* - "Need?" Um, I "need" to defend a prospectus and start a research project in earnest, not be a blogger. And yet I press on. Don't worry, I don't understand my mindset either.
** - I'm going to start posting blog updates to facebook to see if I can generate some traffic / interesting conversation. Whaddya think, regular readers?
"Health is especially important because good health leads to a society that is healthy. Bad health leads to an unhealthy society ... health does not only effect [sic] the individual but the society as a whole. Anything that effects [sic] the whole society becomes vastly important."
"The lines between species have always been a bit fuzzy, and have lead to evolutionary
adaptations. For example, mules are the offspring of a male donkey and a female horse. However, this argument moreso implies that eventually, the sexual interaction between humans and animals will be accepted."
Sorry for the repeats if you've already seen those on facebook, but hey, they're gems. Beck maintains that "Man has battled cancer since the age of the dinosaurs" is the undefeated-and-still-champion, but I am not sure. I also should not talk too much trash as I'm reasonably certain my papers were horrible, though I should say that I made no sweeping claims regarding bestiality, no tautological statements regarding health leading to health, and no claims that sterile animals were an example of evolution. It's the little things that separate the grads from the under-suches. Anyways, the rough semester is over and on pause for at least a couple of weeks in which I can catch my breath, get a little of my own work done, and, hey, write some blog posts*. Speaking of...
* - I should pause to give mad props to my labmate (and effective teaching boss for this semester) Jenny, who taught her first full university course and kicked its ass. There were some background details that made her workload stupid this semester, but she absolutely pulled it off with style and grace and Rita Hayworth gave good face. Seriously, I am extraordinarily proud to be associated with her; congrats on a great semester and here's to many more to come. As an added bonus, I think it's difficult for "equals" to be paired in a teacher-TA hierarchy like that, and we crushed it, kept it fun and efficient and wowsers. I hope (and sincerely doubt) the undergrads appreciated it.
Sprawl rolled up to Ogden, Utah, two weekends ago and brought its asphalting / tarring / road repair supplies. We won the open division A-bracket of Daweena, the first time Sprawl has accomplished that feat (i.e., the first time Sprawl has won a tournament outright) and had a sweet time doing it. Details below, but check out these CHAMPIONS:
Clay, Ryan, Vince, Ian, Tim, Big Nate, Jason, Cole, Nappi, Jim, Joser, Dixon
Tom, eBay, J-Ro, Dheintime, Rob, Paul, Nyet
Tom, eBay, J-Ro, Dheintime, Rob, Paul, Nyet
A tres handsome bunch and not even really our A squad - BP, Griesy, Garret and others had to stay home for one reason or another, but we definitely danced with the ones we done brung. Actually, I should stop the self-congratulatory nonsense before it gets too out of control - Daweena is in its death throes as a tournament it seems. In the past, some big club teams have shown up, and even in the very recent past, the perennially Nationals-bound Johnny Bravo made appearances as did our in-division rivals Sweet Roll from New Mexico. This time around, well, you can check out the pools for yourself at the Daweena site, or I can just put them up here:
| Pool A | Pool B |
| 1 Sprawl (Phoenix) | 2 Three 2 (Salt Lake City) |
| 4 The Killjoys (Provo, Utah) | 3 War Child (Boise) |
| 5 N.U.D.E (Logan, Utah) | 6 John Eichall Scoring Exp. (SLC) |
| 7 Good Game (Rexburg) |
Not exactly the Boston Invitational lineup. So really, we came into a tournament as a one-seed (also a Sprawl first) and held it. Not really all that spectacular in the grand scheme of things. Also a tad annoying that we traveled all that way to face a paltry six other teams, two of which obeyed the "BYU rule." What's that, you ask? Well, Mormons don't play on Sundays, and the state has quite a few of them. So effectively after day one, two teams dropped out entirely because of their Latter Day commitments. So we really bested four other teams. Sigh. Still, trophies are trophies, as they say, so we'll take the tournament victory.
And actually, the whole "hey, no one showed up" phenomenon was a bit of a problem. The majority of us* flew** up after work on Friday and, thanks to the evening departure, the hour and a half flight, the lost hour due to time zone "change," the car rental process and the drive from SLC up to Ogden, UT, we got to our hotel pretty late. The tournament director, as indicated above, was having trouble and trying to recruit teams until the last minute, so he didn't post the tournament program online until sometime where we were in the air over Nevada. So we didn't find out until late Friday night what our competition would be, and unfortunately, I don't think we responded well. At the hotel, late at night, there was a definite vibe of "Hey, no one's here, we got this," to the point that people were up and dicking around to one extent or another pretty late. Beck, JD and I made a grocery store run late that night in preparation for a serious Saturday, but we were the few who seemed to be locked in on the weekend ahead. And that would definitely come back to bite us on Saturday.
