Ugh, just ugh. As mentioned, during Friday night's CHAMPIONSHIP tournament, my right leg's adductors tightened up a bit, largely because we had to sit for an hour waiting for the semis to start. Nothing bad, just tight, and I played through it just fine. During Sunday's Ultimate pickup, they were tight and a little sore, but pretty manageable, until late in the day when I tried to stop suddenly to set a mark, and I felt a sharp twinge in my groin. I immediately took myself out (though did proceed to play softball that night, where I managed to limit myself to jogging - got to jog around the bases, actually. MAO.TSE.DONG.YEAH!) and hobbled around the next day, but felt pretty good really by Monday afternoon. Rested it and went to the game on Wednesday early to try to loosen up.
No dice - I jogged about a mile and a half, did some build-up sprints, plyos, and a bunch of lateral movement kind of drills, and it felt fine. But I stretched a little (bad idea with an injured groin, of course, but I had to test it somehow - didn't want the first stretch to be a violent lunge on the field), and then even just trying to throw, every time I moved quickly to catch a disc or pivoted, I could feel that little tightness. So I had a decision to make, and STUNNINGLY, if you know me at all, I took my cleats / braces / arm bands off and put on tennis shoes. Coach-mode for this game, and as we already knew we would be missing Nat for the game, this was sub-awesome. A good decision if a hard one, I think, because missing one game is certainly preferable to playing hurt, having something pop and missing a month or whatever. I guess we'll see in the long term if the rest pays off.
There were what I can only call ecstatic giggles of non-competitiveness from the other team - don't know how much to attribute to general schaudenfreude and how much to relief or whatever, but outside of their captains and some of their better players (we were playing Who Hucks to the Huckers - super team name, btw - so this included Justin, Joanne, & Rob, all super standup players and all-around great peeps) who were completely on the level and were sorry that I wasn't able to play, there were a whole lot of smiles coming from the other side. This continued in the game - a fair amount of "not really getting the big picture" loud-mouthed cheering from some of the mid-level players on their team - but more on that in a sec (and of course, I was probably just frustrated / sensitive to such shenanigans because I could do little to affect the situation).
So game on, and the first point pretty much encompasses a lot of went on - a couple of good passes to move it about 30 yards up the field, and then Jeremy tried to hit Paul in stride with a leading, perpendicular throw (I'll, I don't know, diagram what I'm talking about here in a separate post, but trust that it's a difficult / low margin of error throw that's only worth making in very particular situations, and this was not one of them), overthrew him, and Paul missed it, giving them the disc at midfield. JT picks it up and puts up a garbage, swill-ass floaty huck, but it's Justin on Jack in the endzone and Justin skyes him for the goal. JT's fist-pumping his way off the field, and whatever, he's excited, but it's a little bit of a "you do realize he just bailed out your crap throw, right?" kinda moment.
So that first point summed it up - a bad decision augmented by bad execution, a short field for the opponent, and a decent play by the other team that got interpreted as AWESOME because the outcome was good. This sort of thing continued all night - overly aggressive, bad decision type throws that resulted in turns and very short fields for the bad guys. Particularly in the first half, we gave them the disc in transition / short field situations that permitted them to score in one to two throws - a lot of these were iso-type plays for Rob, and to their credit, they executed very well and took advantage of our gaffes.
Our Zone O was particularly worrisome - on the one hand, it was just the usual confusion of a League team trying to figure out who should be where and whatnot, but on the other, it was just a severe lack of patience and knowledge of the types of throws that should be attempted against a zone. We moved it pretty well, all things considered, but invariably, after ten nice throws, someone would try to jam it into a tight spot or send it deep for no apparent reason. Missing Nat and me meant a lot of sliding around position-wise for other players - for example, Jack ended up handling quite a bit, and while he is a perfectly competent handler, not having him available to pop is a huge detriment to our team. So yeah, there were some snags, and we weren't dicing their zone D by any means, but we *were* moving it just fine... and then player X would try to jam it down to the sideline to player Y for a turn, or player Z who doesn't *really* have a hammer would try it out for a turn. Very frustrating to watch - the entire time I kept thinking that it was not that I'm such a great player skill-wise that I could single-handedly impact a game, it's that I can anchor our zone O so one, there's a little more rhyme/reason to what's going on, and 2, no one is compelled to try those risky throws because I am right there to demand the disc back and such. Ugh.
