Rachel and I will be in Belize, Guatemala, and El Salvador for the next two weeks.
Peace.
led string lights
2 years ago
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
YR Scrimmage
After a decent practice at Stanford on Saturday (only 12 guys, but we got some decent work done) I decided to unwind with a little sushi dinner at Coach Sushi in Oakland. They have all-you-can-drink sake for only $3.50. Then I threw up in my bed. That makes two times I've been to Coach; last time one of my roommates threw up in her bed, this time I did. Needless to say... I can't wait to go back.
The aftermath was a pretty legendary hangover. I got a ride down to Sunnyvale on Sunday morning with Aman and Shy, with NO plans of participating in the scrimmage against YR. When we got to the parking lot, they went to the field and I maintained my semi-fetal position on the backseat, still holding a McDonald's hashbrown that Aman had given me.
After about 10 minutes I shook out of that catatonic state and stumbled my way to the field, at about 9:15 (for a 10:00 scrimmage). YR was already warming up vigorously, while the SCUC [Scumbags this scrimmage, Christian Crusaders at practice Saturday, previously 9/11 Truthers and Jaeger Bombs] men were lounging about. I quickly dropped into my chair, figuring that was the most I would move for the next two or so hours.
Quick tangent: anyone that has played with me knows how ambivalent I feel about warming up. I argue that everyone is different, and that I personally don't need a strenuous hour warmup to get ready for a game. In that context, I absolutely love beating teams that warmup at game speed. With the Braineaters this season we would take a jog, do some plyos, maybe one box drill, and then play. And that was only because Weston wouldn't stand for anything less. Needless to say, I always take it easy in warmups.
Anyway, when gametime approached Joaq and Yeager pressured me to put my cleats on. I humored them, still not planning to break walking pace all day. I set up the field, and my state showed in the cone placement. Both sidelines were straight; both sidelines were 120 yards; but the field I paced out was about 40 yards apart at one back line and about 60 yards apart at the other. Luckily the YR guys corrected my mistakes.
The game started with a YR break. Oh boy. We had maybe 12 guys, while they had a full compliment of 20-25 with jerseys and everything. We started rolling, and I somehow was convinced/convinced myself (It's unclear) to play a point. I went in cold, hungover, and still drunk, and cut deep with about a 3 yard lead on my defender. The throw was ahead of us and floaty. Normally I would eat a throw like that up like beef jerky. This time, I basically let my guy catch up, jump, and d it while I was jogging straight ahead. I still can't believe my teammates let me on the field, let alone encouraged me to play.
I probably played about 4-6 points over the whole game and they were pretty similar to my first. One memorable one saw me drop a backhand score thrown by shy that bounced off my hands with no defender near. Usually if something like that happens I'll curse and get really pissed off at myself. This time I was in such a mental haze that I just shrugged and then got run all over the field by a handler making upline cuts.
I did at least get one nice sky, followed by a quick bitchy call-fest with the mark, followed by a thrown score. I guess no one enjoys getting pwned by a hungover sack of shit.
More game recap: we broke the hell out of them with ease to take half 8-3, and broke out of half to go up 9-3. YR seemed to be in shock. You could tell that they weren't happy to be getting blown out by a ragtag looking team like SCUC while Team Australia watched on. The second half was even as the SCUC legs got tired and YR cleaned up their game (got rid of the turfs and drops that plagued them the first half) and we won 15-10 (or 15-11... not exactly sure).
Big shout out to Joaq for getting two massive D's in one point, pulling well, and generally balling, especially in the first half.
Our roster for the day, courtesy of Joaq:
Aman
Benji
Connor
Gomez
Harrison
Joaq
Jughead (non-factor)
Laurent (late arrival)
Nat
Nate (late arrival)
Russle (late arrival)
Shy
TomTom
Yeager
Thoughts on YR: They traditionally play small ball, but it was hard to see much of an offensive philosophy here. There was no deep game to speak of, and the small ball stuff seemed rusty compared to what I've seen from them in the past. They throw out a tiny O-line, even compared to our squad which is on the shorter side. I guess the personnel fits their game plan. Maybe there is just a dearth of strong young players in the Bay Area (judging from our two rosters). On D, they weren't generating turnovers, but did get some nice close call bids.
