weekend ultimate recap

so this weekend was the sean ryan memorial tournament at uc santa cruz. the fields there are amazing - the grass is quite nice and soft (although a little long), and the field location is even more amazing. the fields are on the side of the hill that ucsc is on, and they look out over the city of santa cruz and the ocean. frickin beautiful, especially when the sun set on saturday night as we were playing our last game.

for the tournament, we went split squad (a and b teams mixed up as x and y). yesterday, we (stanford x) went 1-2 in pool play, beating ucsc x pretty easily and losing to ucsb y on double game point in a great game and las positas college 12-8 in another good game. in our crossover game (which determines whether you make the winner's bracket or the loser's bracket), we played chico and beat them. minor highlight from yesterday: in our first game, i had just caught the disc when one of the ucsc guys bid into me from behind, hitting me in the side of the thigh and laying me flat on my back. i now have quite the nice muscle bruise on my left quad. today we came in in the quarters and, due to some freak of the seeding, we played ucsb x, and the winner of our game was to play the winner of the stanford y-ucsb y game. this game started out badly (we were down 5-1), but we pulled back and it ended up being quite close - we pulled it out (at softcap) at 13-11 to make semis. our y team, meanwhile, lost to ucsb y pretty badly (they had lost a lot of vets from the day before, because they just couldn't come), so we had a rematch of our double-game-point loss against ucsb y on our hands. the game started out well for us, and we went up about 3 breaks early, but then they rallied late in the second half to make it 8-7 us at half. the second half was quite close all the way, with a break or two apiece, and came down to the wire, going to double game point once again. unfortunately, it was a d point for us, and while they had to work it down slowly, we were unable to get the d, and they beat us once again on double game point.

on the bright side, this meant we got to go home early.

I played okay yesterday - i had my moments, including a couple of layout d's and a couple of sweet hucks, but i also had some issues, like getting beaten by my man far too often, because 1) i have a problem with that in general (it's probably my biggest weakness) 2) some of the guys i marked up against were just faster than me, and 3) i didnt eat enough throughout the day, so i had a lack of energy by the end that didn't help. I also got broken on the mark a few times, which shouldn't be happening at all. today, i think i played better - i still got beat by my man a few times, especially by one guy I marked up on a couple of times who was really squirrelly, but I think I only got broken once (still too many times though), and my downfield d was a lot better today. I think i played very solid O - I had one poor io flick, but the rest of my throws were solid and chilly, I played very solid swinger against a zone d one point (a position i am quite comfortable with after summer league this year), and pretty good wing in a couple of other points. a couple of o points, i was called second to last in the string, and i had two (imho) very pretty flick hucks which were caught for goals. id put them at about 60 yards or so (the fields were short by 15-20 yards) each. on the second one, my guy wasn't too far behind me on my in cut, so he was caught up by the time I was throwing, and he tried to foot block my huck, but of course [:-)] he failed miserably. unfortunately, he did manage to get a huge footblock on my hand. my cuts could definitely use more work though (mostly i need to be more aggressive in making them).

overall, a very fun weekend.

on a (sort of) side note, at this point, i'd put my chances at making the a team at about 25%, maybe less. im undecided as to which team i really want to be on, because i would get way better on the a team, but id have far less playing time for a much larger time commitment, while on the b team, i would have a lot of playing time, but i definitely wouldn't improve as much as i would on the a team. they should be rolling out people this week, so we'll see soon.

and now its time to get my code on.



you, trying to flex on me? don't be silly