Won our first League Game last night against Kevin / Eliza's team "The Champagne Room All-Stars," featuring the likes of Jesse, Al, Wade (former fnuker), and Pete. Eliza and Ryan were out of town which probably took any betting on the game off the table - definitely took their women's game down a notch and gave them one fewer big guy to whom to huck.
Not that it influenced their gameplan at all - I think Wade must have sent it deep 90% of the time he touched the disc. And 75% of those were to Jesse. Once we got it in our heads to prevent Jesse from going deep, they were at a bit of a loss for offense.
They played some zone against us - normally I try to make an agreement with the other team's captain ahead of time that we not play zone in the first game of the season, but I forgot to mention it to Kevin, and they came down Z on the very first point. Kevin thought they were overmatched personnel-wise and that it was their best chance to compete, so I didn't mind, though it did force us to teach everyone zone on the fly. We ended up just absolutely shredding it, so they gave up on it eventually.
Beck played well - got the disc a few times in the zone, almost got a D by running past her girl at one point, made a nice bid on an errant throw and generally didn't let her girl get open or turn over the disc. Not bad at all for a first time out! I'm still worried that she has fun and that we do a good job of explaining offenses / defenses and the like; these hat leagues can be pretty chaotic and not fun if you can't tell what's going on. But Beck's doing an excellent job, and we have a ton of nice teammates who are all making an effort to help her out. Good deal.
We played pretty fantastic as a team for the first time out - tons of hard running on defense, and we were (for the most part) patient on offense and didn't make the ridiculous turns one normally associates with the first time a team gets together. There were a couple of overly ambitious throws in the mix, but they were few and far between. Learned a about some of our players - Rich is an older guy who I already knew (just didn't know his full name) who is very solid; Viral is a super-steal late in the draft: can play mid, handler, and had a big sky for a score; llyson is a wicked athletic player who is picking up the game; Kelly is a very enthusiastic player who made a sick catch and played great D all night. Two folks were missing - Salina and Greg - but all of our unknowns have thus far turned out great (AND our injury risks, Nat and Miller, looked A-OK).
I had a couple of bad plays in the game - one on a huck to one of their tall dudes; I read it way too late and just couldn't get around him to make a play on it. The other was EPICALLY BAD - I cut deep for Craig, he didn't throw it, so I started to head back in, but then Craig put up a big backhand - my guy was in perfect position to D it, so I gave up almost right away, but then my defender didn't move - seemed he didn't see the disc go up at all. So I coasted back, the disc floated in and as I reached to grab it, it nailed me right in the tip of my probably broken finger. Ouch, and I bobbled it, then tried to grab it with my off hand, missed it, then tried to grab it again and ended up swatting it out the back of the endzone. Just a terrible, terrible drop - there was a confluence of give-me-an-excuse factors - bad lighting, weird throw, thought my defender was just going to catch it, these odd broken-ish fingers in both of my hands - but it really was just a horrendous, embarrassing drop, something that I don't do very often on hard-to-catch discs, let alone floaty hucks. On the plus side, the thunderstorm of heckles included things like "He's human!," so I must be doing some other things right.
Yeah, accentuate the positive: I killed their Z, and threw a ton of scores - hammer to G, flick huck to G, scoober to Viral, flick to Paul, hammer to Rich, hammer to Jack, hammer to Miller, hammer to jeremy, and a s-i-i-i-ck inside out, perfect float in front of him forehand huck to Tom. Dropped that one goal, but caught another off a Ded throw by Genevieve, and I Ded a huck somewhere in there, too. Sorry to report all of this, but in light of that terrible play, I have to remind myself that I did anchor our team's offense a little bit. I'm not worthless... on another perhaps interesting side out, I did not even come close to laying out in this game, largely because 1, our team didn't put up any bad throws to me, and 2, I defended my guys well enough that throws did not go to them. So yay for that.
Great game ZORRO. Lotsa speed on this team - we don't have any shutdown stand-out stalwarts like Justin (even though Jack is a total stud and SUCH a great guy to have on our team), but everyone on the field at any time is solid and dependable. Our 5th-8th picks on the guys side - Paul, Craig, Jeremy, Viral - are all STEALS, and it's just silly that people let us get away with that. Of course, this is after one game, so I suppose we'll see. Stay tuned.
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