First game Sunday was against Interesting Tummy Birds, a shall-we-say tempestuous squad that we had seen make some shall-we-say subjective calls the previous year. We were ready for a battle, but eerily confident - it helped that our team was up, cleated and running about by 8:20 or so, whereas they were stumbling on to the field at 8:45 in an actual, legitimate stupor. What really really helped was that GRUB was running an observer training weekend, and Sprawl would be playing with observers for the first time in its history (that I know of). Ultimate is normally self-refereed, but as I am sure you will shocked to learn, as things get more competitive, things get more competitive, and things get shall-we-say subjective. Heated. Chippy. Unruly, even. So observers showing up for a game that probably would have been chirpy if not chippy was great, plus it gave us a chance to play in a stringent "don't be offsides" type environment. Sprawl looked forward to the challenge, and we looked across at our barely awake opponents and got ready to see if the Saturday flow was still in order.
Fifth verse, same as the fourth, second and first - in probably our best all around game of the weekend, we turned it over a mere four times (three on D, one on O) en route to a 15-6 beatdown. Hell, we didn't turn the disc over until it was 10-4! This was by far our best job of maintaining focus through to the end, and playing with the observers worked just fine - we learned quickly to toe the line (literally! HA!) on O points and time our run-up on pulls, plus we got used to the time restrictions and called our lines quickly, too. Sweet. Great start to the Sunday, and a great sign of things to come.
Game two was 99 Problems, a local (Boulder, I think) pickup team featuring pretty much the guys who don't make Bravo (again, as far I know). We had scraped by 99 Problems in the fourth pool play game the previous year by a score of 13-11, and I'm pretty sure that was another one of those games that had some, um, disagreements. So again, when observers came up and informed us the game would be observed, things changed...* for the better. No, really, it's good to have observers if only because that entire "bad calls" aspect of the game becomes a non-factor; you don't have to worry about ridiculous tit-for-tat fests as hopefully good observers will stamp it out before it starts. We were psyched to have them, and again, even more practice at following the letter of the 11th edition law.
* - This is not the first quantum physics joke I will make, nor will it be the last.
We traded with 99 a bit, getting a break to go up 2-1, but alternating out to 4-3. We were repeating our work it up routine, they were utilizing some hucks to challenge our overly aggressive under D. But in the middle of the game, things once again cracked - our D got some turns, and though they did it with more than a few turns of their own, managed to punch in a string of breaks in a row to take half 8-3. I played a D point in this game out of boredom (and got a D, no less!) as rinse-repeat-ditto-echo-coda-etc.'ed our act from the whole weekend - a work it up offense that didn't turn it over, and a D that had too many legs and too much energy for our opponents to deal with comfortably. If I recall correctly, this bunch ran out a man to zone transition - a little bit of a wrinkle, but zone is a gift, and we ripped it up fairly easily th few times they tried it. A 15-5 win was over in short fashion AND secured us a place in the finals, though we didn't exactly know it at the time.
One thing I repeated all weekend, though, was that we didn't particularly care about this tournament except in how it affected our team as we progressed towards regionals. Taking this to heart, we could have sat our starters for our seventh game, but as that luxury will probably not be available to us when push comes to shove, we elected instead to play it straight. Game 7 was against Critical Mass, a masters team that Big Nate had just played a few weekends back at Grand Masters Nationals. This team also started out trading with us by pretty much the same formula - dink dink long huck - but once we dissected their offense (and thanks in large part to our O that again just wouldn't lose the disc - we had two turns this game (six for the O and D combined) and scored on all eight offensive possessions), we pulled away and left it no doubt to help with good Rockies revival. 15-7 was the final, and our pool play was finished at a perfect 7-0.
