We capped our season with a tight 15-11 win over Jesse and Marisa's team "Multiple Scoregasms." I tell you, for all the crap over "hcuk," you would think Big Brother would step in and change their team name to "Several Goals." Oh, well.
Interesting game - we had a lot of people who were out of town or couldn't play for one reason or another1, so we ended up with five guys for the night for the five guy spots, aka no subs. Ugh. So Justin, Pat, Paul, Drew and sore quad Nyet took the field for the duration2. We were a little sloppy on O - just congested on cuts, some bad decisions and the like - and couldn't get ourselves clicking. Started the game trading points3 and were actually down 4-3 before we woke up a little bit and took a 6-4 lead. Took half at 8-6, then went on a run to 11-6. And then...
Ugh. They threw a pretty decent zone, multiple people on our team had bad throw turnovers4, and they clawed their way back into it 11-10. We subsequently got our act together, cranked the D up another notch, took care of the disc on O and ran off 3 to 14-10. They scored, we scored, ballgame, 15-11.
Very nice to have a closer game for a change, even if it was largely due to our lack of subs. Not to take anything away from them - "Exciting" Jesse is an absolute stud5, Marisa smoked us deep a couple of times, Al put up some nifty hucks and Ryan (?), handler from Sprawl, put on some good moves as well. But a lot of the trouble for us at the beginning was getting outrun, and once that evened out a little bit (their 8 guys got as tired as our 5, collectively, or something)6, things evened out quickly.
I personally had a mixed game - definitely put up some overzealous hucks, and while I still completed the majority, they were not exactly healthy-advised. Gotta tone that down big time for next week. D was pretty solid - a handblock and at least three other Ds I can remember, in addition to doing a pretty reasonable job on the occasions where I got matched up with Jesse. Mainly I stepped up the receiving big time, making lots of deep cuts and score catches and the like. Got some nice compliments from the other team regarding my ability to read the disc - I had one supersky in particular for a score on a throw from Justin that was poster-worthy. You know, if they made posters for people with 18 inch verticals.
So, fun times, good heated game, and again, next to no calls. We've had a really clean season (with the exception of week 2, really), and my conscious effort to be nicer on the field has paid off a little. Yay self-improvement. And speaking of seasons, it's over. We finished on a nine game win streak for a 9-1 record with a +59 point differential (+66 for the streak, meaning we averaged winning our games by seven). All that is a wash now, because it's PLAYOFF TIME!!!! In another post...
1 Ned and Nathan's wife/mom passed away earlier this week from pulmonary disease; it's been very sad and they've understandably not been at our games lately. Ned is just a primo nice guy, his son is great, and it's hard to think about such a sad, premature loss for their family. The team made a donation in her honor to the LAM Foundation, a group that does research in her particular disease, and it was the least we could do. They'll both be back this week, and I hope frisbee can be at least a little bit of a therapeutic distraction for them.
2 In retrospect, we could have asked to play 4-3, but the other team only had three (maybe four?) women, so shifting the subbing burden from our men to their ladies seemed a little lame to me. But this was a screw-up on my part; I should've consulted with the other team. Unfortunately I was too stupid to realize that we only had five guys until the game started. Ugh - this is why I send out e-mails inquiring as to people's availability. Futile, futile efforts.
3 Really clunky - some bad turns, their women running deep behind us, etc. I missed Justin on a huck and we had a craptastic miscommunication at midfield, too. An unfun start to the game, but still, the worst was being down 4-3. So, whatever.
4 Man oh man - I had hit Justin on a big huck against their zone earlier, tried it again and the disc just did not bite back and hung up. He still had a shot at it, but couldn't get it. And on the next point, Teri called poach from across the field, so I tossed her a hammer - only I didn't see Jesse at all, who was basically standing right next to her. Bad on her part to yell poach, but that's the first time in quite a while that I just haven't seen someone on the field - he was lined up directly behind another player in my field of vision, and apparently my internal "count seven opponents" mechanism was defunct. Ugh. Not to be outdone by my ineptitude, Genevieve made a couple of overly laser-throws to Brenda in this juncture, and Pat tried to huck it to a WIDE OPEN, no one within twenty yards Paul and just absolutely barfed it. So it was a collective four points of bad, and they capitalized well.
5 Yeah, he's pretty much an Ultimate player prototype - tall, skinny, super fast, super jumps, very aggressive, graceful layer-outer, and just nice as can be. Doesn't have quite the throws that some other Ulti-gods have, but he's got incredible field sense and just gets open pretty much whenever he wants. Kinda amazing to watch, though not really from up close when he's skying you to grab a hammer (but I should not fail to mention that i was not actually guarding him at the time, just trying to help a teammate).
6 This may not sound like it makes sense - I think we were so overly worried about the no subs factor that we were conserving energy, which doesn't work too well. Once we figured out that we could just run all night and our savagea tired would be better than their normal tired, we were good to go.
a "Savage" in Ultimate parlance means "no subs." There are "savage seven" tournaments where you just take a team of seven and play all day, and I'm pretty sure that's where the term savage came from. If you think about it, though, at least in normal Ultimate contexts, "savage seven" is redundant.
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