Navy Ninja Harakiri

The Navy Ninja's under my leadership suffered a disappointing overtime loss to Timmy Pobst's Ron Burgundy last night.  I could not fill Ben Nanny's shoes. However, for the most part it was a pretty spirited and well played game.  We went down two breaks off the start as we were looking for our rhythm (Ben is usually a primary cutter / handler), but then the big guns went out and stopped the bleeding. After some nice 2-3-2 zone work we ended up getting the breaks back, coming out of half on serve.  In the second half fatigue hit our two ladies, but we managed to keep a pretty even keel. We were up 14-13 (game to 17) when Ron Burgundy went on a three point run.    I decided to call people off at summer league (I felt like a jerk, but I did not want to lose to Ron Burgundy) and put on a good line; we got the O and then two breaks to make it 17-16.  We didn't get get the break on the next point, allowing R.B. to tie at 17's.  On the next offensive point I floated a shot too much, making it 17-18 R.B. On game point R.B. Adam Holt threw the turn and R.B. scored, ending the game 19-17. Gahhh.

At least we didn't show our hand.

Summer Ultimate - Lime Squeeze

First games of summer league were last night, and team Lime got rocked by a Prius. We just couldn't get any motion downfield, and when our down field cutters did get it it would be a 75% change of a turn. It was a little frustrating because I didn't want to lose to the people on Prius (also, you shouldn't be allowed to draft your last years team - whats the fun in that?. Though if you wanted to win summer league it's probably a good strategy for the first few games until the other teams mesh). I played pretty well, only one turnover (I got a D on the first point, and then tried to throw it sitting down - didn't work).

For those interested this is my summer tournament schedule:

• Surf n Turf (Destin, Fl)
• P-days (Versailles, Ohio - if Knoxville has a bid)
• Mars (Pittsburg, PA - if my SRNS stuff works)
• SMUT (Knoxville, TN)

I didn't try out for Tansi, and I don't know if I am trying out for Voodoo (SE) (or if Voodoo is having tryouts).  Really starting to look forward to Surf n Turf, can't wait to get all of that sand in my car / backpack. TO THE BEACH!

Surf & Turf 2012

A day on the beach and a day on the land.  In Destin, Florida (along the gulf cost in the pan handle).  It was a really fun time, probably better than Wildwood.  The sand fields where smaller than Wildwood, but where much nicer; the sand made noises like a basketball court when you where cutting.  I also played my first few games of spikeball!

We had a Penguin!

Looking forward to Poultry Days!

CHAMPIONS

IM ULTIMATE CHAMPIONS!

Jeffy's Friends Team Members:

• Jeffrey
• Richy
• Harrison
• Fong
• Timmy
• Alex
• Trent
• Carter
• GT

WHOOO!

Points Progression

I was following the twitter feed of CMU ultimate last weekend at Queen city and was  surprised by the number of runs in their games.  It might not have been real (old folks have bad memories), but I decided to look at my stats from the UT games in terms of score progression.

The above busy little graph shows the progression of score for various UT games.  A good game for a team is like "The Program's" game against us - we only scored 3 points.  A bad game is the UCF game, where UCF scored 7 points in a row.

I think this gives a pretty good idea of how your O and D lines perform; over many games you want to be in the lower right rather than the upper left, and you definitely do not want vertical streaks, they signify a large number of O line breaks.

Maybe if I get bored (I told myself I was going to write my master thesis this weekend; I even got a bottle of scotch) I will mine Pitt's twitter feed to see how a good team performs.

CCC Thoughts

Scores.  We lost to Alabama. We lost to Georgia Tech - these are two loses that cannot happen in the spring. The team went into the tournament confident that we would take the second seed, and we overlooked the fact that we had to work to win games.  That should have been a wake-up, but we didn't put any effort into the Pitt game and probably only won the NC state game because they were playing a bit foully and that pissed off UT.  I left with Raclift after the first game on Sunday; he had an architecture project due at 6 p.m.

Pitt tweeted after CCC "O line gets broken zero times this weekend".  Our O line can't go down 2-3 breaks in the beginning of every game - and it seems that once they get broken in strings / runs.  I'm looking forward to the return of Mark and Twilley on our O-line to open up the deep space

I took stats this weekend, and hopefully I can get a summary of them up soon.

