SFUC Tournament - Sunday

Ohhhhh Sunday.

The weather was the worst of the season so far. For the first time, there was serious rain instead of just sprinkles. The rain was consistent and heavy, but didn't actually have much of an effect on the playing conditions. Players were still catching and throwing fairly normally - downwind. Upwind was a different story. The wind was strong enough that no one was throwing decent upwind pulls, which I think is a good way to judge wind's strength. There was a lot of zone from both teams, but was not exclusive.

The game was somewhat sloppy because of the wind factor. Our defense was pretty tight but the opponent was still able to operate downwind. We played pretty good offense both ways, but we just weren't able to punch it in enough upwind, despite numerous chances. Our throwing game was just not on point, including everyone. Not only were we missing two of our stronger throwers in Whit and Claire, but Kevin had easily his worst game of the season, and our other handlers weren't making many plays downfield (with the exception of the sick, silly, crossfield blade shy threw to me for a terrifying score). A microcosm of the game came at 11-11 in a game to 11, when we had the good fortune to be going downwind. THREE times off of turnovers, the thrower picked up the disc ~25 yards from the endzone and put a poor huck to a poor matchup, and we couldn't make the plays any of the times. It was extremely disheartening, and we lost the final two points to lose in quarterfinals, 11-13.

Still, spirits were high. We all had an extremely good time over the whole season and weekend due to our success on the field, but especially due to the bonding and friendships that developed. It's hard to imagine a more cohesive team of drafted players.

The tournament crystallized some reflections on my own play. Mainly, conditioning counts. When I was out of shape I was a mostly useless sack who could only make the occasional deep strike. When I started lifting and got back into and beyond my normal fitness, the results were obvious. I became much more of a defensive presence, which felt great. I also realized that I can more than hold my own against the players in the country, from teams like Jam, Revolver, and Mischief. Every time I have played the top club teams throughout my college career I realize this, but it stood out more in this league because of the repeated opportunities I had to matchup against a high caliber of player. Finally, my throws have seriously faded. For the last many months, the only time I picked up a disc (with a few exceptions) was when my fingers were frozen stiff with teammates who were capable of doing the throwing heavy lifting, so all I've done since November is throw dumps. Right now, I need to get my breaks and mid-long range throws back into gear for the upcoming club season. I'm not worried about getting to where I need to be, but I'm sure not there right now.

Thanks to all my Moral Hazard teammates for a great season! 15-2 ain't bad.

SFUC Tournament - Saturday

My very first league tournament came and went quicker than I would've liked, unfortunately.
We came in as the #1 seed, so we had an easy schedule with games against the #8, #9, and #16 seeds. I won't recap any of the games because I don't remember the details, but we took care of business in a serious way. We finished with the best point differential of all the pool winners.

I was expecting rain, but the weather was actually nice. This meant that for literally the first time all season, the weather was warm enough for me to not uncomfortably cold and stiff hands. Hooray! I was extremely happy with how I played on the day. I caught my fair share of goals, threw more than usual, and cut well. I was more happy with my defense than with anything else, though. I put in work and got good results. My personal highlight was shutting down Jon Levy of Revolver on the dump. Starting at about stall 5, I got really locked in and was in a great wall sit position, sliding along with his cuts. I could hear my teammate's on the sideline yelling "Yeah Jughead, great mark!" as the thrower threw away a desperation throw at stall 9. Everyone congratulated me when we scored, which was extremely gratifying.

Saturday - Good times!

SFUC Week 13 (Regular Season Finale)

The final game of my inaugural Winter League regular season got off to a very inauspicious start on the way to the fields. Just blocks away from Crocker Amazon, Daly City's Finest pulled Shy and me over. Interestingly, we were not in Daly City. Nor were we Ridin Dirty. A young cop comes up to the passenger side window, and tells me that a headlight is out. OK, which one? Well... he forgets. And doesn't go take a look. I give him my license, registration, and insurance, and he asks Shy for his too for some reason. Hm. Maybe we looked suspicious because we were both wearing stocking caps. Before he goes back to the cruiser to check our info, he asks if we are on parole or probation. "Sorry, we have to ask." I did not know that. While he is taking a leisurely 5 minutes checking our info in his car, Shy and I continue our pleasant conversation. Finally he comes back, and tells Shy and I we need to get CA licenses instead of our old ones if we've moved permanently. Fair enough. He says "if some cop is being a dick, he could get you in trouble for driving without a license, because technically that's what you're doing." Then he asks if we are familiar with the area. Weird question. We tell him we are just here to play some frisbee up the road. He gives a serious warning: don't hang around after the game. "You WILL get held up at gunpoint if you grab a bite to eat after the game." Again, those are real live quotation marks. Finally, he sends us on our merry way.

