We remade the Oxnard to Santa Barbara trip to hit up our fourth different field in two days. The team felt nice and loose. Got there at about 7:45 along with the other teams, and we were pretty slow to get cleated up and jogging about. I felt awful - despite the limited play the day before and my best efforts to stay caloried up, I was having a mini energy collapse. Plus my shoulder was killing for reasons unknown - probably a combo of a big layout on an Ebay and the sleeping-on-it-funny consequences of sharing a bed with Cole for two nights. So hammers, scoobers and flicks were all wonky from a persistent catching / clicking in my shoulder, and I couldn't run well. Grrrreat. On top of that, our O in our white-blue scrimmage before the game looked just plain ugly. Couldn't move the disc, really couldn't et it off the line, lot of unexplained turfs, yeck. part of this was our fired up D lines giving us trouble, but still, I had a nice little sick feeling when we lost the flip and found out we'd be receiving to start the game.
Ah, the Condors game - easily our biggest game of the weekend, and despite all of our sputtering in pregame, we came out *seriously* jazzed. Short pull to start, J-Ro hits me, I hit Dhein, and we're off, firing it around the field easily until Greisy hit Ebay for a medium range huck goal. Sprawl exploded off the sidelines in one of the more enthusiastic displays I've seen from this team ... it was 1-0. Phew. Long game ahead, but there was every sign that multiple national titles or no for the Condors, we could run with them, no problem.
Like most west coast teams, the Condors used some breakmark throws, well-spaced field, and big hucks to fast guys and/or super-goons to attack our D. Really the entire game, but particularly early on, they took big, 50-50ish huck chances that consistently worked in their favor - definitely a blind spot for Sprawl. We responded with a more conservative approach, occasionally sending it deep, but really only in 80-20 to 90-10 type situations. In other words, both teams were flinging it, but our personnel / method required a bit more precision. In our favor - at least initially - we were being nice and precise. The game started back and forth, with neither side really even half-interrupting the other's O. But at 3-2, our D clamped down a bit - hey, they're trying to go deep on us over and over! STOP IT! - and got that coveted first break to put us up 4-2.
It's a bit of a blur, but to rewind a bit - I think at 2-2, we were doing another job of work-working it, when we had to reset on the sideline. J-Ro got it to me, and I looked up to see Cole heading down same third style for a huck. We have a rule on Sprawl - don't huck it to people cutting away in the same vertical third, as even if you complete this throw regularly, it's a much lower percentage throw then hitting people making angled deep cuts across the field. So I was a bit aggrieved that our big deep receiver was effectively ignoring the rule ... except that his wacky bad cut completely opened up the left side of the field. Cole and a guy one on one with the entirety of the left half of the endzone to play with? Thank you very much. I fired about a fifty-sixty yard IO flick huck out to the left half of the endzone (following my "not same third" rule), zipping it past the defender to a calmly jogging Cole for the score. It was the third point in a row in which we had more or less diced their D, and that throw chad two effects - one, whatever shoulder issues I had before the game felt nice and cleared out, and I had a mental flash that it was time to channel my inner gunslinger Garret to help out our O. Two, the Condors weren't going to let us just run our man offense any longer, so the rest of the game would feature a hella lot of zone transitions and general junky, tricky D's. Ay caramba.
Back to the present - we traded a bit more for a while to put us up 6-4. Some super highlight plays in here - Vince had a big layout D on a huck somewhere in the first half of this game, Studer poached off a man to D a huck, only to have a post-Studer fist pump foul called - WHAT?!? (The national coordinator Byron was right there on the play, and while he couldn't give any kind of observer argument during the game, he did confirm afterwards that this was a non-foul). On the O-side of things, they came down in zone-to-man transitions, clams, J-U-N-K junk (low down cheap little punks / taking everyone for the ride). And it flustered us throughly. But, with all humility, let me introduce the now-fresh shoulder - I started working the scoobers, hammers, cross-field blade flicks, you name it. Hit BP across the field a few times, hit Rob in nice pockets behind the cup, hit Cole and Dhein on big gaining blades, broke traps by hitting J-Ro with no-lookers. Fun times, and it effectively dissected their Z. A lot of high pressure situations and throws, and they weren't all perfect - one scoober went between BP and Dixon and they both hesitated, resulting in a rush-to-grab-it BP drop - but for the most part, we demonstrated to them that the Z wasn't going to hold us down. They even started calling me "the handler" and putting their fastest D guys on me (to no avail! HA!). So if I did anything for Sprawl this season, it was that first half-plus of zone shreddage. I was *really* glad to be able to use the one thing left in my declining skill set to help out the club in this game; it felt great, and after another D break in there, we took half of semis 8-5.
(Somewhere in there, J-Ro made one of the D's of the year - poached the lane for juuuuust a second, and a guy tried to huck it over him. Josiah used every bit of every plyo this year to leap and partially block the pass, sending it sailing out of bounds and preserving the lead. 'Twas awesome - Cole had a similarly huge play later in the game, but the J-Ro out-of-nowhere poach-D is one of those "remember-forever" moments).
By half, some of our hosses were starting to get worn down, and now is as good of a time as any to comment on the subbing. We had two full lines going on D and O, with some overlap of the running types between, but handlers on O (Josiah and I) playing every O point. So we had about twenty players available for the twelve spots in play. Paul called subs for us all weekend and had a set of instructions for overall PT, and I talked to him specifically about the idea for this game - it was our biggest game, so we needed to treat this like a competitive sport and keep our best guys out there. So we ended up playing sixteen of the 22 players overall, meaning that six guys did not play in the semi-finals Condors game. Without getting into specific names, here's a bullet point list of considerations to make:
- Three of the people who did not play were late adds to the roster for purposes of filling in for injuries. It should not be entirely surprising that they did not play in our most important game of the season.