Were I an honest blogger, this would be the paragraph where I point out all the bad play of our team, the particular bad decisions and the general lack of stepping up / controlling the game that we got from our handlers. And the repeated ill-thought-out throws from some of our mids, our inability to get our women better-involved, etc. A lot of people - Tom, Craig, Paul, Genevieve, to name a few - had personal (and uncharacteristic) bad nights. I am sure people looked at this game and try to explain it as "Oh, Nat/Nyet didn't play," but I'm hoping its less that - b/c that would be really bad if two people were so essential to the team that their absence were a death blow - and more a combination of "Nat/Nyet weren't there AND the people who were there had individually off nights, too." I think that's probably accurate - sure, Nat and I may have made a big difference, but I'd like to think it's not the difference between last week's highly competitve team and this week's borderline incompetent appearance.
To accentuate the positive, though, we teamwide kept running until the very last point. Jeremy's hustle and heart were impressive; Miller was still playing tight D through the final point. Beck played good D all night; Salina did a good job covering the wing in the couple of occasions where we threw a Z. Jack admirably stepped into the handler role and stayed positive all night despite highly frustrating circumstances. Our hustle aspect was not lacking; it just couldn't really get going because of all the poor throw decisions. People stayed relatively bright despite a terrible night - so in the grand "fun, run, smart" triumverate, we really only failed on the last measure.
Oh, yeah, the final score: we lost 15-6. Sorry that I'm not going through the usual play-by-play here, but really, it was a lot of head-hanging, incredibly bad throws that got D'ed on our half of the field, they picked it up and put it in. Huzzah for them - again, they played efficiently - but good lord, the guys on their teams who were screaming and jumping all over themselves, j***ing in their pants when they were up 9-2 just have NO CAPACITY to differentiate when they're playing well and when their undermanned opponents are imploding. I suppose the nice thing would be to just let them have their day in the sun and be done with it, but they carved themselves a big hate stick for the next time I play them with their antics. I hereby vow to remind a couple of dudes in particular of their place in the Ulti-verse the next time I line up across from them. Grrrrr. :)
None of this is anything to do with their captains, as I mentioned above - Justin, Joanne, and Rob (not a captain but a high level player from Sprawl) all "got it" pretty quickly, and while they didn't lift their foot off the accelerator - nor should they have - they approached the situation entirely the right way, just kept playing hard without ranting or being stupid about it. And they did do stuff - trying to get some of their less-experienced players more involved, etc. - that is exactly the type of thing you SHOULD be doing in a blowout like that. We played in a lot of blowouts last season, and when we got ahead, of course we called deep plays for Alexxx, called different people in at handler, what have you.
What we did NOT do is start effing around, throwing behind the back, no look junk. Which is what Kuby did - up 14-6 in a game with the other team clearly down in the dumps, he throws a no-look blade in an attempt at a score. I immediately called him on this from the sideline in a relatively nice way - "Just so you know, that's kinda BS" - which was probably borne partially from frustration on my part. But seriously dude, no matter how innocent you play, I *know* you are not throwing that garbage if the score is 14-12. I TAKE UMBRAGE, FO' REALS. Maybe he's too stupid to even realize how that looks - his captains were apologetic and claimed this - and maybe I'm being overly sensitive. But now you know not to do that, and now when we run into you in the playoffs, you have given us BULLETIN BOARD MATERIAL. Huzzah!
And yeah, I realize this is all ridiculous; I'm just trying to salvage something from a horrible game that made us all generally feel like crap. Though I did, by all reports, do a decent job of keeping things positive on our side despite the circumstances. We'll pick it up next week, and hopefully with a week of rest my groin will be good to go. Until then, I'm liking the balance of league thus far - lotsa close games on the Wednesday side, and it certainly seems like there's more parity than we had last time. We'll see how it plays out.
P.S. Lest it be forgotten, the other team also capped things with a cheer to the tune of the Annie song: "O Zorro, O Zorro, we love you, O Zorro, you're only a Nyet away." While flattering and all that... um, yeah, thanks for making my teammates feel like crap, like they need me around to play well. They don't, and hopefully this off night will be shown to have been just that by season's end.
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