Potlatch - Day Two

Day two was our most competitive and my most fun day. For the second year in a row I was in a totally synergistic pool. Last year Airtight, DarkHorse, and other teams with Claremont kids were all in the same day one pool. In this year’s day two pool were the Claremont, UCLA, and UCSD alumni teams, as well as Team Fisher Price aka the Canada National Team.
We started out against the UCLA team, Smash Masters. This squad featured a lot of the ballers from the young BLU dynasty, and various Smaug alums. Their women were predictably really strong, perhaps outperforming our strong DarkHorse women. Our advantage this game lay with our men, although Punky (what kind of a nickname is that?) and Fozzy held it down well for them. I was knocked out of the game pretty early when a huck went up with me and former Monster teammate Alex Korb in pursuit. He had inside position and I had to try to go over the top. I’m not clear on exactly what happened but somehow the top of his dome connected squarely with the tip of my jaw. I iced it down for the rest of the game, a little afraid that it might actually be injured because I felt a lot of pressure all the way up my jaw to my ears on both sides, and couldn’t open my mouth very far. Sitting in front of my computer a week later though it has finally stopped hurting (mostly) so I’m sure it’s nothing serious. Anyway, we closed out that game like we should.
Our second game was against the UCSD alumni team Chromeo. We at Claremont have a pretty unsuccessful history with UCSD. We had never beat them until two seasons ago (though we have since dominated them). As it turns out, current college performances have little to do with alumni games, and they beat us in a pretty awesome, exciting game. It was one of my two favorite games of the weekend despite getting beat. Wormser followed up his strong all star game performance by absolutely crushing us with TWO callahans on the same type of play. Both callahans saw us receive deep in our own end zone with Chromeo throwing zone. Twice, we tried to float swilly shit over the cup into a brisk crosswind, and both times Wormser had enough time to get a pretty good jump and bring them in. Luckily for us the first one was called back because we went 3-4 and they came down 4-3, but still. I remember Wormser being a super squirrelly short-range cutter who was always open under when he was with the Squids. I either have a fuzzy memory (likely) or he has been hitting the Air Alert like whoa, because he was playing with crazy springs all weekend. It was fun for me to go up against Dollar again. At Discos Calientes last year we guarded each other a little while and each put up big plays against each other. So it was sweet to get one back on him this game (albeit an awkward one), but it the sweet hucks of him and his teammates that defeated us by a couple in hard cap I think. The end was pretty frustrating because we pretty much gave it away with the second Callahan and another lame turnover for their last two goals.
Our last game of the day was against Team Fisher Price, the Canadian mixed national champions and Canada’s representative to Worlds, who had just strangled Shazam the night before in the showcase game. I think a lot of our team was intimidated; people were talking beforehand about not taking it too hard if we got blown out. I, on the other hand, have realized that the people and teams I look up to look like they are on a whole other plane from afar, but when I play against them it is not overwhelming. I think the elite teams are far better than teams of my level as a whole, but individual matchups between me and elite players are never as uneven as they seem like they could be. Case in point: at Cal States (or was it Labor Day?) last year I caught deep goals over/past Alex Nord, Bart Watson, and Morgan Hibbert. Obviously they are all vastly better players than me, but they are not so good that they can stop me (and DarkHorse) from doing what we want. I recognized Morgan Hibbert from UBC/Furious and UBC’s two big handlers that helped throttle the Braineaters at Stanford Invite this spring. I guess they had a couple baller women too, but I didn’t recognize them. I don’t really remember much about the game besides the fact that it definitely was not a blowout. When soft cap went on, I believe the score was 13-9 TFP. We tightened up the rotation with Steve Kolthammer, Kevin and Michael Stout, and Sam “James K. Polk the Dark Horse Candidate” Miner and Joaq playing the final few points. And… we beat them. It was pretty awesome, and perhaps the only time the team really flipped the switch all weekend. TFP seemed pretty stunned and were not in much of a mood to partake in our postgame festivities, but we were pretty hyped. The team scooted over to Red Hook immediately to do the volunteer work, but I stuck around to hang out with Airtight for the last two rounds.
The party was the yoozh (how do you spell that? As in short for usual). The lines were totally outrageous—maybe 40 minutes for food. Perhaps that’s why the crowd was out of control. I didn’t notice anything crazy, besides my friend getting kicked out of the party for peeing in the bushes. They put a huge black sharpie X on his hand, but didn’t tear off his bracelet or anything, so he licked down his hand and rubbed off the X and then came back in.
It was a good day.