Dire Wolf at Swill in the Ville
This past weekend, my club team, Dire Wolf, made the 6 hour drive down to Louisville, Kentucky for our second tournament as a real team with a finalized roster. Results-wise, we took second place, going 5-1 with our only loss coming to louisEVIL, the hosting team.
While we did a lot of good things throughout the weekend, there were definitely some things that we need to improve. Probably most importantly, our offense became stagnant many times throughout the tournament because we were reluctant to dump and swing. This resulted in us jamming the disc up the force side, throwing into a lot of tight windows, and several turnovers.
Another thing that really hurt us, particularly in the finals was our inability to adjust to our opponents playing style. In spite of the fact that the louisEVIL defenders were backing all of our cutters and really taking away our deep game, we continued to huck the disc rather than take the easy underneath cuts that they were giving us. It’s pretty well known that our team loves the deep game, and for the most part I really like this style of play, but at the same time, we need to be able to work the disc up the field with in cuts. As was evident on Sunday, we were not able to do this consistently.
There were a lot of more minor things that we could improve on as a team, like getting beat uplink, preventing swing/break throws, and our underneath defense, but I’m confident that we’ll improve on these as the season progresses. Plus, these are the things you can always be improving upon.
Of course, we also did a bunch of things really well. Our end zone offense was quite solid; I can only remember two end zone turnovers and one of them was my fault, which I think is pretty good over 6 games. Our deep game, both offense and defense looked good, apart from the times when defenders were backing us. We also threw a bunch of junky and zone defenses which really confused some of the less experienced teams and gave us some easy turnovers.
I should mention that we were really short on players (14 the first day and 15 he second). Moreover, it was above 90 degrees on both days and quite humid, and our fatigue really started to show in the finals, where pretty much everything that could go wrong did.
All in all, it was a decent weekend; we took care of business when we needed to, but we left with a slew of things that we need to improve on before the series. In that sense it wasn’t a waste of time. Our next tournament is NY invite, a little more than a week away.