akrish

I’m a little behind on this one but a couple of weeks ago Mr. Yuk made the 11 hour drive down to Wilmington, North Carolina to compete in Fall Easterns, a highly competitive tournament featuring some of the best teams in the Atlantic Coast and Ohio Valley regions. The tournament got a lot of coverage on skydmagazine (see here, here and here) and here is the official results from score reporter.

We came in seeded somewhere in the bottom 4 out of 16 teams (I heard that they didn’t snake the last round of the pools, so it’s not obvious exactly what seed we are) and finished 4th over all, losing the 3rd place game by forfeit only because we had to start driving home. Here’s a quick game by game recap:

1. University of Delaware — After getting into Wilmington after 3am the night before, we clearly weren’t ready to start playing at 9am and this showed as we quickly went down 7-1 against Delaware. It was incredibly windy (20-30 mph winds) and our offense couldn’t seem to break their zone. Meanwhile they adopted a “punt and play-D” strategy that seemed to work quite well as we gave them great field position over and over, allowing them to convert easy scores. We came out a lot more fired up in the second half, but had already dug ourselves into too deep of a hole to win this one. Delaware wins 15-7.
2. University of Virginia — If it’s at all possible, winds seemed to increase for the second round of the day, and this lead to a really sloppy game. However we came out strong. We adapted to the wind, playing the same style of field position game that was successful for Delaware against us and this allowed our O-line to convert. At the same time our D-line’s zone generated turn after turn, and we accumulated a couple of breaks. CMU wins 6-10 on hard cap. Some video footage of this game is here.
3. William and Mary — We played W&M at Hucks of the Hilltops a few weeks before Easterns (I wasn’t there hence no recap here), and lost to them on universe point after being up for most of the game. Coming off a big win against UVa, we were hungry to bring it to these guys. We started off really well, converting our O-points and punching in a couple of breaks, eventually taking half, but afterwards we started to slip. If I remember correctly soft-cap went on when we were up 12-9 and W&M broke over and over again to tie it at 13s and bring it to universe. They would come out ahead again, leaving us on one hand dejected, but on the other, excited to play regional rival Ohio State in our cross over game. William and Mary wins 14-13.
4. Ohio State — OSU knocked us out of regionals last year in a very close game, and our veterans were looking forward to facing them in the crossover game. To start out, I think they were playing a lot of their tryout players, but we took a pretty substantial lead, forcing them to put in their veterans for the second half. We kept bringing the pressure and came out with a comfortable win and a berth into the Championship bracket on sunday. CMU wins 14-8. Footage of this game is here
5. University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill) — Our first game on Sunday was the quarterfinal matchup against UNC. As we did on Saturday morning, we came out slow, allowing UNC to take half 8-3. The second half however, was a completely different story. We generated break after break, with big defensive plays, winning the half 10-7, but losing the game 15-13. UNC is a very good team (they ended up winning the tournament) and I was very impressed with how we played, particularly in the second half. Footage of this game is here
6. North Carolina State — Losing in quarterfinals, we dropped into the 3rd place bracket. I don’t remember too much of this game, except that we had a lot of momentum from the UNC game and kept rolling. CMU wins 13-9.
7. University of South Carolina — The Skyd report from day 1 suggested that USC was the story of the tournament, because of their unexpected success, despite our similarly unexpected success. As a result, we thought of this matchup as a way to prove that we were just as memorable as they were. I don’t remember too many details of this game either, except that it wasn’t ever particularly close. CMU wins 15-7, earning us a berth in the 3rd place game.
8. University of North Carolina Wilmington — The third place game was set to start at 3:45. With a 11 hour car ride in front of us, we simply couldn’t push off leaving for a couple more hours and were forced to forfeit to UNCW.

