Last weekend (Sept. 12-13), I traveled with Sprawl down to Tucson with Sprawl for Club Sectionals. I was still (and am still, really) in knee-gimp mode - the last time I played "for real" was in Denver at the beginning of August - so I wasn't going to risk limping around for days afterwards by playing at Sectionals. I did feel guilty for the extent to which I had let the team down, injury-wise, so I met with BP (team captain) earlier in the week to talk about calling sub lines for the weekend and otherwise being a sideline coach. Seemed like the least I could do, and besides, with someone else there to coach / call lines, the captains could focus more on their playing. Hooray for small deeds.
Actually, I'll give myself two points of karmic value; driving down to Tucson for the weekend to just watch others play (and become more and more miserable at the fact that you cannot) is a hair above the call of duty. I had plenty of schoolwork to do as well as a lecture to get ready for this week (more on that later), so it's not like a trip to Tucson wasn't costing me anything. SO yeah, good job Nyet for helping out the team at your own expense. Borderline altruistic. Plus, any thoughts I had on bailing for the weekend were killed when I agreed to give Paul, Cisco and Stoli a ride to Tucson. Nothing like a little interpersonal commitment to prevent one's moral failings. Actually, that was a pretty fun little 1.5 hour car ride that we took 4 times*; good convo and hanging and listening to a miscellaneous collection of four and five star songs**.
* - I really don't like going to tournaments and sleeping in a hotel or on someone's floor unless absolutely necessary. We used to drive to Austin and back from Rice (2.5 hours) back in the day just for the privilege of going to Rice parties and sleeping in our own beds, and it was always worth it. So yep, we drove down and back, down and back again in the two days. It was well worth it (more later), even if mother nature did have to take a second hit to her carbon-load.
** - Paul tried to nominate me car DJ, which I resoundingly rejected with "I am not DJ by nomination, but by divine right." I didn't have a ton of time to make mixes as Beck and I had a date that night - a terrible, terrible Italian place around the corner, ugh - so I just collected my four.five star songs, shuffled them, and recorded the first six mp3 discs worth of songs for the drive. Turns out that the iTunes Shuffle feature really likes the Beatles, as a disproportionate amount of Fab Four songs, even for my collection, showed up on the first disc. Oh, well. Good tunes / times, and yes Eric, a hip-hop number or two showed up later.
Long story short, this is what I did all weekend:
That's Skunk, Alan, Rob, Brady and Tom in the relative foreground (um, hey jackass writer, when is the foreground NOT relative?), and me hunched over and recording playing time and plus-minus stats on an Excel file. That's right, not only did I call lines, I went "sauermetric" and calculated our team efficiencies and individual plus-minuses. There is a dork within me; he rears his head often. The info was actually very valuable, not just in terms of keeping track of subs and PT, but in doing at least a little evaluation of teamwide strengths / weaknesses and a little bit of figuring out which players are possibly D players and which are better O players. Good stuff, I'll try to include it in this account.
Saturday was a strange day in Ultimate terms because we only had three games scheduled (four is more typical) and two of them were again the Sprawl B team ("Heat Stroke") and a bad, bad college team from University of New Mexico ("Hanta Virus"). In other words, two easy games and really just one competitive game against a club team from Tucson called Monsoon. BP wanted, however, to give our lines a solid chance to play together (not always easy to get everyone at the same practices), so we didn't really back off in either of the first two games until we were well ahead. Which turned out to be roughly halftime. We crushed Sprawl B 15-3 and UNM 15-2, which is entirely nothing to get hung about. But it meant that we had one game left for the day and a lot of our starters had plenty of gas in the tank. So we were going to throw the book at Monsoon to make sure we won our pool outright and got ourselves into the finals.
A side note about Ultimate line-calling - it's a pain in the butt. 19-20 players for 7 spots on the field, and Ultimate players are far too egalitarian minded to note that, for example, for the majority of sports, half of the guys on the team play not at all in a given game. So everyone is expecting to play roughly a third of the time, even though that is obviously dumb; if our starters are going to grab roughly 50% of the playing time, those extra points have to come from somewhere. I did my best to keep things balanced; in retrospect, I wish we had benched starters after the first few points in the opening two games and let everybody get their kicks and giggles in those contests. Again, those were not the orders, so no go. Anyways, it's tough to call lines - you're trying to give people two points in a row and then some time off, but some points are much harder / longer than others, so that doesn't always balance out. You have an idea about which players you want out on offensive points and defensive points, but if you're killing another team, you play almost exclusively defensive points - half your lineup is getting no PT. You go in with an idea - I want guy A to play 30% of the points, guy B to get 40%, guy C to get 50% - but you can't too many of those 30% players on the field at the same time, and you have to match positions and roles. People get hurt here and there. And worst of all, people stand behind you, reading over your shoulder, making comments about the amount (read: lack) of PT they're getting. Just awesome. Anyways, it's a little complex, and hopefully I did a reasonable job.
So game 3 on Saturday rolls around, and it's book-throwing time. So we do - BP, Justin G., Justin D. (buddy from WEfnuk days), Dixon, Vince, Josiah, Stoli, and to a lesser degree, Trant, all get significantly more points than the others. We throw out lines of Justins, Dixon, BP, Stoli, Vince and Trant for some points, which is pretty much putting a Power Play 1 team out there. Some people were cool with it - I specifically remember Brady and Aaron telling me, unasked, "don't worry about us, just win the game." AKA the appropriate attitude. Others not so much. Ah, well. The all-star lines worked - rolled over Monsoon 15-9, putting us in the finals Sunday morning against Sweet Roll, the New Mexico club team that is simultaneously Sprawl's best friend and nemesis. Sprawl has never *really* beaten Sweet Roll (partial lineups in Flagstaff tournaments this year doesn't count), so everyone was amped for a Sunday 11 AM throwdown. Those three games only took us until 3:45, which was fantastic, as we were headed back to Phoenix by 4:00 and got home by 5:30. WHich means I had plenty of time to run over to Tempe for a monthly poker game that Beck and I play in with Jason and Grant from ASU and some other miscellaneous card not-sharks.
TBC
No comments:
Post a Comment