I still can't wait for our team to be able to field its strongest roster, which frankly might no happen until the series. With how well we've played so far (winning Solstice with a skeleton crew, smashing YR with a little bit less of a skeleton crew but nowhere near our full squad), I can see us doing some big things if our attendance ever improves.
Aman and Shy sold me out afterwards and didn't want to stay for Revolver vs Team Australia, so we rode back up to Berkeley to watch the tail-end of Fury vs Team Australia (women obviously). The game was pretty sloppy, and from what I saw the Aussies were unimpressive, but I know they were battling jetlag and the field was slippery and it was somewhat windy. For Fury, Alex Snyder was definitely the standout player. Her throws are money, and she had one especially sick long IO flick break for a goal. It looked like Fury ran their endzone Iso with the stack hugging one sideline and one cutter roaming in the end zone. Maybe that was just one called play because I didnt see too much of them, but I can't imagine an opponent would let themselves get fooled by that more than once in a game. Fury's throws were much sharper than Australia's, and I didn't see any great feats of athleticism by either team.
Conclusion: I was hungover until the next morning. I don't think I had a clear pee all day. We beat YR.
The aftermath was a pretty legendary hangover. I got a ride down to Sunnyvale on Sunday morning with Aman and Shy, with NO plans of participating in the scrimmage against YR. When we got to the parking lot, they went to the field and I maintained my semi-fetal position on the backseat, still holding a McDonald's hashbrown that Aman had given me.
After about 10 minutes I shook out of that catatonic state and stumbled my way to the field, at about 9:15 (for a 10:00 scrimmage). YR was already warming up vigorously, while the SCUC [Scumbags this scrimmage, Christian Crusaders at practice Saturday, previously 9/11 Truthers and Jaeger Bombs] men were lounging about. I quickly dropped into my chair, figuring that was the most I would move for the next two or so hours.
Quick tangent: anyone that has played with me knows how ambivalent I feel about warming up. I argue that everyone is different, and that I personally don't need a strenuous hour warmup to get ready for a game. In that context, I absolutely love beating teams that warmup at game speed. With the Braineaters this season we would take a jog, do some plyos, maybe one box drill, and then play. And that was only because Weston wouldn't stand for anything less. Needless to say, I always take it easy in warmups.
Anyway, when gametime approached Joaq and Yeager pressured me to put my cleats on. I humored them, still not planning to break walking pace all day. I set up the field, and my state showed in the cone placement. Both sidelines were straight; both sidelines were 120 yards; but the field I paced out was about 40 yards apart at one back line and about 60 yards apart at the other. Luckily the YR guys corrected my mistakes.
The game started with a YR break. Oh boy. We had maybe 12 guys, while they had a full compliment of 20-25 with jerseys and everything. We started rolling, and I somehow was convinced/convinced myself (It's unclear) to play a point. I went in cold, hungover, and still drunk, and cut deep with about a 3 yard lead on my defender. The throw was ahead of us and floaty. Normally I would eat a throw like that up like beef jerky. This time, I basically let my guy catch up, jump, and d it while I was jogging straight ahead. I still can't believe my teammates let me on the field, let alone encouraged me to play.
I probably played about 4-6 points over the whole game and they were pretty similar to my first. One memorable one saw me drop a backhand score thrown by shy that bounced off my hands with no defender near. Usually if something like that happens I'll curse and get really pissed off at myself. This time I was in such a mental haze that I just shrugged and then got run all over the field by a handler making upline cuts.
I did at least get one nice sky, followed by a quick bitchy call-fest with the mark, followed by a thrown score. I guess no one enjoys getting pwned by a hungover sack of shit.