Redeaming Quality - I learned a new cheer for a completed deep pass for a score:  Call -"Boom" Response - "Headshot" C-"Boom" R-"Headshot" C-"Boom" R-"Headshot" All -"Yea Haww".  Evidently it was stolen from Madison Club.

Dave Baldwin 2011

Scores. The Alumni came out real slow (and real hung over ) against UT A, spotting them five points.    We then fought to within two, had a very intense zone D point, and then lost by three.  We were running a 2-3-2 zone, which I think is what the Russian Twin Defense is.  Kinda tricky to figure out how to play.  Had some very good heckling.

The next game was against Virgina Tech.  Yeah, we beat them - it was my first time beating Tech.  Actually, they were a depleted team, but I'll take it.

UT A lost the finals against Cincinnati on universe point.   They were up a break or two, and then blow it away.

Fall 2011 Club Sectionals

Sectionals are this weekend in Chattanooga, TN.  I'm getting a little bit of the pre-tournament jitters, which is good.  Looking forward to good times, and maybe a couple wins, we play Chain and then Slow Country Boil (don't know anything about them).  Breaking out the chops!

Good luck to Gambit, Tanasi, Yuk and other teams this weekend.

Guarding the Upline

Sectionals is this weekend, first game is against Chain, then against Six Pack.  Voodoo scrimmaged UT tonight, with us winning, though UT didn't play their best lines.  In scrimmaging I had a hard time guarding a throw and go handler (Mark) on the up line.  It seems the only way to defend is to make sure it doesn't happen - after it happens the defender is playing catchup / damage control.  I found myself just chasing Mark up the field as he essentially did throw and go's with various players.  The way I understand the rules is that you have three steps to stop after a catch, so as long as you throw it within those three steps without changing direction it isn't a travel.  Mark is also left handed, so running off his backhand plays off a force flick. J?

Sunday Pickup

I have been going to a lot of Sunday pickup recently.  I think it is making me a worse player.  I get to try different things, but the intensity is not there.  I'm getting into bad habits just as the series is starting.  I can get away with throws that will be turns in real games, but most of the time I don't see it until afterwards.  These are mostly low break flicks the go across the middle of the field.  Voodoo (SO) isn't looking like a regionals caliber team, mostly because we have only had one real practice the entire season, and we didn't have a tournament with all our players.  I got plans to bring some fire, and we'll see where it goes from there.

Congrats to Dire Wolf players.

The Mountain Cut

Defenders inability to learn

All of the frisbee teams I have been on have emphasized the Mountain Cut.  Cut one direction, and then quickly change and go the opposite.  For a defender then, why do we get beaten by this cut?  We should expect that after a few steps the offense is going to change direction.  Is it just that defenders just don't know the moment?  This seems to simple; would think that with a little prediction the defense could dominate.

Swill in the 'Ville: Voodoo (SO)

Voodoo (SO) played their first tournament this weekend, Swill in the 'Ville, in Louisville, Kentucky.  I am a little disappointed in how well we did, but it was our first tournament.  It was very hot.  We need to do a lot of work in taking care of the disc / cleaning up the cutting on offense if we plan on beating some the Atlanta based teams.

Highlights: 

• Seeing Jeremy, Ben Clark, Andrew Bunn, and getting a CMU bumber sticker from Ashimey
• Beating the Missouri team twice
• Voodoo's initial D line had 5 previous farmers on it
• Getting beaten up line by a girl.  There was some fantastic heckling afterwards

Lowlights:

• Getting beaten up line by a girl for a score. 
• My lefty backing going about 20 feet.  Probably should have tried that out in summer league first.
• Almost losing to the Missouri team in the Ninals.

I still need to work on calling the trap soon enough in a zone, and a little bit of holding the force.  There were two points where I shifted to a straight up close to the endzone near the sideline on 3 on 3 situations when I though the other two O players where farther from the break side than they were, and I ended up being broken for the on the cone shot - I think we just need more communication there. 

Ultimate Update

I made Voodoo!  Evidently it's cool to have the same name as another team in ultimate. . . though when I asked about this I was told that Knoxville played Voodoo NW for it at one time and won.  Not sure if this is a good decision or a bad one.  I don't like the idea of playing on a team with tryouts but still being bad, and the current talent is looking only slightly better than Steel Reserve.  Tryout teams just make it seem more important, but Knoxville doesn't have the personal - all of the good players are willing to drive the 3 hrs to Atlanta for Chain or are playing with Tanasi (Nashville based).

