In the Money / The Fourth

Had our second "Competitive Scrimmage for Money" yesterday on a very hot, muggy Fourth of July. A lot of players were out of town for Potlatch (a big fun times tournament up in Seattle) and others were simply out of town for the Fourth, so confirming attendance was a colossal hassle. Actually, it would not have been a colossal hassle if the people who were going to attend had just replied to my initial invite earlier in the week (Tuesday), but this is not exactly surprising as 1, they are Ultimate players and 2, they are human beings. So as of sometime Thursday, I only had 10 confirmed people coming including myself - so I made the game co-ed and invited out a few PHXation players and then just generally expanded the invite to the Ultimate-wide community. The PHXation players were just fine, I mean, they made it a co-ed game which is inherently different from a club men's game, but they can all still throw / catch / know what's going on. The VOTS-wide community component, though, probably knocked it down from "Competitive scrimmage" to "scrimmage" to "mmage." We had about 30 people come out total - some of the extra show-ups were just Sprawl-ish players who just either didn't confirm or confirmed way late, but some of whom were just VOTS-ish players. And no offense to them, but the whole thing dropped several notches of intensity as a consequence - and even some of the Sprawl-ish types did not stay entirely focused on playing "real" Ultimate. So the game suffered to some extent, though we all had a good time. Still, I feel bad that Josiah felt compelled to say, "I feel like i just lost five dollars playing pickup."

The teams:

Dark: BP, Tricky, Josiah, Jack, Ken, Jose, Brayden (aka Kid), Volo, Jeremy, Tim, Nipar, Derek (12 year old Connole), Joanne, Sarah, Monika, Lexi (for the first and third parts of the time).

White: Justin, Nyet, Russ, Craig, Chris (rando tall guy from out of town), Josh (VOTS guy), Jason (VOTS guy), Ben (VOTS guy), Kevin "Dad" Connole, Patrik, Sean C., Emily, Liz, Kaetlynn, Lexi (for the second third of the time).

So, a good turnout, but a lot of non-clubbers out there, plus a 12 year old and a 14 year old running around the field. Oh, well, like I said, good, if not entirely crispy, times. White came out storming the first game, hitting a couple of deep shots and capitalizing on a ton of bad, bad throws by dark. This game was a bit of a laugher, something lie 1-0, 2-0, 2-1, 3-1, ,3-2, 4-2, 5-2, 6-2, 6-3, 7-3, 8,9,10,11,12,13-3. Yowsers. Like I said, just lots of bad throws and drops from dark; we played okay, but certainly not so emphatically well that we should have run away with it like that. Bunch of good highlights - Liz caught the opening two goals of the game on hit-the-deck grabs; I hit Russ for some big deep scores; Kaetlynn made some excellent grabs; we were overall very chilly witht he disc, though, as admitted, a lot of this was helped by the fact that we were constantly playing on a ten yard field. Dark threw a hospital pass for J-RO at one pont, and I charged across the field to D it, realizing a little late that I just wasn't gonna get there in time despite the floatiness. I tried to stop and just caught J-Ro instead of running through him, but I efectively wrapped-up tackled him without driving him to the ground. Ouch - sorry, J-Ro, and I hope you were kidding about cracked ribs. Game one goes easily to white, though, and we were halfway to a free lunch.

By far the lowlight of the day happened early in the second game - Katelynn cut hard for a disc, Joanne on her heels, the throw was little behind K so she stepped sharply back to get the disc and ran right into Joanne. Joanne had been slowing down to get to the disc, but the overall effect of going for the thrown-behind disc was that sudden stop and get hit with your legs planted phenomenon. She twisted her knee and went down in a heap; I really hope it wasn't an ACL injury, but it certainly looked like it was possible. Ugh. Feel better, Joanne.