More game recap: we broke the hell out of them with ease to take half 8-3, and broke out of half to go up 9-3. YR seemed to be in shock. You could tell that they weren't happy to be getting blown out by a ragtag looking team like SCUC while Team Australia watched on. The second half was even as the SCUC legs got tired and YR cleaned up their game (got rid of the turfs and drops that plagued them the first half) and we won 15-10 (or 15-11... not exactly sure).
Big shout out to Joaq for getting two massive D's in one point, pulling well, and generally balling, especially in the first half.
Our roster for the day, courtesy of Joaq:
Aman
Benji
Connor
Gomez
Harrison
Joaq
Jughead (non-factor)
Laurent (late arrival)
Nat
Nate (late arrival)
Russle (late arrival)
Shy
TomTom
Yeager
Thoughts on YR: They traditionally play small ball, but it was hard to see much of an offensive philosophy here. There was no deep game to speak of, and the small ball stuff seemed rusty compared to what I've seen from them in the past. They throw out a tiny O-line, even compared to our squad which is on the shorter side. I guess the personnel fits their game plan. Maybe there is just a dearth of strong young players in the Bay Area (judging from our two rosters). On D, they weren't generating turnovers, but did get some nice close call bids.
I still can't wait for our team to be able to field its strongest roster, which frankly might no happen until the series. With how well we've played so far (winning Solstice with a skeleton crew, smashing YR with a little bit less of a skeleton crew but nowhere near our full squad), I can see us doing some big things if our attendance ever improves.
Aman and Shy sold me out afterwards and didn't want to stay for Revolver vs Team Australia, so we rode back up to Berkeley to watch the tail-end of Fury vs Team Australia (women obviously). The game was pretty sloppy, and from what I saw the Aussies were unimpressive, but I know they were battling jetlag and the field was slippery and it was somewhat windy. For Fury, Alex Snyder was definitely the standout player. Her throws are money, and she had one especially sick long IO flick break for a goal. It looked like Fury ran their endzone Iso with the stack hugging one sideline and one cutter roaming in the end zone. Maybe that was just one called play because I didnt see too much of them, but I can't imagine an opponent would let themselves get fooled by that more than once in a game. Fury's throws were much sharper than Australia's, and I didn't see any great feats of athleticism by either team.
Conclusion: I was hungover until the next morning. I don't think I had a clear pee all day. We beat YR.
Friday, July 11, 2008
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.
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.
Thursday, July 10, 2008
Potlatch Recap Day One
Potlatch 2008 was my most successful one yet. My team, DarkHorse, balled out of control thanks to a totally stacked and awesome team. Here is the roster:
Amanda Bailey
Lucy Barnes
Schuyler Charf
Dan “Shy” Chazin
Neva Cherniavsky
Drew d’Avis
Ashley Hovey
Steve Kolthammer
Katie “Krump” McDonald
Sam Miner
Joaquin Nagle
Michael Prude
Deirdre Ronaldson
Sarah Ross-Viles
Jay Schulkin
Kevin Stout
Michael Stout
Trina Stout
Alex Wells
Faye Ziegweid
Dave Zucker
A roster full of ballers who rolled there way into 9th place at Potlatch. Our game/gift was pretty awesome. A custom pony wristband for the two MVPs of our opponent, My Little Pony temporary tattoos for all, and of course the “leading a horse to drink” relay race. Our squad did a good job of staying loose on the sidelines with PBR, Joose, and Sparks+, which I attribute most of our success to.
DAY ONE
I’m a little shaky on day one results because we rolled through our pool pretty easy. Our first opponent was Guard, Seize Them! I have a little rivalry with Guard going back to the Airtight summer league days, where they may or may not have defeated the juggernaut one of these years (and no I am not counting the playoff games I always missed because I had to be back at school). We played a little uneven this game, winning easily but not playing with any chemistry. By the end of the game, though, we had gotten used to each other and set the tone for a weekend of dominance.
