Another ugly game for the VOTS annals Monday night. Beck and I spent the day in Tucson and rolled back into town at about 7 for our 8 o'clock game against Plastic Falls, aka Team Nabity. The brutal wind storm from Sunday hadn't quite left the vicinity - it was considerably better, but there was still a stiff breeze from the west, meaning our field was decidedly divided into upwind / downwind directions. That stiff breeze fluctuated a lot over the course of the game, changing from nearly non existent to gusting with great frequency, and you can guess the kind of impact this had on not just a bunch of hat league players, but a bunch of PHOENIX hat league players who have as many words for wind as eskimos have for cacti. Aka none - we are especially incompetent in these conditions, and I knew off the bat that we would be in for a terrible night.
And the night, she did not disappoint. My first pull got hit by one of the aforementioned gusts and sailed onto the baseball field (homerun!); we got a quick turn and an easy chance at an upwinder, but Craig turfed an easy, easy throw to Nat. And it rained on from there - bad floaty throws, drops, chaotic offense on both sides, just a total mess. Capsule of the game was a twenty minute point in the middle where Eric's team kept working it upwind only to get D'ed or thrown out of bounds or dropped on the goal line (Allyson / Jeremy / Paul all came up with huge Ds here; even I poach-laid out on Tim on an errant throw for a D). We saw their incompetence and raised it with turns on our own ten yard line, drops, floaters, turfers, you name it. On multiple occasions, I turned to Tim and asked, "Can we just go home instead?"
Ah, the characters from the other team - they had Eric and Katherine, of course, and Eric Reif, Tom, Dave, Mel, Tim, and Fife, and Ned. A bunch of people I all enjoy playing with / against; I especially appreciated Ned, with whom I had a couple of spats regarding closeness of mark on the field, but we're both of the mindset that arguing about a call is not arguing about people; you can gripe about whether you were within a disc length or what have you and then chat on the sideline afterwards. Good stuff. Seriously, I just like playing against all those guys, because you can have an intense game without it devolving - as a consequence, when guys on the other team make sweet plays (see Eric's sky below), you feel good for them. And you can spend the whole game giving goofy trash talk and compliments and everyone just stays in good spirits, even if there's an occasional argument over a foul call. So good times.
They were unfortunately (and within their right, no complaint, I just rather it would've gone the other way) unwilling to go 4-3 as Mel had to leave and Katherine wasn't feeling entirely well. We're having some playing time issues - a few people on our team don't know exactly when to come off and when to let other people stay on, so we had some messed up chemistry going on our sidelines with people frustrated that they weren't getting to play as much and not getting the disc when they were playing. Combine this with the occasional 20 minute point and the fact that it was about 50 degrees with blustering winds, and you've got a bad situation - a whole lot of standing on the sideline and stiffening up. We SERIOUSLY need to work on this; Genevieve and I spent some time talking Tuesday about how we can make sure to even out field time and give some of our new players some easy opportunities to get the disc.
(The getting new people the disc problem is not exactly new in VOTS, and with the wind and the prevalence of zone last night, there were some times where it just wasn't easy to spread the disc around. We've been doing a reasonable job - we tried to get the disc to one of our new players when the game was 10-10 and he/she dropped it, so it's not like we're looking people off because the game is on the line - but still, it sucks for people to come out, run so hard and then not get a disc for the entire game. Will try to remedy this promptly).
Anyhoo, back to the silly game - everything stayed within a break for the duration, so the sequence of scores was probably something like 0-1, 1-1, 1-2, 2-2, 3-2, 4-2, 4-3, 4-4, 5-4 , 5-5 (hell point), 5-6, 6-6, 6-7, 7-7, 7-8, 8-8, 8-9, 9-9, 10-9 (upwind zone break), 10-10 (downwind choke), 10-11, 11-11, 12-11 (super upwind improbable comeback). So a tight game throughout, but really, because of the slew of turns, it felt a lot more like a classic battle of incompetence than a good game.
Despite all my bad-mouthing, there was a serious highlight. We had thrown zone on them once or twice, unfortunately matching up with the less windy portions of the game - I don't think our Z was very effective at all, so we abandoned it relatively quickly. They threw a Z late when the wind had started howling - just bad luck for us, and a great strategic call for them. It allowed them to collapse everything on top and essentially expect no long passes - I definitely had the disc at one point and looked up to see six of their seven players within 15 yards of me. So we had to attack it with really short passes and a ton of them - Nat and I estimated afterwards somewhere between 50 and 100 on that single point - but we worked it up the entire field for a score upwind from Nat to genevieve. Just a rare, inspiring point in which we just doink doinked it all the way up the field.
Of course, we didn't complete the break - we got a turn, and I cut wide open for the follow-up score, but Craig sent a high huck over my wrong shoulder to give them the disc back. D'oh. So Tim gets the disc, and sends an upwind huck to Eric Reif who is being closely guarded by Paul. Paul gets inside position, jumps, just misses the disc, and Eric skyes the everliving crap out of him. Just a sweet grab, and one of the better "right over him!" grabs I've seen on the VOTS fields in a while. Eric sent the next throw easily to the endzone, so that 50-100 throw point was for naught. Argh.
Soft cap goes on at 10-10, so it's now a game to 12. They get a turn off a bad high release from Chris and score downwind to go up 11-10; we get it back and shred their zone downwind (scoober to Jeremy in the back left corner) to make it 11-11. I was pretty sure we were going to lose this miserable game because Eric won the opening flip and had a one point advantage as far as going downwind. Sometimes I hate frisbee. So we put out a defensive line (Paul, Jeremy, Nat, Jack, myself, Allyson, Kelly? - Kelly stayed on this point INEXCUSABLY; she had already played more than her share of the women's points, and to not give way to genevieve at this point was just dumb. Genevieve, of course, is way too nice to say such things, and I didn't want to step in, but really - game on the line, our superstar captain should be out there) and ramped up. Got off a good pull, they tossed it around a bit but our defense was on top of them. They eventually tried a deep throw to Tom through double coverage (I had poached off); bad idea, disc sails out of bounds, so we at least had a shot to win the game upwind.
And we did! Shot to Nat in the middle of the field, over to Jack, Jack to Paul, Paul to me, and I hit Nat deep with a big OI, upwind backhand over the stack for the score. Huzzah! Improbable! Win! Yeah, whatever. Don't get me wrong - it's fun to win and all, and fun to come back from a tight spot like that -but it was just an ugly game, and with all the bad vibes from our sidelines w/r/t PT, I just didn't have any exuberant feelings. I played fine, handled well and had some good Ds, the usual amount of effort, etc., but just felt like crap after this game because of the peripheral goings on.
iPJ and iPMM also attended this game, but smartly went back to the car after about fifteen minutes because of the wind and cold. I don't blame them - really gave them a horrible show. Ah, well, glad we won, I suppose, if for no other reason to maintain Monday Wednesday trash-talk justification. But it really was one of the dumber games I've played out here, and we need to do some work to regain some good times team feelings.
ADDENDUM
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Fun quote from Katherine's blog:
"I must say, Zorro probably has the strongest group of female players I've come up against this season. Granted I wasn't feeling great, but chasing them around the field was rough."
This coming from an experienced captain on Monday night which supposedly has the better pool of ladies. So great job, Beck, Salina, Allyson, Genevieve and Kelly!
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