I should also not fail to mention that D/C had a birthday dinner / party on Saturday night. We couldn't get to the dinner on time because of the frisbee, but Christina had e-mailed us a few times and kept sending texts that she really hoped we could make it for dessert at their place ... which was fine, but a little odd as we had already planned to meet them at their house afterwards. It was as though you called someone to say "Okay, I'll see you at the movie" and they replied "I really hope we see you at the movie!" Um, okay. :) Turns out their was a method to the madness (or at least a hormonal explanation?) - over some delicious cheesecake and pie, we were very excited to find out that D/C is now D/C+ and are roughly ten weeks along! Yay! Congrats to the happy couple, and we look forward to thoroughly spoiling your offspring.
Back to the disc: Sunday started off with a showdown with the Tucson guys in the form of Arson/Monsoon featuring a few of the people we tangled with in the finals of Hoasis (with the noted absence of Grob). If the Nyet-Dhein-Cole combo beat them at Hoasis, the Sprawl combo overwhelmed them. I was nervous going in, realizing that Saturday's opponents had turned out to be a little lacking, and wondering what the quarters would hold. No worries needed - the D just swarmed, got the disc and did not give it back. It was 4-0 before anyone had blinked, our D had not turned it over ... when we turned an endzone possession over that would have made it 5-0, the general sentiment (and the actual quote heard*) was "Wow, they made a mistake." We didn't make many - 7 turns total, and our D pretty much ruled the game. A quick 13-3 win gave us time to watch the B+ squad battle it out with Le Tigre, the team I played with at NYF last year**. This time around it was still the core of Jamal and a few older guys, but they also had some of the Sweet Roll stalwarts (whose names I don't recall). The B+ guys tried hard to set up a semis rematch, but Le Tigre/ Roll rolled, so we were going to be facing some of our big rivals on the way to the semis.
* - Speaking of, well, speaking, with the other team I mean, I did nearly none of it this weekend. I think I made one call (on Jose in the B+ game, who pretty gratuitously ran into me - it wasn't bad, just dumb, and you can see it early in the video on the previous post) all weekend and generally kept all my fiery discussion to our huddle. BUT one thing happened in this game that was funny while I was not in the game (and thus not "making a call") but on the sideline. We pulled it, the disc was floating clearly out of bounds, but after the receiver on the other team made the brick call, he caught the disc about five yards out of bounds. By rule, he had to play the disc where it crossed the sideline - you have to let it actually land out of bounds in order to make the middle call (for the hopefully obvious reason that you don't want people calling out of bounds on close discs and then catching them such that you would never know; plus it gives you a time advantage to catch the disc and run to the middle of the field. Regardless of the rationale, the rule is very plain). So as he started to walk it to the middle, I pointed out that hey, wait, you have to play it there. Grumble, grumble from the other team - it was 10-2 at the time, why are you being so particular, etc. But my favorite was the classic Ultimate comment, "Are we gonna play Ultimate, or are we going to play the rules?" I was trying to be in nice mode, so I said to go ahead and take it to the middle, but know the rule, and the captain from the other team actually sincerely thanked me for the good spirit. Anyways, that was the height of controversy from me this weekend, so yay for that.
** - Interestingly enough, the "red-headed guy" I mentioned clocking in that past is Ian who is now running with Sprawl. Great dude, great player, and *that* is part of the general coolness going on - we're attracting players down from Flagstaff! Hope we can keep this up.
Again, I got a little nervous - the Sweet Roll players were stud dudes, probably the best competition we had seen so far. What I forget in these situations is that our DUDES - BP, Rob, Dhein, Griesy, Cole, and Dixon in particular - are way more than two tall dudes can handle. Our guys all brought the fire, AGAIN - we started on O for the first time on the weekend, but quickly went up a break 2-0, then traded to 4-2, then ran it to 6-2 before making our first turn. Our big guys shut their big guys down, and we AGAIN were just way too much for them, with another stellar across the lineup effort. Only five turns* in this one, most coming well after the game was decided, and we clubbed our way to the finals 13-4. Lots of excitement for this one as most of the other local teams (ASU alumni, Phxation teams, etc.) were done playing by this point, so we had a sizable crowd and a lot of people giving the "when did Sprawl get good?" quotes. Even Vince, who quite moronically decided to play with ASU Alumni this weekend, was kicking himself a bit over not playing with a team that had finally worked itself into something of a crisp machine. Anyways, Le Tigre was very gracious in the loss, wishing us luck against PBR Street Gang in the finals (and Jerrel asking me to hurry up and turn 33 so I can play in the masters series).
* - I made my first turn of the weekend in this one on a backhand huck to Griesy that he pulled up on and couldn't catch up to. I do not regret it, as it was exactly the throw I wanted to make. As all handlers know, it is always the receiver's fault, but on this one I thought I laid out there for him well enough. Ah, well.
Ah, the finals - PBR Street Gang is a San Diego team placed 15th at nationals last year and actually made some noise, beating semifinalist Ironside in pool play and GOAT along the way. They brought a limited but quite talented squad to NYF and looked to be some serious competition - Dhein and I had been excited all week to see what we could do against a nationals-caliber bunch. We ended up playing a tense, action-packed finals that was one of the more exciting Ultimate games I've seen / been a part of. The skinny is that we lost by a single break, 14-12, but more importantly quite obviously demonstrated that we can hang with these guys, no question. The game was (obviously) a lot tougher than the rest of our weekend's games, and there were quite a few differences that took hold when playing an elite team:
- They killed, killed us on 50-50 discs. Just had tall dudes who went up and got it. They were generally more tenacious on discs in the air than I've seen in quite some time, and this was easily the difference of the game - they made more plays than we did. This is a decided weakness of ours, and something we will work on (it also would have helped to have another goon on our side, VINCE!)
- Their hucks were actually accurate and all playable. Other teams threw it away deep way more often than these dudes did.
- They broke us pretty easily. We need nastier marks, no doubt.
- They were the first team to resort to junk defenses - half-zones and poaches - to slow us down. This on the one hand is good because it means they could not stop us in a straight man to man setup, but it's bad because we didn't react to it fast enough. But the latter is actually fine because we were using this weekend to work out the kinks in our O - phase two is to adjust to the weird things that D's try to do against us.
I'll put up some videos, highlights and photos of finals in a separate post, as this is getting long.
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