In non-devastating knee-injury news, we lost Justin for the second game - he had places to be - and it had a big impact. This game was much tighter - 0-1, 0-2, 1-2, 1-3, 2-3, 3-3, 3-4, 3-5, 4-5, 4-6, 5-6, 6-6, 7-6, 7-7, 7-8, 7-9, 8-9, 8-10, 8-11, 8-12, 9-12, 10-12... 10-13. This game was also sloppier, especially on our end - lotsa newbie bad throws. The mysterious Chris (who is not from here but is just here for the summer) had two throws to me, one was a laser flick at the corner of the endzone - we were playing on the baseball field at Rhodes, which is inevitably confusing because of the infield jutting into the field and the curved fence running along the sideline - anyways, the disc looked out of bounds when it was actually just over the sideline, so I tried a rather crazy toe-it-in layout to catch it when I probably just could have gone with a conventional layout. I miseed it, bah. And a point later, Chris launched a forehand deep for me - it looked like it was going to sail up, so while running after it I started looking for my defender (Kid) to see where he was going to be coming from so I could figure out a good route to take to the disc. The throw was inside out instead of outside in, so it dropped and tailed away from me instead of curving back to the field - I should have noticed this and run more directly after it, but by the time I figured out that it was a less-than-ideal throw, I had to lay out for the disc and missed the trailing edge catch. Bah. I also missed Craig with a huck in this game; that was pretty much it for my egregious errors on the day (if you don't count getting faked out by Craig's handler cut earlier and getting confused by Emily's start-stop cutting action). And, I suppose, if you don't count having Kid run around on me like crazy for a couple of points - dude is fast, and I just got very out of synch with him for a bit. I completely couldn't keep up. Sadness. Anyways, I had that bad stretch in the middle of the second game, but otherwise was solid. Yay - I am solid in a pseudo competitive game. i should be sure to put that on a blog or something. No really, I played well, had some good heads up play with BP whom I consider to be one of the best players (top five, easily) in the area, I was a little chumpy on D, but good on O and I took over a little bit toward the tail end. So overall, yay.

So tied at 1 after two games, necessitating a sudden death game to three. We won the flip, so we received, and despite our best efforts to tank it, we scored the first point. They responded by hucking it straight to Tim (Ha, I didn't even mean to do that - his last name is "Streit," FTR) off the pull and tying it 1-1. I got a huck off to Craig to make it 2-1, we got a turn, and Craig put a big forehand to me against Tricky. I got position on him, he clocked me in the back of the head as we both jumped, but I still grabbed the disc and fell in the endzone. And 1!!! And game. We won 3-1, which is nice because it also dispels griping about just winning because we won the flip. Free burgers, YEAH. I am now 2 for 2 in competitive money scrimmages and free lunches. YEAH.

So, as stated, fun if less than ideal times. Losers paid Liz, who ran to the grocery store and met us back at Jose's for a quick bbq. Unfortunately, not a whole lot of people came by to cash in - Liz and I were actually the only white team people who won the free lunch (the rest of the attendees were dark team LOSERS), so the proceeds really just went to Jose's general bbq fund. Ah, well. Good times relaxing with Ultimate peeps after the scrimmage, something I really don't do enough of. The over-the-top, gratuitous highlight: Monika and I were talking about breaking the mark, when someone who will remain nameless said, "Oh, I don't even notice where the mark is. I just throw it wherever I want." This is absurd generally, but given the speaker, symptomatic of delusions. Ay caramba.

Drove home from Chandler to find a sleeping Beck. Went to the grocery store and got some 4th of July gluttony supplies, and we spent the afternoon hanging out in the pool, reading, relaxing, and trying to train Wrigley (with the use of little smokey sausages) to jump in the pool (we failed; she will put her front two paws in, which is a major step - HA - but no jumping in quite yet). Beck marinated and cooked some steaks for dinner, we watched a little Burn Notice (a terrible but highly entertaining spy show) and I made us root beer floats for dessert. We can see (and unfortunately, hear) the downtown fireworks from our backyard, so we watched those for a bit and watched Sparkle cower in the house for the rest of the time. (There was a rather infamous incident up at the iPLakehouse one year on July 3rd, where we thought we had lost Sparkle but it turned out she was hiding under the bed from fireworks. Super sad).

Fun day, afternoon, and night - hope everyone else's Fourth was as grand as ours. Though I also hope everyone else's was not 107 degrees and humid like ours...