* - What was wacky was not that they had fooled me or anything, but that I had such a non-reaction to it - my first thought at the news of Cole's broken leg was "well, that figures," not "Oh no!" Pessimism has its regulatory advantages when things turn out badly. Or... are joked about turning out badly, I guess.
So after checking out the scene for a few minutes and confirming our first field, I cleated up, braced up, and got ready to go. Got the team rolling into our pregame routine and jogged over to the captain's meeting at 8:15. Pretty low key affair - unlike recent tourneys which lacked basic Ultimate necessities like water and oxygen, the folks in charge of Colorado Cup (Boulder's GRUB) know what's going on and had all the gears in place. Food, trainer, water, massages, you name it. Beautiful fields taboot. (Actually, other than double booking us on a field on Sunday, the weekend could not have gone smoother from a tourney perspective - props to those guys). (Wait, withdrawn - the pizzas they got us on Saturday were wack. Four larges per team - that's 32 slices for the 21 guys on Sprawl, if you're into math - and the breakdown was one meat, one cheese and two veggie. I am confident a treehugging Boulderite was in charge of the 75% vegetarian-friendly call). Everything was in order; games to fifteen all day long with no unusual rules in place. We were in the open division, just like last year, where we had gone 3-4 (and 2-4 three years ago, 2-5 four years ago); CO Cup also has an elite division, featuring the likes of Johnny Bravo and GOAT and Furious George and such over the years, but we are not quite there yet. The pools were a little odd - there were 9 other open teams, so instead of the usual pool play on Saturday, elimination play on Sunday setup, we were to do a faux round robin and play seven of the other teams between Saturday and Sunday. The top two finishing teams then square off in the finals. On the plus side, everybody gets seven games at minimum; on the minus, it seems a little susceptible to luck of the draw in the who-you-don't-play department. Good deal nonetheless, as avoiding the two pools of five setup meant no byes throughout the day - no fun to travel that far to spend two hours of the day sitting around.
I got back to the team after the captain's meeting to find Sprawl fully in gear and getting ready to scrimmage; I took a couple of laps on my own and sprinted a bit to test things out. I didn't feel great at all - seemed to be topping at out at, oh, 80% energy, but I thought that could probably get me through a day of O-line only play. Came back, ran a few points in our scrimmage and couldn't really keep up with people on D but felt just fine on O, so I gave myself an amber-shade-of-green light for the day.
First game was against long-time rival Sweet Roll. Word on the street (field?) is that the boys from New Mexico are increasing their chances for a nationals appearance by teaming up with the girls from new Mexico and going co-ed - we ran into the co-ed version of New Mexico at Mohini, and indeedily, they look quite good as a two-gender unit. This is sort of unfortunate from an Ultimate drama standpoint - Sweet Roll was established well before Sprawl, and the two teams have always been very friendly with one another. They are, in short, great guys with whom we get along swimmingly. But they are also guys who have beaten Sprawl every time the two teams have squared off. So it's long been a goal of Sprawl's to "beat Sweet Roll," regardless of how warm-fuzzy we feel about them. We took them to double game point (or something close) last year at sectionals and couldn't convert, so now with Sweet Roll disassembling, Sprawl will not really get the chance to beat them in the club series and get the torch passed or what have you. Sad.
But that's okay, because enough of Sweet Roll came to Colorado Cup that game one of Saturday represented a sort of last chance to break through the Sweet Roll barrier, and Sprawl did not disappoint. Both days were very mild wind-wise, a factor that played sharply in Sprawl's windless-Valley-of-the-Sun hometown favor. The D-lines came out swinging, putting the Phoenix crew up 3-0 before NM knew what had hit them. And with turnover-free play from Sprawl's offense in the first half, the good guys were up 8-3 in a blink. More of the same with a little less focus in the second half, and this epic turning of the tides was anything but - Sprawl won in a 15-7 relative no contest.
Before I get crazy rolling with this, I should just throw out who was there. Your 2010 Colorado Cup Sprawl Traveling Squad:
Trant, Joe K, Dixon, Jim, Vince, Cole, BP, Josh, Griesy, Skunk, Ebay, Big Nate, Will
Paul, Kyle, Nyet, J-Ro, Aaron "32 Ounces of Ice" H., Rob, Studer, Ian
Great group, and what we figured out really quickly was yes, we have the studs to run with anyone, but we also have an exceptionally deep team - when people fall into their roles properly, having 21 guys that you can just send in waves at the opponent is downright oppressive. Sweet! I'll throw in some individual play commentary at some point here, but good enough for now to have those pretty guys' pictures upfront so you can visualize the goodness.
