Rematch against Bill's team tonight. They had that James character tonight whom they were missing last time we played, so the contest had a little bit of a different dynamic. And yet the same result - we gave up five points in a blowout win, this time 13-5 because of the shortened pool games. Here is the scoretracker: 2-0, 2-2, 6-2, 6-4, 12-4, 12-5, 13-5. There was a REALLY rough point in that little 6-2 to 6-4 gaffe - just a ton of turnovers for both sides, very sloppy play. Hopefully we got that out of our system before the weekend.
We had a little bit of fun tonight outside of the normal it's-fun-to-play-Ultimate fun. Justin brought a ridiculous boombox, and I made some funk, nay, fnuk mixes for the evening. SO we rocked out a bit during the pregame drills. Alex (female edition) brought an LP of funk songs that we signed and gave to the other team postgame. Beck also stopped by the game tonight which was very nice of her - I generally play better with my favorite audience member - but she wasn't feeling great after a long day at work, so she watched most of the first half and then headed home. She's sleeping now as I type and let Stephen Colbert talk at me.
The gameplay was solid - as I may have mentioned last time, this team poaches a lot, and with James, they also had a poacher who makes a difference in the air. We did a pretty reasonable job of taking advantage, especially as things wore on, but we initially seemed pretty dumbfounded by it, just jacked some hucks up and generally put too much zip on throws. Oh, well. Poaching is such a high risk, high reward strategy, and employing it 100% of the time is just bad defense - we spent half the game hitting wide open people in the middle of the field. I mean, granted, it stopped our easy hucking game, but it exchanged it for easy 20 yard gains whenever we felt like it. I guess I'm just looking forward to some higher quality matchups and honest D this Saturday. We'll see.
We collectively did a better job of getting our womenfolk involved on offense tonight - hit Brenda a bunch in the middle of the field, took some deep shots at Genevieve, hit Alex at midfield and had Teri handle quite a bit. Everyone really worked the disc well tonight - even Chunlang got in on some handling, so good times all around.
I personally played fine - one bad throw into a poach when trying to huck to Genevieve, but otherwise hit all my deep throws and everything else, threw a bunch of scores and caught quite a few, too. Some layout D bids, a couple of rescue Ds for teammates, and some generally decent D on my peeps - even coerced a horrendous huck out of Clint. No real animosity, either, despite "playoffs!" Called a foul on Brendan (he slammed me from behind on a hammer from Justin; Brendan claimed that I jumped into him which was fairly bizarre, but whatever, no biggy). James called a travel from half a field away on a give and go cut which just struck me as sour grapes; it was 11-4 at the time and the call was entirely pointless. But no heatedness, so good times. Yay friendly Ultimate.
Ned showed up tonight - first time back since his wife passed away. He and Nathan (his son) are missing this weekend, but I am glad we got to say hey to Ned before the season ended. He played great, despite not really having exercised at all in the past several months, lots of super steady and solid handling.
So, step 1 of the playoffs completed. We've got big games against Schrute Hucks and Plastic Hurling Phenomenon between us and the semis. Should be fun. I have (perhaps stupidly) agreed to play softball tomorrow night, so hopefully that will be more of a "stay loose" thing than a "tire myself out" thing. My quad is still tight, but doesn't seem to be getting worse. Ugh. Stay tuned for the account of how we did - I will forego predictions here, and suffice it to say, regardless of how we do, it's been a fun season with some pretty solid play.
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