For the most part, we played much better than I expected. This made me really excited to be a part of Mr. Yuk this year and I’m hopeful that we make some noise in the spring and going into the college series. The win against OSU was especially satisfying because we’re going to see them again at regionals and it shows that we can compete against some of the better teams in our region. Our success has also motivated me to do work over the winter, so that I can contribute in the spring.

On the positive side, for the most part our offense was silky-smooth. In the USC game they only had three turnovers and gave up no breaks. I, in part, expected this, as we only graduated one O-line player, and two of our starting handlers have returned from serious injuries, but it was definitely reassuring to see. It’s really nice to play for a team where you can count on the O-line to score. Our D-line, after losing several seniors, also impressed me for the most part. Holes were filled by rookies who really stepped up, and despite our lack of offensive-minded players, we managed to convert after generating turnovers. We can certainly improve in this area, because it was clear that our defensive offense was run by three or four players, and most everyone else didn’t really have an idea of what to do after the turnover.

Of course there are many things we need to work on. Most patently obvious is that we need to start playing when games actually start. We can’t afford to give up insane leads in the first half as we did against Delaware and UNC. I don’t really know how to fix this, because it is mostly a mental thing and something that I don’t know how to teach people. More tactically, William and Mary discovered that they could keep hitting up-the-line dump cuts, and this helped the go on their run towards the end of the game. UNC broke our marks over and over again, resulting in a lot of fairly easy scores. These are two sort of little details that will haunt us in the spring if we don’t fix them.

Fall Easterns wrapped up our fall season and hopefully gives us a lot of momentum as we go indoors for the winter. Our next tournament will be sometime in late February or March. I’m really looking forward to an exciting spring season.

The days leading up to last weekend were tumultuous for Dire Wolf. After solid practices on Tuesday and Wednesday night, we were all excited about Chesapeake Open, which is probably the most competitive tournament on the east coast before nationals. The tournament staff had released the seeding and the schedules and we were looking forward to games against GOAT, Sentinel, Mad Cow, and regional rivals Ring of Fire. Unfortunately, Hurricane Irene started moving north and the rumors that Chesapeake would get cancelled halted our excitement. By Thursday morning it was official; Chesapeake would not take place this year.

As this was supposed to be our last tournament before the series, we felt the need to get some real games in, as opposed to practice. When talks with some other elite teams fell through, we decided to drive to Cincinnati for a tournament called NATI Open. NATI looked a lot less competitive than Chesapeake, so most of us weren’t too excited about spending another weekend out of town. However, we all realized that we could and should win this tournament, so we made the drive, took care of business and earned our second tournament win of the season.

The goal this tournament was to work on specific aspects of our game. Since we are predominantly a hucking team, we played the first half of the first game only working the disc underneath. For our team, I was very impressed with how well this worked; we have very few turnovers that half, we worked hard to get open, and I felt like a lot of people got involved in the offense. In other games we worked on various defensive sets and ironed out some kinks in our defense. Despite not being able to play top-level teams, I believe we improved over the course of the tournament, and we came away from it confident and better prepared for the series. It was no Chesapeake, but still a productive use of our time.

Ultimate is getting crazy now, with the first Mr. Yuk tryout today, and with the Club Series in two weeks. Being on two teams for the next month and a half will be stressful, but it should also be tons of fun. I’m really excited about both the Club Series and the start of the college season.

NY invite was a huge wake-up call for Dire Wolf. It was our first where all of the teams were at least at our level, meaning that we couldn’t just cruise to victory in any of our matches. Our offense looked frantic and sloppy, and in many of our games it felt like we simply couldn’t score. As a result we ended going 1-5, with big losses to regional rivals Bear Proof, Oakland Ultimate, and Medicine Men. Our only win came against Dead Rabbits, and even there we struggled offensively which made the game a lot closer than it should have been. By the end of the weekend it was clear that we have a lot of work to do if we want to be successful in the series.