* - "Us" in my case included Beck and me, as my lovely wife took the opportunity to take a quick vacation in Salt Lake City for the weekend. She avoided the tournament entirely - a great call - and got to enjoy some museums, eateries, temples and the Great Salt Lake around Utah. We got a separate hotel room away from the 6 to a room mayhem that always accompanies tournaments, an arrangement that did wonders both for my sleeping comfortably next to someone vastly more attractive than the average Sprawler and for my not having to sleep next to someone who rambles violently in his sleep (cough cough Dixon) or conducts sonorous nasal symphonies at 95 decibels all night (let's just call him > Nate). It was also, natch, fun to travel with the Beck, and we got dinner, hung out and had a very normal-style vacation when I wasn't running around in the sun. Great time, and good to get away - SLC was approximately 65 and gorgeous all weekend while Sunny Azz was in the upper 90s, so the Beck definitely made the right call, even if she did have to hang out for moments with the motley paving crew. Here she is in profile hanging at the Great Salt Lake:
** - Two cars (eight dudes) drove the 12 hours from Phoenix to Ogden. I haven't driven more than 6 hours to a tourney since Tufts spring break in '02, and let me assure you that flying is the way to go, particularly if your drive each way is going to involve a desert and a possible through the night timeframe. Egads, I am, in strictly Lethal Weapon terms, too old for that shit. Anyways, props to the dudes for saving cash, but I was super glad on both ends to make it to my destination in a scant few hours without having to crowd into a vehicle for half a day.
So we rolled down to hotel lobby on Saturday and grabbed a free breakfast - I was SO HAPPY to have my routine Quaker Oatmeal available as a breakfast option, and adding some Cheerios (normally too expensive at our local grocery) was an added bonus. That's crazy, I know, you would think you would want something a little fancier at a hot hotel breakfast, but it hit the spot for me. The nineteen sporty dudes were surrounded, encompassed even, by a preteen / early teens dance competition crowd staying at the hotel, which made for quite the breakfast buffet scene. We're talking a swarming sea of besequined premenarchals, with Cougar-esque overly enthusiastic moms taboot. We were more or less behaved (yet told not a few mayhaps inappropriate Dixxxxxxxon jokes*), but really most of the convo was locked into how we were going to roll everyone at the tourney. Bad signs on the concentration front. We got collected and headed to the tournament; I left Beck to sleep in and enjoy her day in the big, overly clean and naive-as-to-the-true-meaning-of-postmodernism city.
* - that is a shoutout to any Tuftsman who may be reading, btw.
We got to the actual fields (I mean, with grass and tape lines and everything - we didn't know what to do with ourselves, so used to the barren Phoenix dirt-crete as we were) and got in a pretty decent warm-up, but it was apparently not enough. Our first game was against N.U.D.E. They started things off hucking and zoning, and we were apparently not ready for that in the slightest as we botched some easy plays and went down 2-0 quickly. Gathered ourselves and shredded the next few zone incarnations, causing them to drop the approach entirely*. We traded until about 4-4 and then got our collective act together - they had a couple of reasonable players, but really had no business hanging with us for as long as we did. We ran it out to 14-4 from there and won 15-5. That seemed to serve as a wakeup call, but it really wouldn't get us all the way awake . . . things were rusty throughout this game; I have us down for 12 turnovers on the score sheet, but some of that is probably unreliable tracking. The name of the game Saturday was rusty - we just were not clicking well and not valuing the disc. More to come. Unfortunately, after that quick win, we had a few hours to lose our focus as an odd number of teams invariably means a bye. Three hours off between games is not excellent, for the record (and you would think they would maybe given the team who traveled the furthest more games...)
* - Why do teams do this? Oh, no, they shredded our Z once, therefore we should never throw it again! I mean, I know it took them 75 throws, but they SCORED! Seriously, peeps, take a statistics class.
* - Why do teams do this? Oh, no, they shredded our Z once, therefore we should never throw it again! I mean, I know it took them 75 throws, but they SCORED! Seriously, peeps, take a statistics class.