I’m not sure of the order of the next two games, but we played Beer Factor and Madtown Booze Hounds. The Beer Factor game produced nothing memorable besides a classic co-ed play featuring Alex “Mom” Wells. The other team put up a terrible floaty outside-in flick huck that Alex quickly got a bead on. He ran to get under it without watching where he was going, jumped up while running backwards to knock the disc away, then landed squarely on a girl from the other team.
http://picasaweb.google.com/michaelprude/Potlatch08/photo#5221077641497479618
http://picasaweb.google.com/michaelprude/Potlatch08/photo#5221077683188081442
http://picasaweb.google.com/michaelprude/Potlatch08/photo#5221077739107129922
http://picasaweb.google.com/michaelprude/Potlatch08/photo#5221077766330067538
She was PISSED, of course, and threw her hat and stomped off the field like a cartoon character might do.
http://picasaweb.google.com/michaelprude/Potlatch08/photo#5221077785526351730
Good olllllllllllllllllll’ co-ed ultimate. I don’t blame Alex at all by the way, sometimes shit happens in ultimate. Anyway, the game was a blowout.
Our other day one game was against a Madison team featuring Trikey and Nicole M. http://picasaweb.google.com/michaelprude/Potlatch08/photo#5221075991693116898 During our game against GST I glanced over at the game next to ours and saw a big kid with dyed red hair and a Dennis Rodman jersey pull and then fall over. I couldn’t believe my eyes; it was Trikey! We bageled them, which is never fun to do. The definite highlight of the game was me trying to throw a backhand breakmark huck around Trikey. A little backstory: during Braineaters practices this fall, we did a ton of hucking-while-marked practice. I got really good at bombing breakmark backhands, but it didn’t translate to Potlatch three months later, I guess. Trikey handblocked the shit out of my throw. It wasn’t even a deflection. Crap.
I also got in a few guest points with Airtight against the UT alum team during one of our byes. I had been hoping that Airtight would have been rocking some fly new jerseys, but they went down the t-shirt spray paint stencil route. It ended up looking pretty great. I got a #11 shirt and wrote Filthy across the bottom. Man I love that word. Sean, Doug, and Greg were numbers 24, 7, and 365. Referring to their penchant for keeping it real, of course. Greg’s said Dumb Nasty, which was filthy. Ha. I also liked that Shomir was number 80085.
As for the game, I predictably only went in to try to reel in some bombs. Greg threw me an awesome backhand huck around a cup and I just had to run it down. And of course, I fell down while running and the disc dropped to the ground in the endzone. Balls. From then on every time I was on the field Calle would yell “He only wants to go deep!” He was right. There’s hardly anything more satisfying then when someone is scared of you going deep and backs you by fifteen feet, and you still smoke them for an easy deep score. It almost happened, but this time the thrower (I forget who) didn’t hold up their end of the bargain.
SHOWCASE GAME – All Stars vs Sockeye
1. Sockeye was boring
2. Nobody was hucking to Stout
3. Wormser absolutely blew up
4. Frank gets one measly d and now he is crowing like all his weak shit is vindicated. Stout, you are only encouraging him. He was largely unimpressive. Even in warm-ups he was throwing discs away. That being said, he made the event a lot more fun and exciting.
5. The All Stars jersey were sweet, but they really couldn’t give each player a number so we could tell them apart?
Amanda Bailey
Lucy Barnes
Schuyler Charf
Dan “Shy” Chazin
Neva Cherniavsky
Drew d’Avis
Ashley Hovey
Steve Kolthammer
Katie “Krump” McDonald
Sam Miner
Joaquin Nagle
Michael Prude
Deirdre Ronaldson
Sarah Ross-Viles
Jay Schulkin
Kevin Stout
Michael Stout
Trina Stout
Alex Wells
Faye Ziegweid
Dave Zucker
A roster full of ballers who rolled there way into 9th place at Potlatch. Our game/gift was pretty awesome. A custom pony wristband for the two MVPs of our opponent, My Little Pony temporary tattoos for all, and of course the “leading a horse to drink” relay race. Our squad did a good job of staying loose on the sidelines with PBR, Joose, and Sparks+, which I attribute most of our success to.
