akrish

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.

I wanted to write about israel about once a week, but this past weekend was really busy (read on for why) so I didn’t get around to it. Plus my weeks have been pretty uneventful (until now…) so there wasn’t much to write about.

So last week (week 2 of work) was, as mentioned, pretty uneventful. I’ve gotten used to going to work in the morning, spending most of my day there, coming home and working, watching tv, or otherwise passing time at night. In my previous post, I commented that the dormitory isn’t a very social place and that definitely still holds. In fact, now that I’ve stopped trying to be social, it’s become even more so. Thus, I typically come home, make some dinner, and head to the lounge where I do work, watch tv (online), or otherwise waste time on my computer. So usually life is just that.

Last Tuesday, I went to play ultimate with the Holy Landers, one of the few teams in Israel. We “practiced” in a town called Rishon, a bit South of Tel Aviv, so I got a ride from one of the players. Practice was really fun, it was good to get back into playing again. I also met a bunch of people from the states, who have been playing ultimate for years and are quite good.

I’ll get back to what I did on Friday, but on Saturday I participated in a Hat Tournament at the nearby Hayarkon Park. The tournament was very different from the tournaments I’d been to, in that teams were created on the spot (I guess that’s how hat tournaments work) and the games were very relaxed. There were two “divisions,” a youth division and an everyone else division. I was amazed that the youth division had like 25 people and the adult division had around 50. People came from all over Israel, but I definitely did not expect to see such a good turnout. There were 5 teams in my division and consequently I got to play 4 games.

Apart from the ultimate, which was pretty awesome, the tournament was a great chance for me to meet a lot of different people here. I met some of the kids, some other natives, and a lot of people who are originally from the states or other english speaking places like Canada and New Zealand. Since the tournament, I’ve been hanging out with many of these people, and I think they will be my core group of friends during my stay.

Even at school, ultimate was my way to meet people and branch out from my existing group and I felt that this year was a lot more interesting because of ultimate. Now in Israel, ultimate is again a really great social tool. Since I’m not really in a happening place, and since my living environment isn’t that social, I’m relying on ultimate to kick-start my social life and so far it’s working. How ironic is it that I just met someone from the states in my dorm, and he seems pretty cool.

So this week, I was supposed to play ultimate yesterday, today, and tomorrow, and practices got cancelled so I went to throw with a couple of the people that live “close” to me. And it’s definitely good to get out of the dorm and to go around town and stuff. Tomorrow, hopefully I’m going to go into Tel Aviv to hang out with someone else from ultimate. So life is good this week. I’m actually pretty busy and unable to deal with the minor crisis of choosing what I want to study in grad school.

In other news, on Friday I went to Haifa to see the Baha’i Garden. The gardens were amazing and Haifa seems like a really cool town. I only wish I could have spent more time there, but it was Friday, and everything stops/closes early to prepare for Shabbat, including the trains. I took a bunch of pictures but I don’t have any more space in my Flickr account until August. As soon as I get space, I’ll upload them.

Work is also going pretty well. I’m still working on the same project, but basically we are happy with how fast things are running and are now looking at improving “correctness” of the results. By correctness I really mean, massaging our algorithms to spit out solutions that are biologically significant. We are also trying to make the algorithms find similar quality solutions. So this week I’m mostly generating a bunch of statistics and analyzing them so we can figure out how to move forward.

I mentioned this mid-life crisis I’m having and it’s pretty serious. I plan to apply for graduate schools in the fall, but I don’t really know what area I want to focus in. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, and researching about it and I think it merits its own post (I’ve noticed myself saying this a lot recently…).

Finally, some food related things: croissants here are really good, I’ve been eating a lot of them. I also went to a really good hummus place with some ultimate players after the hat tournament. It was a small place, near the harbor, and unfortunately I don’t remember the name, but their hummus was excellent. In haifa, I ate at a really good cafe near the entrance to the Baha’i Garden, where I got a mozzarella, pesto sandwich and a salad. The sandwich was one of the better ones of that kind that I’ve had.

In summary, things have really picked up here. I’m really glad that I play ultimate, and that it’s a pretty big thing here too.

It’s high time that I wrote something about Ultimate; I’ve been playing for this entire school year and I’d say I’ve become kind of obsessed. So obsessed, that I just spent the last minutes (between writing the previous sentence and this one) watching videos of ultimate on youtube. Ultimate has essentially replaced soccer for me. In high school, I was obsessed with soccer, I would watch games whenever they were on (and often record them), I would run and lift weights to improve my fitness for soccer, and of course I played competitively for a club team and for my high school. This year, I’ve been watching ultimate videos whenever I get free time, I train for ultimate and I played for Thugmo (our Men’s B team).

I have a decent amount to write about with regards to ultimate (of course keep in mind that I’ve been playing for less than a year) and I’m sure there will be many more posts to come about the sport. For this post, I wanted to write about throwing. During the year, I usually spent a couple of hours a week outside of practice just throwing a disc around with a couple of my teammates. I attribute a lot of my improvement over the past year to those sessions outside of practice, as I’ve noticed that my throws are significantly better than they were at the beginning of the year. My coach also repeatedly told us this: throwing is the best way for a new ultimate player to get better.

One thing that I really like about throwing sessions is that you get to goof around. At practices, I spend most of my time working on my real throws, the ones I’d use in games. When I go out and throw with my teammates, yeah we work on real throws, but we also work on stupid throws. Like today, we started out normally, throwing standard flicks and backhands, then started mixing things up with high release throws and upside down throws. Finally, we played a 4v4 scrimmage with only left handed throws. It was really fun, but I’d argue that the scrimmage wasn’t all that beneficial.

There is some benefit to the goofing around though. Some of those throws are really useful (especially hammers and high release backhands), but practice and tournaments aren’t the place to perfect them. That’s where throwing sessions come in. You get to work on the throws that you don’t have, and get them to the point where you feel comfortable throwing them in games. I’ve been working on my high release flick and my left-handed backhanded, both of which I feel can be useful short-distance throws, and I’m almost at the point that I’m willing to throw them in games. The same can be said with my hammer. Throwing sessions have really increased the types of throws that I am comfortable with.

From another perspective, as a overworked student, throwing is a great break. When I was a freshman we used to play soccer as a break, but for soccer you need at least 6 people. With ultimate, you can have a pretty good time with just one other person, and I can almost always find someone on my team who is willing to throw with me for an hour. It’s really easy to organize a throwing session, and I derive a lot of enjoyment from it.

I guess I’m just really excited to be playing a competitive sport again. After a couple of years without it, I realized how much I missed it. Last year, I tried filling the gap with running, but the lack of a close team didn’t cut it for me (although I do still enjoy running). It’s been really amazing to be back on a competitive team.

I’ll leave you with a video I watched while writing this. Enjoy.