Game 2 was the Killjoys, incidentally one of the Mormon teams. They featured some solid players and one supergoon who was clearly a basketball crossover and had no concept of rules. Awesome. After a little "let's stop thinking about how easy this tournament's going to be" intergame speech from Nyet, we came out defensively insane, getting big turns and running things out to a 5-0 and then a 6-1 lead. Easy skeezy... not so much. We went on a really bad, turnover-heavy stretch and let them tie it up 7-7. We were playing some pretty trigger / huck happy teams all weekend, so the closeness of games was almost entirely dependent on how low percentage we were with the disc. That's sorta always the case in Ultimate, but other than getting beat deep on occasion, our D was pretty intense all weekend, it was really just the O that kept screwing things up with low percentage attempts. We did take half, but the rest of this game was a nasty battle back and forth - we got up 13-10 and had another collapse, actually letting them know it at 14s. That was quite a scare - but some big plays (I notched it at 15 with a huge flick huck to Dixon, and then our D lines came up huge) secured us a 17-15 win in a game that should not have been that close.
Now is as good of a time as any to insert self-centered commentary: I had two turns the whole weekend, and they unfortunately both came late in this game, both on overzealous, yes-this-is-a-tough-throw-but-I've-got-it-nine-times-out-of-ten IO flick hucks. The first one was to Big Nate, and just didn't quite get high enough; his beaten guy stepped in front and knocked it down. So I overcompensated on the next one and hung one up to eBay. That one actually wasn't as bad as it still went out to the proper side and gave him plenty of position on a guy who was shorter than he was; still, it wasn't crisp by any means, and eBay couldn't come down with it. Terrible, terrible timing on my part as this let them back into it late. Luckily, my D teammates picked me up, and we came away with it. I still felt pretty terrible there for a bit; hard to yell at people about valuing the disc when you're making crunch time errant, risky throws.
Speaking of feeling terrible - knee had still been bothering me pretty badly for the month before Daweena, so after the league finals tourney (two weeks before Daweena, write-up forthcoming), I tried to rest it up. This meant that in the two weeks prior to Daweena, I had sprinted once, at a Saturday SLUG, and had otherwise just ridden the stationary bike and run on the elliptical. So cardio wise, I was fine, but man, I had no quick-twitch or speed burst at all on Saturday. This manifested itself a few times: Big Nate threw a stall nine desperation blade to the back of the endzone that I swear I had but my legs just wouldn't move, so I ended up having to lay out for a trailing edge bid and missed it; Jim and Trant tossed me errant dumps that normally would've been fine, but I laid out to find myself two inches short on each; I beat a guy for an easy goal to the backhand side that Tim led me too much on and I just had no extra gear to run it down. And Dhein put a huck up to me that hung up a bit, giving the aforementioned goon time to run down and sky me from behind (in my defense, he did have about four inches on me, and the throw was sub-awesome). All that stuff, and I got beat deep twice by young dudes, and I just couldn't change directions well. Turns out you actually need to sprint now and then to be fine tuned for a sport that requires quick bursts of speed. So I felt pretty bad about my general athletic ability and play at moments on Saturday for sure.
All of that said - good experience. I was not 100% on Saturday, and I had a really bad stretch late in that 2nd game (and a little bit into the third game), but I kept my head, recalibrated and made some big hucks and breakmark throws to help us out. I'll fully admit I was down on myself at times, but I gutted it out and came through alright. So yay for me. (And two throwaways, one that was really more of an inadvertent 50-50 throw than an explicit throwaway, in five games is not terrible at all, especially given the number of hucks and shots I did hit). So probably a personal B / B+ weekend overall - I can play better, but I pretty much got my job done. Particularly since I evaluated the play on Saturday and came back for Sunday with a calmer, clearer head and played near perfectly. Trant helpfully pointed out that I need to QB the team more - meaning do more staying back and handling and less joining the cutting fray - and I agree. So there's that to work on, too.
All of that said - good experience. I was not 100% on Saturday, and I had a really bad stretch late in that 2nd game (and a little bit into the third game), but I kept my head, recalibrated and made some big hucks and breakmark throws to help us out. I'll fully admit I was down on myself at times, but I gutted it out and came through alright. So yay for me. (And two throwaways, one that was really more of an inadvertent 50-50 throw than an explicit throwaway, in five games is not terrible at all, especially given the number of hucks and shots I did hit). So probably a personal B / B+ weekend overall - I can play better, but I pretty much got my job done. Particularly since I evaluated the play on Saturday and came back for Sunday with a calmer, clearer head and played near perfectly. Trant helpfully pointed out that I need to QB the team more - meaning do more staying back and handling and less joining the cutting fray - and I agree. So there's that to work on, too.
Alright, slap a to be continued here - we'll finish Saturday and cover Sunday in the next post.
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