After finally finding parking, we get to the field. It is COLD. And perhaps more windy than any of our previous games here, a pretty stiff upwind-downwind orientation. Luckily, I brought my new gloves, which I promptly lost by leaving them at the fields. We were playing Pajamahadeen, featuring Jam's Remucal, some Brass Monkey players (according to Shy), and a couple former UCLA women.

The game starts with us getting broken downwind, then us scoring downwind and breaking upwind to go to 2-1. The wind gradually died down over the course of the game, but something like 12 straight upwind points were scored by both team's offenses. They were zoning us, but our overheads were cash money, probably 10 for 10. That number is especially impressive considering that our wind-free overhead percentage is much lower. Shy threw 3 hammer goals, two of which were wicked leading throws and one of which was a shitty throw to a covered static receiver who was covered but skied for the goal (Spencer?). At the end of the game we ran off a few breaks to get the 12-9 win, the score when the field lights cut out at closing time.

I was able to really take advantage of the wind on defense. I stuck with my man in dangerous parts of the field, and encouraged a couple crappy throws both in man and zone that I either gobbled up or knew would fail in the windy conditions, especially downwind, when hucks were predictably sailing long. My favorite personal play of the game was on zone D when I was playing deep deep. All game I was playing way under the wings on zone D to force a swilly huck and take away the hammer space. At one point, a woman was about 20-25 yards behind me, in the end zone. They didn't have many huckers so I knew they weren't gonna send it to her unless Remucal had the disc. He got it on the backhand side of the field and wound up. I immediately started sprinting deep, and the throw went up. It ended up being a poor throw that went out of bounds, but it felt GREAT to kick myself into my new 5th gear, courtesy of squats at the gym. I chased down the errant disc and hit it away, but I loved how it felt moving faster than I normally could.

The game was fun, any possible lingering beef between commish and I was firmly squashed, and we closed out the season in first place with an awesome record of 12-1. I like to say we were 14-1 though, because the two weeks we had games canceled, we missed out on playing the bottom two teams in the league, who finished with a combined 4 wins. Last night I told Shy I hadn't been on such a strong team relative to the competition since Sandwich Day, but then I remembered we lost to the UCLA alumni team and almost got beat by a SLO split squad... Airtight in the old summers is a much better comparison.

A little Jughead Media cross-promotional synergy: I'm on twitter, and I'm co-author with Greg on brononxylo.

SFUC Week 12

We played the 2nd place team, stocked with Mischief men. They were good, we were better.
The game was fantastic. There were a lot of calls from both teams, as is the norm when two good teams face off. I played my best defensive game of the season (thanks squats!) and a fair offensive game.
The awesomeness of the game was negated by an absurd incident involving me and a non-participant after the game. I've thought about the incident many times over the weekend, and it still makes me furious. But I'd rather not discuss it here.
Another big game coming up on Thursday, and unfortunately we'll be missing some players due to Kaimana. But the Moral Hazard train will keep rolling!