- Two were backup handlers who 1, were just going to lose time by virtue of keeping J-Ro and me on the field, and 2, were backups. One of these was Paul himself, meaning that Paul, who easily had the power to do so, did not call himself into this game, and did not complain one bit about it. This would be a good moment to acknowledge that Paul helped Sprawl immensely this weekend, on the field and off, and did a great, thankless job with the subbing. So props to Paul, who understands that his playing time will certainly come in the future, and sacrificed his ego for the sake of helping us all out. I really, really appreciated his efforts.
- One was a late-add headcase of a player who had sustained an injury late in the season and more or less had not been running for the past month-or-so. I could go into a specific naming-names rant here - and the people involved will probably easily be able to tell who I am talking about anyways - but suffice it to say that this guy was difficult to coach, had real trouble responding to criticism, and more or less ignored instructions. He's a good player, don't get me wrong - at least when his head is on straight / not infused with THC - but his dependability is suspect, and in a big game, he's not going to be run out there to make the key mistake.
As if to prove my point, that latter guy became angry about not playing in the first eleven points of the semi-finals game and took off his cleats. And, well, it's hard to respect that (or to respect the snarky facebook post same guy made after the game. Disappointing for a teammate to do that - I'm not exactly shouting '66 "Judas," but seriously, man, get with the team-first program).
All of that said, one, did our guys get tired? Sure. We also didn't do track workouts and only practiced once per week all summer long; what are you going to blame here? Two, could we have done a better job rotating people in? I don't have any qualms about the people who didn't play, but we probably should have worked in EBay and Aaron a bit more to spell the starters and to give Aaron/Ebay a chance to shine. It also would have helped to have BP not playing so much handler, as he helps us more at mid positions. I spoke to Paul at halftime about that exact adjustment, and we tried to make it ... but it may have been too little too late.
All of which is to point at one persistent quirk of Sprawl - we tend to want to blame strategy level things (we should run a vertical stack! we should swing more! we should have more plays!) in a context where we don't attend a lot of tournaments and we can't get everyone out at practice at the same time. And I reiterate, we don't do track workouts, and we plain don't have the across-the-board athleticism that some of these elite teams have. I.e., we're collectively deceiving ourselves if we think that the reason we lose a particular game is that we didn't play our end of the bench guys enough. As I've brought up here several times, there are a number of things we don't do that great teams need to do - there are good, practical reasons we don't do them, but I don't think a one of us can pretend that he did *everything* he could have to promote Sprawl's success this summer.
As you may be able to gather from the tone here, we couldn't maintain the first half pace and ended up losing the game. The Condors were tough and clawed their way back into it. Weird stuff went down - Griesy got point-blocked a couple of times. We ended up in a bad sideline trap with BP at primary dump, and his juking faked me out on a dump throw. Cole essentially didn't know how to run our dump drill and had a couple of resultant turns. Cole also never completely clicked with our O, ended up glory-hounding quite a bit* and thereby cut off an untold number of deep cuts - basically, he clogged badly. Dhein had some wacky turnovers and generally had way less of an impact on this game than normal. Etc., etc. There were still plenty of great plays - Josh got up SUPER high for a D (that got absolutely spanked earthward and was lay out caught by the guy that threw it - one of the more amazing Ultimate plays I've seen). Vince had a giant D in there; BP had some spectacular full lay-out bids. But chip, chip, chip, little miscues here and there (the vast majority for which you could construct a hearty argument that "practice attendance issues" were the primary culprit - we just, in the end, don't know each other quite well enough to be smooth in frantic D environs). We went down 10-9, go a break to get back into it, it was tied at 11's... and we finally caved to a more well-rounded team, dropping the contest 14-11.
* - So yes, Cole scored a ton of goals, especially in this game. But he also dillied around the back of the stack, trying to set himself up to score those goals and doing little else to help the O. I don't want to harp on the guy, but man, he was a misshapen cog in the machine at the end of this game. We never would have been in a position to win without him there in the first place, but for about the last twenty minutes of this game, Cole's defender was standing in the way of my potential hucks. Frustrating.
A crushing lost, it turned out. The disappointment was palpable, and as much as I tried to remind everyone to keep heads up and get ready for a long road to the finals, we exhibited every symptom of a deflated team. We faced The 405 next, a team of athletic college guys and a few dudes from last year's L.A. Monster. We had no reason to lose to them, but they started the game with an easy huck score, we started on O with an atrocious throwaway, and it was immediately 2-0. I called timeout for another "wake-up!" huddle, but the damage was sort of done.
The 405 broke our marks left and right with some quite nice throws, and hit just a ton, ton, ton of hucks deep. They had one skinny athletic freak #12 who spent the whole game jumping way over our guys and coming down with nasty goals. Our O was relatively buttery after that initial break, but the game was a big tradefest. Somewhere in here the Phxation Spitfire girls showed up, and that was a nice boost of crowd support. I threw some hammers and hucks for goals for the fanbase, but despite throwing everything out there to make the comeback, we couldn't swing it. Not a particularly fun thing to write about - I had an errant throw to Griesy in this one that resulted in a break, so i feel nice and terrible about that. Ian called a travel on a throw that inadvertently undid a D for us. BP went psycho style, getting at least two layout D's that I remember in the clutch. But it didn't quite add up - our D made some quality adjustments in there, but then our O started sputtering (Cole had a hammer drop in the endzone that might have staked us, Vampire style). We lost 15-13, and Sprawl's season was over with a disappointing fifth place finish at regionals.
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