I am finding Summer League frustrating.  The worst is the miscommunication throw aways - I expect a certian cut to be made and throw it to that space, but the cutter decides that he didn't want to make that cut after all.  Our team has even developed our own Jeremiah, (old guy who plays bad ultimate), and I find it really frustrating.  We also have two other people that like to pretend they know strategy and keep trying to impart their wisdom upon me.  Just become hard to have fun when you have to deal with personnel gibberish. 

Summer League

Yesterday's summer league games was one of the worst for our team.  The team we played was better than most (top 3 I would say), and I tried to be aggressive up-field when I handled.  At points less than 50% of my throws were caught.  It was frustrating because they weren't bad decisions, just bad decisions for that particular cutter.  And then the old person on our team berated me for not looking at him as a dump and throwing too much away when he is never in position for a dump - evidently I am supposed to make eye contact with him about stall 3, give him until stall 7 to try and get open; but why not take the first shot down-field?

There were lots of situations where I caught a deep ball and threw it away near the goal line.  I would normally look back for the dump, but I wanted to see what would happen.  It seems dumb to waste the one on one match up, but I think in those cases where you can float the throw anywhere I needed to have a receiver who would read the throw.  A lot of my receievers tried to catch my loop around to the back come on the front cone and couldn't come up with the height; but I thought they would have lost the foot race to the front cone.

In any case I am trying out for Voodoo (Knoxville's Open Team) where I will get to be a cutter with handlers that I can rely on.   I still want to work on upfield handling at summer league though.

Regional Photos

It has been a busy and somewhat stressful week so I haven't had time to work on any projects  (got a lot of ideas buzzing around, but completing ideas has never been my strong point) so I will post some silly / awesome pictures of regionals.

Before that, three congratulations are in order:

• Esther and Lidnesay on completing high school
• Miss Sutherland on becoming Mrs. Harper
• Brando for making Gambit 

Now for the photos:

Tennessee doesn't do team photos. We do Flag Photos.  In a flying V.

Plays like this were characteristic of the Georgia game.

No idea why my legs are tucked under me.

Whoa!  The Murph Dance!

The sectionals 'stache

To end the silliness I give you:

Callahan

College Team Preformance

I watched Corey's Lecture today and was curious about the end where he plotted what he hoped to be the future of the program.  He was envisioning Yuk making it to Nationals in a few years or so - a great goal, but I wonder if it is attainable.  I downloaded the data / copied it from Score Reporter, and posted it as a google doc.  Some caution should be taken for the years 2008 and 2009, there was a lot of unknown teams in the top college spots.  The data was also weird in that it seemed to be done in late December / Early January, not at the end of the Spring Season. 

What I saw was not a lot of variation in the performance of the selected teams; the good stayed good and the medium stayed medium.  But CMU Ultimate is designed to be a program, so I wondered if a B-teams performance is an indicator of an successful A-team; thinking that B-team's performance provides an indicator the the programs performance as players matriculate from a successful B-Team to A-Team.  I don't think that the data is there to reach such a conclusion - partly due to changes in the  RRI / Ranking calculation, partly due to the wild fluctuations in 100 and below teams.

Kinda weird how Stanford A and B follow a trend, as does Pitt's A and B though.

Knoxville Summer League

Green and Yellow Hat got ups!
From Regionals against Georgia

The first games of Knoxville Summer League were tonight.  First ultimate I played since regionals.  Came out flat and slow but warmed up towards the end once I found my legs.  We ended up beating our opponents 17-7 or so.   Highlights included handling, caching and throwing multiple hammers, throwing  a terrible scobber, throwing a huck, and shredding a zone.  Lowlights included being  beat on multiple in cuts because of laziness, fouling some poor dude (I thought he was going to make a play on it but he just decided to stand still - I told him I fouled him and gave him the disc, but then I followed it up by point blocking him), a terrible break shot, and getting a calf cramp at the end.  I don't know why I am getting them - I got them every time I had a hard practice  / track workout in the spring.

Going off on a tangent, if you don't have the throws / don't know how to handle don't do it!  We had a lot of people pick up the disk off a turn and then just throw it away, or ignore their dump.   I know that they are their to learn / have fun, but I groaned inwardly.  Also, what is with people just running around willy nily?  It seems to be a lot more work for me to guard a cutter who doesn't know what they are doing compared to a cutter who does.