DAY ONE
I’m a little shaky on day one results because we rolled through our pool pretty easy. Our first opponent was Guard, Seize Them! I have a little rivalry with Guard going back to the Airtight summer league days, where they may or may not have defeated the juggernaut one of these years (and no I am not counting the playoff games I always missed because I had to be back at school). We played a little uneven this game, winning easily but not playing with any chemistry. By the end of the game, though, we had gotten used to each other and set the tone for a weekend of dominance.
I’m not sure of the order of the next two games, but we played Beer Factor and Madtown Booze Hounds. The Beer Factor game produced nothing memorable besides a classic co-ed play featuring Alex “Mom” Wells. The other team put up a terrible floaty outside-in flick huck that Alex quickly got a bead on. He ran to get under it without watching where he was going, jumped up while running backwards to knock the disc away, then landed squarely on a girl from the other team.
http://picasaweb.google.com/michaelprude/Potlatch08/photo#5221077641497479618
http://picasaweb.google.com/michaelprude/Potlatch08/photo#5221077683188081442
http://picasaweb.google.com/michaelprude/Potlatch08/photo#5221077739107129922
http://picasaweb.google.com/michaelprude/Potlatch08/photo#5221077766330067538
She was PISSED, of course, and threw her hat and stomped off the field like a cartoon character might do.
http://picasaweb.google.com/michaelprude/Potlatch08/photo#5221077785526351730
Good olllllllllllllllllll’ co-ed ultimate. I don’t blame Alex at all by the way, sometimes shit happens in ultimate. Anyway, the game was a blowout.
Our other day one game was against a Madison team featuring Trikey and Nicole M. http://picasaweb.google.com/michaelprude/Potlatch08/photo#5221075991693116898 During our game against GST I glanced over at the game next to ours and saw a big kid with dyed red hair and a Dennis Rodman jersey pull and then fall over. I couldn’t believe my eyes; it was Trikey! We bageled them, which is never fun to do. The definite highlight of the game was me trying to throw a backhand breakmark huck around Trikey. A little backstory: during Braineaters practices this fall, we did a ton of hucking-while-marked practice. I got really good at bombing breakmark backhands, but it didn’t translate to Potlatch three months later, I guess. Trikey handblocked the shit out of my throw. It wasn’t even a deflection. Crap.
I also got in a few guest points with Airtight against the UT alum team during one of our byes. I had been hoping that Airtight would have been rocking some fly new jerseys, but they went down the t-shirt spray paint stencil route. It ended up looking pretty great. I got a #11 shirt and wrote Filthy across the bottom. Man I love that word. Sean, Doug, and Greg were numbers 24, 7, and 365. Referring to their penchant for keeping it real, of course. Greg’s said Dumb Nasty, which was filthy. Ha. I also liked that Shomir was number 80085.
As for the game, I predictably only went in to try to reel in some bombs. Greg threw me an awesome backhand huck around a cup and I just had to run it down. And of course, I fell down while running and the disc dropped to the ground in the endzone. Balls. From then on every time I was on the field Calle would yell “He only wants to go deep!” He was right. There’s hardly anything more satisfying then when someone is scared of you going deep and backs you by fifteen feet, and you still smoke them for an easy deep score. It almost happened, but this time the thrower (I forget who) didn’t hold up their end of the bargain.
SHOWCASE GAME – All Stars vs Sockeye
1. Sockeye was boring
2. Nobody was hucking to Stout
3. Wormser absolutely blew up
4. Frank gets one measly d and now he is crowing like all his weak shit is vindicated. Stout, you are only encouraging him. He was largely unimpressive. Even in warm-ups he was throwing discs away. That being said, he made the event a lot more fun and exciting.
5. The All Stars jersey were sweet, but they really couldn’t give each player a number so we could tell them apart?
Wednesday, July 2, 2008
Solstice Recap
Dateline Eugene.