Really, I'm afraid that this writeup is going to be somewhat boring - the Sweet Roll game was pretty indicative of what was to come all weekend. Our O was, for the most part, downright clinical - we scored on 89% of our O points, 67% of our possessions, and 68% of the time we received the pull, we marched it down and scored sans turnover*. A team that is hardly giving up any breaks to speak of like that is going to be tough to beat, and on top of that, our D lines were pressuring opponents like crazy, forcing mistakes and scoring at a 57% clip themselves. The D-line play occasionally failed to differentiate their hot D from their chilly O - i.e., sometimes overly aggressive, chancy O attempts followed aggressive D play, and we turned it over unnecessarily - but as a squad, we stayed positive didn't get down on any mistakes, and continued to ramp it up. Just a pretty weekend - better teams will not make it so easy on us, but we took care of bidness, as they say, and were remarkably efficient.
* - My memory of all the games this weekend will look like this: J-Ro or EBay catches the pull, flips it to me. Griesy or BP's man is playing behind them by five yards, so BP/Griesy takes the easy fifteen yard gain. If it's BP, he flips to Griesy who then hucks it to Cole for a goal; if it's BP, he hits Dixon, who flips it back to J-Ro, who swings it to me, who breaks the mark to Griesy, who hucks it to Cole. Rinse, repeat. I can't emphasize enough that I spent a good deal of my weekend jogging behind the play; not to say that I didn't have to run and play hard on occasion, but I have no doubt that the smoothness of our O was the only thing that got me and my low tank of energy through the weekend.
On to game 2 against a somewhat older crew from Tucson, Monsoon. Same story - D-lines got us off to a great start, O-lines refused to turn it over - the whole team only turned it over four times this game, sheesh - and things rolled to a quick 15-5 rout. Time and again, teams stopped against us this weekend - even if things were contested at first, Sprawl effectively convinced opponents that there was no real point to running hard. So there was a general pattern of man defense for the first half followed by a few half-hearted attempts at zone that got diced, and then a fair bit of seemingly going through the motions. At times, it was hard to keep Sprawl's focus - we definitely sputtered more often in the last few points of games while up big, and given our capacity to let teams back into it (see Daweena), that's a tendency we'll want to kill.
Things changed quite a bit for game 3 against Flux, an Austin team featuring none other than my Rice teammate Marcus "Cuse!" Gavin. Again, Flux couldn't stop our offense, but we had some trouble stopping theirs, too - they ran a vertical stack, the first one we've seen in a while, and ran some nice plays where they dinked it around until they could huck to a good matchup. It confused us effectively, and after they came down in Z got a couple of extremely uncharacteristic turns from Joe K, they took half 8-6, up by two (!) breaks. Impressively, we did not sweat it at all, instead trying to figure out how to crack their O - we ended up running some hybrid D's with a lot of switching / last-backing, and with a break right after half another shortly thereafter, our D pulled it back to 10-10. They continued to Z us, we continued to be exceptionally calm with the disc on the O side, and eventually our deeper squad caught up with them: another break at 11-11 to put us ahead, and another break at 13-12 to put us out in front by two for good. This was a fantastic game - only 8 turns on our side, and just 9 by them, with an extraordinarily clean second half from our team. And it was great to play against a former teammate who was definitely their team's *guy* - seems the Rice factory continues to produce. I'm sorry, make that The Rice University.
We ended day one with a four turnover, same-as-it-ever-was win against Inception (a team who, by contemporariness of team name alone, you can tell had to be a local pickup squad). We ran off to a 5-0 lead and never really looked back - again, just too much athleticism and too many pairs of legs carrying it. 15-4 was the final, and we did a much better job of keeping the whole team locked in during this one. The early finish gave us great seats for the showcase game, a Universe point showdown between local favorites Johnny Bravo and the Canadian GOAT; the Canucks took it in an upset, and we enjoyed that mightily over all 32 pieces of our pizza.
Beck had a great day and joined us for the first half of the showcase game; she and I left at halftime and considered going to a divey-ish Boulder bar called the Dark Horse but thought better of their limited menu and headed back to the hotel and downtown Louisville. We ended up settling on a place called Waterloo for dinner, and yes, Austinites, that is the same Waterloo as Waterloo Records - the place was decked out in music label gear and had some Texas fare on the menu, too. Despite spending much of the day jogging on the field and watching Griesy huck it to Cole, I was starving, so I engaged in my usual mid-tourney caloric absurdity - bread, Guinness, asparagus cheese dip, a bowl of tomato bisque, mini-grilled cheese sandwiches, more bread, a potato burger* w/ cheese and a big plate-ful of fries replaced whatever I burned on the field during the day. Very, very good. We made it back to the hotel relatively early - 10-ish - and I packed our week-plus worth of stuff to put it in the car the next morning and set my Ulty clothes out for championship Sunday.
* - Ground beef w/ mixed shredded potato that maintains the moisture of the burger (supposedly). 'Twas excellent.
TBC...
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