Regionals Afterthoughts (Emo post)

It is weird, but now I find myself being less satisfied with the teams performance.  I think back to the Florida game and the bid they got on me, thinking if I would have just noticed I could have out bid him and we could have made the score one point closer - maybe that would have been the fire we needed.  In the Georgia game what if I was just a bit faster and my straight up mark had more of a force to it, what would have given us the energy to beat them.  I feel confident that we could have beaten Georgia; but the questions are how I could have given team members the energy and confidence they needed to succeed.

There is a part about making goals (or maybe being human) where the current state is not good enough.  Always room for improvement.  Always the desire for a perfect game.  I think that this makes sense - this is what drives us (me?) to improve ourselves.

I received an invitation to try out for Chain this weekend.  I don't want to pass up this opportunity, but at the same time I don't know if another year of competitive Frisbee is right for me, and I don't want to do something half-assed.

I kinda feel like Zip Tip's Last Post: "just remember, we're better than those guys".

South East Regionals

Highlights

• Sunday at Regionals
• Shutting down Mr. Sage and Mr. Sullivan on Florida (with Trey) as they tried to do a weave against Trey and I.  It was great forcing them back field.
• I had a really nice bid against Georgia.
• Phil's Callahan
• Beating Georgia Southern (we previously lost to them twice at CCC)

Lowlights

• Having three turns (though only one was my fault - the rest were poorly thrown that I got my hands on after bidding)
• Losing to Florida
• The Georgia Game

 I am content with how the season turned out (series record is 10-2, total record is 26-12).  It would have been nice to end my college career making nationals, but I can settle for 3rd at regionals (technically tied for 3rd, but . . . ).  I don't think that I will play club this fall; I want to learn kung fu or something like that.

Finally, below is a somewhat embellished write up by Richey.
"Our first game Saturday morning was against Auburn, who we took down 13-5 with great contributions from some of our younger players, notably freshman Jordan Eddy.
In our next game of the day we faced a Mississippi State team that took us to overtime the last time we had played them.  We came out excited to play and dominated them 13-2.  The highlight of the game was an insane layout defensive score (CALLAHAN) by Captain Phil Brock.
Our third game of the day we played the #2 in the nation ranked Florida Gators.  Again, Agent Orange started the game ready to fight hard and took an early 3-0 lead.  As fatigue began to set in Florida's speed and intensity became too much for us as we lost 8-10.
Luckily we had time to rest our legs in a BYE round before playing our last game on Saturday against the Home team Florida State.  Excellent work by both our offensive and defensive lines helped us to defeat an accomplished Florida State team 13-5.
Sunday morning we arrived at the fields knowing our chances of making Nationals for the first time ever would require us to win all 4 of our upcoming games in which we were to play some of the best teams in the nation.
Our first game was against cross state bitter rival Vanderbilt.  The game was close at first but we put them away late 10-5.
Our next game was against a Georgia Southern team who was leading the tournament after going undefeated Saturday, beating Florida on universe point.  Georgia Southern took an early lead on us, which we fought hard to regain and eventually win the match-up 11-8.  This victory put us into the Semifinals for a Sectional finals rematch with Georgia.
Our thirteen players warmed up for the game facing Georgia's army of at least thirty players knowing how badly both sides wanted the win.  Every player on the small Tennessee squad gave everything we had and more.  We were all sunburned, tired, and barely able to stand but we ran our hardest and fought for every point.  However, we came up short 9-13 and will not get to make the trip to Nationals.

As I know all of our players are heartbroken over this loss, I would like to point out the unbelievable amount of heart, desire, and commitment we have all shown this season.  Taking third at Regionals is the best any Tennessee team has done in at least the past 10 years, and we did so in the face of insurmountable odds.  This has been a year to remember and I will treasure being a part of this team forever.  As we look forward to a promising season next year I would like to thank Jake Altemus for coaching us through the series for providing us with knowledge and motivation that moved us to the next level, as well as our Seniors leaving us John Kerrigan, Matthew Urpher, and our Captain and MVP Phil Brock.

- Richey Ward"

And that folks, is why you never use a nickname that is spelled slightly different than your last name.

Sectionals (Sunday 1-0)

Congratulations!  UT won over Georgia, securing the second or third seed at regionals.  It was a good game that came down to the wire, but we should have ended it 10-13, similar to the Tech game we let them back in it.  We need to make it a priority at Regionals to close teams out; with our numbers we cannot afford to play long games.

It also looks like Yuk made it to regionals as well, holding the third seed in their conference.