The two big things that we really struggled with were zone offense (it was fairly windy) and end zone offense. For the former, we haven’t really had many windy practices, so our offensive style has always been to through big hammers and blades over the defense’s cup. When it gets windy, these become really low-percentage throws and this resulted in a lot of turnovers for us. Patience is essential to be successful against a zone, but we aren’t the kind of team that will swing the disc from sideline to sideline again and again, and as a result our offense repeatedly turned the disc over.

The story with end zone offense is pretty similar. We weren’t willing to be patient and ended up rushing a lot of throws, practically giving away the disc. I should also point out that we were missing three of our starting handlers who are all very comfortable breaking the mark and this was evident in our end zone offense, which is usually solid.

It was a horrible weekend, but I think there were some positive takeaways. For the most part, our defense was pretty good. We ran a lot of different different defensive sets and we were good at adjusting, recognizing a teams weaknesses, and capitalizing on them. In fact, our defense generated a lot of turnovers, it’s just that our defensive O couldn’t convert the turnovers into goals.

Off of the field, we had a great time in the city. My car got in fairly early on Friday night, so we had some time to walk around, get some New York style pizza, eat at a crappy diner and grab some ice cream. On saturday I got to meet up with my brother and a friend from high school and eat dinner with them before meeting up with my team at shake shack. And on Sunday we went to Stage Deli, which is apparently a famous new york deli, before starting the drive home.

I went to Wildwood, New Jersey this weekend for the Wildwood Beach Tournament with a bunch of CMU ultimate people and some others. For those who don’t know, Wildwood the town is one of the big vacations spots on the Jersey Shore, with a huge boardwalk, amusement parks and a long stretch of beach. Wildwood the tournament is probably the biggest beach tournament in the world and it was amazing to see so many ultimate players wandering around and literally taking over the town (One staff member told me there were over 400 teams). This was my first wildwood and my first time playing legitimate beach ultimate and it was really amazing.

While ultimate isn’t necessarily the focus of the tournament, which is renowned for its parties, I wanted to write a bit about it here. We played 2-2 mixed and we had really talented women, so we exploited them a lot in our offense. Despite being a fun tournament, our offense was really amazing. We did a really good job of working the disc up the beach and attacking the break side and I was particularly impressed with our ability to dump and swing so effectively. I distinctly remember several times where I was able to get the disc as the dump and find someone already making a cut to the break side for the swing. Without a lot of team chemistry, it was amazing that we did this so well. In beach, it’s common for teams to resort to the deep game partly because the field is so short and because you get 2 points for scoring end-zone to end-zone. Our team rarely ever tried this because we could advance the disc so smoothly. Ultimately we only scored 2 two-pointers the whole weekend.

Our offense really contrasted with what I’ve recently become fairly accustomed to on Dire Wolf, which really utilizes the deep space a lot more than we did. While both styles have pros and cons, I think I’m more of a fan of the “work it up the field” offense because that’s what I’ve played for the past couple of years. However, both offenses are very one-dimensional and an intelligent defense can cause a lot of problems to both. For example, as I wrote about here, once a team realizes you like to exploit the deep space, they will back your cutters, forcing you to work it underneath. On the other hand, if a team realizes you don’t have a strong deep game, they can run a defense that makes it hard to hit in cuts (force middle/straight up and have cutter defenders force away). Ultimately a good offense needs to be more well rounded. Our beach team had a hard time hitting deep shots, but the quality of our opponents wasn’t that amazing, so this didn’t really cause us much of a problem.

Defensively, we did what we had to do, but I definitely think we could have earned a lot more turnovers. Most of the teams we played ended up turning the disc over without much pressure from us, so we didn’t have to get blocks, but I think there was certainly room for improvement on our part.

On the whole though, Wildwood is supposed to be a fun tournament and not necessarily a competitive one. I had a lot of fun hanging out and playing with my team, and was especially happy to play with Mr. Yuk alumni who I hadn’t seen in awhile. It was a great way to take my mind off of work and a refreshing change from the competitive nature of club ultimate.

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.