Somewhere around the end of the 99 Problems game, some clouds started gathering over the mountains in the fields' backdrop. The classic thought occurred to me - we're going to play in perfect weather all weekend long only to play the finals in a windstorm - and lo, etc. Flux, the team from Austin starring my Rice pal Marcus, only had their one loss to us, so the finals was going to be a rematch. When we headed over to the scheduled field 3, though, there was a women's third place game going on that had started at 2, and the scored was 5-2. Seeing that we were scheduled to play at 3... there had been a screw up. I walked over to frisbee central to figure out the deal, only to find Marcus and Flux's captain vaguely implying that they wanted to bag the finals and head home early. That didn't sound ideal to me - didn't want to walk out of Colorado Cup with a sort of ceded championship, wanted to win in legitimately - so I half-talked them into playing a game starting pronto. They offered to play a shortened game to 11, I said I would ask my team about it, but we agreed to grab one of the now vacated Elite fields and get the finals in. Of course, given that their team was exhausted, the shortened game would only help them, and the coming storm - and all the zone game / not-running that would entailed - pointed to their advantage, too.
Interlude: Les Sprawl Boys relaxing while waiting for the finals:
Note the surprisingly happy-seeming Nyet in the background...
I consulted very briefly with Rob about the game-to-11 angle, and we decided this was dumb - why give them an advantage when we had a deeper squad that was more suited to a fifteen point game? So maybe that was a bit of chicanery on our part, as right as they walked up I rescinded our game-to-11 offer (that I, for the record, had never officially signed off on). They seemed a bit miffed, but said, "Okay, we'll play a lower quality game." It's just the rules, folks, though of course I'll admit to taking the competitive advantage angle on that one. Chalk it up to reading a nerdy baseball book en route to Denver, I suppose. :)
So the game went on, and we got in maybe three points before the wind howled in. And they were three ugly-ass points. I'd guess wind in the high 20s to mid 30s, erratic, a light drizzle* and generally the type of weather that turns Ultimate frisbee into something a little stupider than regular frisbee. We got a break early and went up 3-1, but the wind wrecked us, and we gave the break back to make it 3-3. They were running a pretty effective trap zone on us, we responded in kind... and the tension of the bad weather, some tight play, the fact that it was the FINALS!!!!! cranked up the chippy factor. In our defense, they started it with a couple of ticky tacky travel calls on yours truly - I didn't respond with any travel calls, but other Sprawlers most certainly did start the tit-for-tat session. Some of the calls, on both sides, were legit; many were technically correct but unnecessary in that no one was gaining any particular advantage by sliding two inches on the wet grass, and some were in the atrocious zone, the sort of "oh, you threw a huck to an open guy in the endzone? Well that's a travel." Pretty annoying...
* - Oddly enough, I have much more trouble throwing flicks in a light drizzle than in a downpour. A slick disc as opposed to a soaked one makes it harder for me, I suppose. So very windy and lightly drizzling - aka Boston comma Mass every spring - is pretty much bad news for Nyet.
But wait! OBSERVERS!!! We called the TD over and requested observers to clean up the muck, and they did a pretty good job of tidying up the game and speeding things along. And either they liked us a whole lot or we, you know, weren't making lame-ass travel calls, because nearly everything we sent to the observer was called in our favor (I think we were about five for six on the day). This helped a bit, but this game was really marred in all ways - calls, chippiness, and just crappy, crappy weather. Beck had shown up to watch the finals (and post updates to facebook for the benefit of Keith), but she wisely took to the car once the drizzle started. Not an ideal end to the tourney, but shouldn't we talk about the government...
