I feel like I should before I forget them. Most of these came from a think tank session between myself, "Driven" Nelson, Ying, and Dunlay, so any commentary is welcome. I have yet to bounce any of these off of Terp or Cartier, or the team for that matter, but I don't really feel like many of the players at UNI are as into Ultimate as I am, so I don't think they'll have many qualms.
First of all, UNIPUC needs jerseys. Badly. We're currently sporting some sort of pseudo-attitude tee as our jersey of choice, that needs to be replaced. I'm fairly certain Patagonia would most likely be who I'd be looking to for jerseys, everything that I've seen I've liked, and the other companies I haven't been too sure about. I'm unsure of when exactly to buy the jerseys, I want the players that wear them to be loyal to the team and not the iffy people that come once every two weeks or so. I was setting a tentative date as a month after Grinnell or so, that way I'll be able to see who's willing to at least give up time for a tournament and any of the people that don't like the atmosphere can peel off.
Anyway, the jerseys. I think we finally agreed upon most likely a blood red color (I'm sure a lot of teams use it, but it's so cool!) and a metallic gold, or if that's not a suitable choice for a color, probably the next blue up from Carolina Blue. I was aiming for an aquamarine or maybe even a turquoise blue/green, but getting that metallic gold would definitely be my first choice. (These all being jersey base colors). You just don't see something like that ever, but I suppose that could be due to the fact that it's not possible to make. Writing on the respective colors would be gold for red, red for gold, etc. For blue either black or white? We were unsure about that. Definitely not orange though, that was a resounding no. Complimentary colors are apparently a no go with blue/orange.
Looking at the jersey options from the Patagonia website I think I'd be leaning towards Marina blue/black print and then Chili red if there's the chance of having gold print, otherwise crimson/black. Naturally this all depends on what the team thinks, but those two colors both match what I had in mind.
Now the big problem, insignia. After a mid-this-post outing to Cafe Milo / the Boheme, Ying and I tried to brainstorm some ideas on what to do about it. We narrowed it down to a good six, although our last two are a little iffy.
1. (Inside joke) One of the dragons from Bubble Bobble - his head open (a la gameplay) while creating a few bubbles, the number would be inside the largest one.
2. Panther version I: A stern looking panther, complete with cane, monocle and top hat, looking disapprovingly upon the rest of the ultimate masses.
3. A Tony the Tiger / Captain America panther (Thumbs up, soldier!).
4. An envelope asking "Sectionals...?" with a large red DENIED stamped over it
5. (Stretching for ideas here): Bagheera from the Jungle Book
6. Pink Panther!
I feel like we'll probably go with 2 or 3, but man would 1 or 4 be amazing. If only.
There's probably also the slight chance that we have some artistic geniuses on our team that could pull out a spiffy looking symbol like ISUC's, but that would be a very slight chance. Mike Lun, where are you in our great hour of need?!
First of all, UNIPUC needs jerseys. Badly. We're currently sporting some sort of pseudo-attitude tee as our jersey of choice, that needs to be replaced. I'm fairly certain Patagonia would most likely be who I'd be looking to for jerseys, everything that I've seen I've liked, and the other companies I haven't been too sure about. I'm unsure of when exactly to buy the jerseys, I want the players that wear them to be loyal to the team and not the iffy people that come once every two weeks or so. I was setting a tentative date as a month after Grinnell or so, that way I'll be able to see who's willing to at least give up time for a tournament and any of the people that don't like the atmosphere can peel off.
Anyway, the jerseys. I think we finally agreed upon most likely a blood red color (I'm sure a lot of teams use it, but it's so cool!) and a metallic gold, or if that's not a suitable choice for a color, probably the next blue up from Carolina Blue. I was aiming for an aquamarine or maybe even a turquoise blue/green, but getting that metallic gold would definitely be my first choice. (These all being jersey base colors). You just don't see something like that ever, but I suppose that could be due to the fact that it's not possible to make. Writing on the respective colors would be gold for red, red for gold, etc. For blue either black or white? We were unsure about that. Definitely not orange though, that was a resounding no. Complimentary colors are apparently a no go with blue/orange.
Looking at the jersey options from the Patagonia website I think I'd be leaning towards Marina blue/black print and then Chili red if there's the chance of having gold print, otherwise crimson/black. Naturally this all depends on what the team thinks, but those two colors both match what I had in mind.
Now the big problem, insignia. After a mid-this-post outing to Cafe Milo / the Boheme, Ying and I tried to brainstorm some ideas on what to do about it. We narrowed it down to a good six, although our last two are a little iffy.
1. (Inside joke) One of the dragons from Bubble Bobble - his head open (a la gameplay) while creating a few bubbles, the number would be inside the largest one.
2. Panther version I: A stern looking panther, complete with cane, monocle and top hat, looking disapprovingly upon the rest of the ultimate masses.
3. A Tony the Tiger / Captain America panther (Thumbs up, soldier!).
4. An envelope asking "Sectionals...?" with a large red DENIED stamped over it
5. (Stretching for ideas here): Bagheera from the Jungle Book
6. Pink Panther!
I feel like we'll probably go with 2 or 3, but man would 1 or 4 be amazing. If only.
There's probably also the slight chance that we have some artistic geniuses on our team that could pull out a spiffy looking symbol like ISUC's, but that would be a very slight chance. Mike Lun, where are you in our great hour of need?!
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