Beck and I got some quality warm-up throws in pre-game, captured by my mom in digital:
No game shots, though, as my dad was more interested in spectating than photographing. Ah, well.
We lined up to start the game against Joe Disc Pack, Liz and Russ D's team. They had the first pick on both the men's and women's side in the draft; they ended up with something of a mish mash of great players and erratic ones. They were missing their first pick Korby, one of the better women around these parts, so that balanced for our missing Genevieve. They also only had two women, so they were in for some fun on that front. On the guys' side, they have Bryan P, one of the handler / mid hybrid types and captain from the Sprawl, a total stud; Russ, an older but very tall and lanky good handler; Shannon, a fasty D guy with quite the heckler's mouth; and Bill, an older handler with some throws and knee troubles. They were missing Volo with a heel injury, taking away a mid option from them (albeit a mid option with a penchant for the aforementioned erratic-ness. Volo has gotten better since I've been in Phoenix and is a very active cutter, but he still makes some odd decisions and turfs the occasional throw) - he tried to play mid game but couldn't move too well.
The game itself was a mess - just badly disorganized play, lots of timeouts called on account of what-the-hell-is-going-on-out-there, lots of bad decision throw-aways, just a lot of trash that dragged on and on. On top of being ugly, it was just SLOW - I'll save the final score punchline for a bit, but suffice it that the soft cap went on two points after half time - so many turns, so much dragging around, just UGH. Tight the entire time, too, so neither team took enough advantage of the mistakes the other side was making. I made jokes to other experienced players at several points that we should be embarrassed to be a part of this. I'm negative that way.
As mentioned, I was pretty crippled out there, and ended up sic'ing Jack / Paul / Nat on the likes of Bryan and Russ while I guarded relative do-nothings. My leg did warm up as the game went on, but I spent a lot of the night operating at about 70%. Of course, this did not stop Bryan from guarding me when they were on defense, so after our myriad turns, I got to run around on one leg trying to stop that guy. No fun.
It's hard to remember all the ridiculous throws that happened - Jeremy tried his seemingly requisite lead up the sideline with the IO forehand he doesn't quite have yet a couple of times, resulting in turns; Craig tried hucking it to Beck by throwing it directly over her head; Kelly had some of her high release high float throws that were brutally D'ed; Paul turfed some; we as a whole just spent a lot of time trying to jam the disc up the sideline. They played zone against us on maybe one point, but both Tom and i were out there, so we did a much better job of shredding it than last week - people are figuring out where to be when, so that's nice.
Some definite highlights - whole team ran hard throughout and played pretty solid D.1 By far the highlight of the night was a goalline layout D by Allyson, and we are talking flying tsunami holy crap layout style. Just awesome. Nat is clearly getting back in shape and taking over as a mid at points, badass, and we got some big Ds out of Jeremy / Paul / Miller. Salina and Beck played solid all night - Beck would tell you that she missed three throws, but really only one of those was one she had a reasonable shot at; the others were just bad puts. Beck did run like crazy on D and called her first pick - yeah milestones.
Beck also was involved in a play that sort of encapsulated the night - somebody cut deep on Jack, the throw went up, and Jack leapt and D'ed it, only to have it float back to a morass of people. Jack tipped it again off somebody, it headed toward the ground with Beck's woman possiby about to catch it - so Beck took a swipe at it, inadvertently knocking it back UP into the air such that Volo dove and caught it for the score. UGH. SO Beck made the right play and it completely backfired. Just BLEH. But really, that was the type of night - even the goals were trash.
I've probably made the point well enough that this was an UGLY game. Here's the score line: 0-1, 1-1, 2-1, 3-1, 3-2, 3-3, 4-3, 4-4, 4-5, 5-5, 5-6, 6-6, 6-7, 7-7, 8-7, 9-7, 9-8 (softcap on - SHEESH), 10-8, 10-9, 11-9 GAME Zorro. So never more than a two point advantage for either side.
How did we pull this out, you ask? Well, a little bit of parents-in-town-time-to-put-on-a-show action from me (he said humbly). The last six goals we scored were a break to Miller from me, a full-field forehand huck to Nat, a layout grab on a short huck and a break to Jeremy for the score, a trailing edge layout catch (beating BP deep), a sky in the back right corner over three peeps, and a front corner scramble to end it. A little bit of a takeover on my part, and I feel bad about this - as evidenced by last week, it's not necessarily that great to have one person involved in 73 percent of the teams' goals like I was in this game (I threw a score early in the game and had one of those famed "jump into the endzone" catch-scores where I managed to dodge the other team's poaching woman) - but I had gotten very frustrated with the mayhem on the field. I was happy with this because one, I was being guarded by BP for a lot of it, and though he did sky the crap out of me on one floaty huck, I came through against a very good defender, and two, I was doing it on 1.5 legs. So a good feeling, my parents got to see some nice plays and relive my youth vicariously again, and we won. So hoowa!
A lot of work left to do - we are a reasonable D team right now, but are essentially running around headless chicken style on O. Not good. I am psyched that Allyson is so receptive - we were talking about cutting and D strategies throughout the game, and she is clearly eager to learn and get better. Our wacky handler situation needs to get toned down, and I still feel like we're not utilizing Jack enough. Oh, and we need to cure a certain pair of players of the "only got eyes for you" syndrome. So yeah, it's league, and we need to un-sloppify it. Weird that we had so much trouble the last two weeks after the relatively pretty game we had against PH two weeks ago. Hopefully we'll get it to click - I guess this is the way it goes in hat leagues, and we just haven't come close to getting it together for sure yet. We can do it. In the meantime, gotta heal up, 'cause we got crossover games the next three weeks, including a
BATTLE OF THE BLOGGERS
showdown with Team Nabity. Oh, it's on. Yeah, I'm talking to YOU, CRAZY WRITER LADY!!!
1 With a few glaring exceptions - someone who shall remain nameless let off two or three hucks by Bill when we were marking straight up - no good - AND that same someone got beat deep by Bill for a score when the softcap was on! WHAT??? Getting beat deep by the aged handler with ailing knees with the game on the line? NARP!
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