Back to the game - key point happened at 4-4, with some horrendous turns by our O (and by me) at a potential turning point in the game. We had by far our most turns in this game (15 in all), understandable because of the conditions. But after three turns by our O lines on this point, I'm pretty sure this is the point where BP threw an IO forehand that got blown across half the width of the endzone - it was headed for the front left cone, and ended up at the back right cone. I got a good read and rescued it with a back corner trailing edge layout to make it 5-4. Wining that hell point pushed us over the top in the proverbial war of attrition - our D line came through with a break shortly thereafter, and then came through with a big endzone stand that turned into a length of the field huck from Cole to a sprinting, sprinting, laying out clap-catching Ebay for the 7-4 lead*. That gap sustained us a bit - O-points and D-points became interchangeable with a lot of turns coming from both sides, so our O got "broken" again at one point, but really this was a who can leg it out better situation, and the answer was Sprawl. We took half 8-6, then scored another D-line break right out of half to go up 9-6, then grabbed another a couple of points later for an 11-7 lead. Flux more or less started going through the motions at this point, and when we broke their Z with an IO scoober from your narrator to Rob - that's right, I'll throw that shizza in the wind! - to go up 12-8, and when Studer caught a quick goal to make it 13-8... well, lightning in the distance provided a good excuse for their captain to call the game. We shook hands, acknowledged the quality of our two matches despite the heatedness that had arisen during the finals, and Sprawl, the club team from Phoenix, was your 2010 Colorado Cup Open Division champion.
* - I'm having trouble remembering when it happened, but Griesy also had a HUGE play in here, going way up over a crowd of about eight people to snag a goal. This is probably a fair time to mention that Griesy clearly elevated his game this weekend - again, I'll do more of a player by player thing in the following post, but homes was the obvious playing and statistical MVP. Nice!
The TD grabbed us and quickly informed us that the rumor Trant had heard was correct, and we did win VC Ultimate "Colorado Cup Champions 2010" shorts for our troubles (predictably, quite a few ballers were wearing those bad boys at practice tonight. I, hoping not to be "that guy," left them at home... though it's probably telling that I have them on right now). We jogged through the drizzle to the truck to get our hard won shwag, the mood jubilant as ever. Cole in particular was beaming, and while it wasn't part of our goal, demonstrating the distance we've come in this emphatic fashion was quite sweet.
Beck pulled the car around, happy to have been able to see the game from the comfort of our Nissan hatchback, and I grabbed a change of clothes for the road home. One carload of Sprawlers had to split quickly as they had 6:30-ish flights to make back in Denver (the finals ended at 4:35 or so), so we said goodbyes, I canceled Monday night's practice, and the remaining folks agreed to meet at the Baker Street Brewery for celebratory fun times. I had a couple of local ales, another bowl of tomato bisque and an order of fish and chips - my third for time for the vacation, btw - and had a blast recounting with the dudes, among other things, Ian's story about how he tried to defuse a conflict between Cole and an opponent and "accidentally called the player on the other team a douchebag." Ian: not a diplomat.
Back to the airport, waited a bit in the terminal while Ebay used a whiteboard to flirt with pretty ladies, and before long we were back en route to Phoenix on an uneventful flight* after a long stay away from Fred and the pups. Aaron was kind enough to give us a ride home, and we capital-C Crashed back into our own bed for the first time in ten days.
* - Uneventful if Beck's rented movie not playing because there is no iTunes internet connection at 10,000 feet is to be considered a non-event. Again, we are talking straight-up IRE. I can't even begin...
So the last part of our vacation - Colorado Cup - was about as successful as possible from a team standpoint. As a postlude, I'll drop that tonight I pulled a classic dick Texas high school football coach move tonight and made us run our butts off after the big victory - we only had 20 or 21 people there tonight, but we worked hard on sprinting down on the pull, containing swings, stopping hucks, transitioning from a huck to endzone offense, and transitioning from flow to non-iso endzone calls. 'Twas a hard, wear-you-down style practice, and I think people got the message that beating the likes of our CO Cup opponents is not enough. Good to see everybody respond positively, and good to hear the Sprawl buzz catching on - it was really, really fun to see all of the facebook messages and congratulations flying around minutes after we won the final game. But again, it's just a step, and not to be negative nelly per usual, but there's more work to do...
So that hopefully meets the Keith-imposed Wednesday night at midnight deadline for reviewing the weekend. I am, of course, not really done - in the next post, which will be written precisely when I get around to it, I'll give 1, the self review, 2, individual Sprawler notes, 3, some generalized highlights from the weekend, and 4, of course, the nerdy stats. So to be continued, again.
Boulder:Paved. Next stop, hopefully Flagstaff.
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