First, a little explanation for why this post took so long. I had been job hunting in the days leading up to Solstice, and got hired Friday afternoon right before I left to ride up to Eugene. Work started Monday, so since then I have been so busy that I haven’t had time to update the ol’ blog. Now for the good news; the place hired two of us to tackle this big project, and we were so good at it that we finished in one week, so they fired us on Tuesday (or “let us go” because they didn’t need us anymore). So now I have plenty of time to get back in touch with the internet.
Anyway, Solstice. Solstice was fuckin awesome. Yeager laid out the Jaeger Bombs team goals for the weekend before our first game: have fun, stay up on your teammates, and don’t go o-fer on the weekend. Check, check, and check.
In my biased opinion, I’d say we had the most fun of everyone in the open division. The sideline banter was hilarious, and we didn’t have any lame ‘sack up’ inspirational timeout speeches when we were doing poorly.
I couldn’t have been happier with my new teammates. Most of them are straight clownin, and the ones that aren’t are quiet and not at all annoying. I’ve played with a ton of different teams over the past few years and this group of guys seemed to be the most entertaining of all. That gets me reeeeal pumped for the season and glad that I am playing with the Bombs.
The playing itself was real sweet as well. We went 7-1, winning the open division and avenging our only loss to the UW team in semis. You better hope we don’t match up at Potlatch Sean, there’s no way I’m losing to you twice! Pretty much of all our games were close and saw lots of comebacks, but we pulled out the ones that mattered. Also, our team was in terrible shape and I think I was probably the worst offender. I hadn’t played ultimate since college regionals, and hadn’t done much exercise during that time either. Literally only a few points into our very first game, my legs were shot for the entire weekend. I’ve realized that when I get really out of shape, my hamstrings are the second thing to go (besides my lungs), so the rest of the weekend saw me shuffling around and only actually running when I absolutely had to. That meant some heinous defense where I would guard people by backing them by 5 yards because I couldn’t really change directions if someone put a real cut on me. It also meant that my deep runs were a lot more rare than usual, and less productive too. At work on Monday I was walking like I was constipated because my legs were so sore. Anyway, I managed to play the whole weekend in that condition never playing more than one point in a row until finals. By then our numbers of healthy players had really dwindled so I ended up having to play the majority of the points. I somehow managed to pull out my only layout D of the tournament in the finals despite being totally dead. It felt pretty sweet to layout a little upwards instead of straight horizontal, but the downside was that after I got the D I faceplanted and THEN the guy I d’d landed on the back of my head, smashing my nose into the ground. I took an injury sub, and my nose still hurts (according to a co-worker who used to be a trainer I bruised the cartilage). The good news is that I got to sit out the rest of that point which probably lasted around 15 (!) minutes. As our victory prize we won a cooler full of Full Sail IPA; pretty sweet.
I watched the elite showcase game which was Rhino vs Revolver. I have to say, if that team plays in the series as Rhino (and for that matter this year’s Monster team does the same), they better change their name. I heard there were only 3 returners, but I didn’t recognize a single player. Incredible. To be fair, the new rhinos looked pretty scrappy.
It was great to see a lot of people I haven’t seen much of recently due to geographic constraints: Alex Wells, Sean Rohan, Joaq,etc. The party was a great place to catch up with some delicious microbrews (whatever it was was better than Red Hook). Lowlights of the party included a super long bathroom line (Shy and I ended up crossing swords to save our linemates time) and YR’s super creepy dim room. Maybe they all had migraines. Bob did bring the clownin with his introductory question though: “So how was the open division?”
Team Summary
I think the Jaeger Bombs are going to be pretty sick this season. We did extremely well at this tournament despite being unconditioned and missing some of our top future contributors (the UC Santa Cruz studs, maybe some guy from CUT, etc.). It’s a blast to keep playing with Shy and reunite with Joaquin, and I can’t overstate how much fun all my new teammates are. Plus, Yeager is totally sick on the field, coming through with some impressive handler magic and huge D bids. It just sucks that practices are so damn far away from Oakland. But worth it.
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