SFUC Week 11

For six weeks in a row, Moral Hazard has won either 13-11 (twice) or 13-10 (four times). The trend continued on Tuesday night, as we defeated the Armchair Revolutionaries 13-10 in a workmanlike effort.
They featured Fury's Lauren Casey, Jam's Taylor Cascino, and Mischief's Chris "Fozzy" Hyde. I played against Fozzy for four years when he was a Smauggie for UCLA, so it was cool to matchup against him again outside of college.
Each team had a couple runs to start the game, and eventually we went up pretty big, maybe 9-5 or so, before coasting to the 13-10 victory. We played a great total team game, with no one stealing the show and everyone contributing big. Our D was generating turnovers galore with sticky dump defense and strong marks, and we were able to shut down their huck game pretty well, so they spent a lot of time trapped on the force sideline with high stall counts. Our huck game was pretty abysmal with all the throws coming out poorly, but we adjusted to a more under game and got easy yardage up and down the field.
With our hucks not working out so well (I threw away a backhand huck myself), I was able to put more energy into defense. Furthermore, I can already feel my gym work paying off, so I had more energy to begin with. I had a few nice points of shutdown endzone D when my guys were iso'd, which always feels great. I got something like 4 D's, which is a lot for me for one game. I had a great chasedown huck D in the front corner of the end zone that I snatched hard (not high in the air though) in front of Fozzy, a hand block during a crazy mixed-up transition, a run-through poach D in the same end zone corner, and a semi-D where I went up super early for a floating blady huck to Fozzy, so he went up too early in response to me, and the disc went over both our heads.
After the game I made my first post-game bar foray with the team, which was good times. PBR for all never misses.
Coming next week: 1st place Moral Hazard versus 2nd place Dirty Tricksters. Should be a good one.

SFUC Week 10

It's been more than a month since the official SFUC power rankings were updated at http://sfuc.wordpress.com/, but it's safe to say we are #1 after winning all our games since the last update, including this week against the Attack Poodles who supposedly only had 1 loss up til then.
They featured Brian "Boo" Garcia from JAM, and a lot of competent but unknown-by-me men.
We won without too much trouble, 13-10?
I played terribly.
There were 3 hucks that were poorly thrown that I still got a hand on, but didnt bring them in. Each one of those plays made me furious, as on a normal day I'd say I catch each one of those 90% of the time. 1/10*1/10*1/10=1/1000 odds of dropping all three. I still caught a couple goals, but my defense was somewhat weak, as again no one would throw deep to my guys and I was weak on the under.
Luckily, I have a PLAN!
Through the magic of CraigsList, I scored an $8/month gym membership, and I've been going relatively frequently for the past week or two. I'm getting serious about squats, which I am in dire need of since I don't get regular exercise in any other way. Once I get my explosiveness back, and then improve on it, I am confident that I'll bounce my defense up.
Oh, also I had a sweet huck run down that was just out of my grasp as I layed out in the back corner, but I felt alright about it because I made up about 10 yards on my defender in front of me to even have a play on it.

SFUC Week 9

This week we played the Crony Capitalists. The game was absolutely insane. Moral Hazard squeezed a couple tournament's worth of preposterously filthy highlights into one short game to 13.
I'll try something new this week and break down my post into sections, if only so I don't forget anything.

How I played: On Wednesday I went out for an evening on the town in Oakland. It was pretty overwhelming to look out at downtown from our house and see a half dozen helicopters (police? news?) circling over downtown in preparation for a feared riot following the planned BART shooting protest. We decided to give safety a big F You and drove downtown. I didn't drink anymore than any of my three lady housemates, all of whom were fine at the end of the night. Something crazy happened to me, though, and I ended the night throwing up loudly in my bedroom trashcan, and alternately loudly shouting about how terrible I felt, and stumbling around the house and knocking a painting off the wall. One of my roommates made a joke about one of the bartenders drugging me. Ha?

Anyway, I was laid low all day Thursday with an awful hangover. I couldn't eat, or uncurl myself from the fetal position, until about 6:00 pm. I choked down a mouthful of dinner, and picked up Shy and drove to the fields. I was feeling a lot better when I got moving around, but I was a little sluggish the whole night. I had a pretty big play early in the game when Shy lit me up with a flick huck. I rode the magic carpet and snatched the disc and landed right outside of the endzone. Then I threw a three yard pass to an open girl on my team. Time stood still as the pass somehow managed to not be completed. Frustrating! I also threw away a flick huck that I should have completed but rushed too much. On D, I was playing way under my guy trying to bait hucks, because most of their throwers looked kinda weak to me. That strategy failed though, because throwers refused to put the disc up, and my guys would just run by me and catch uncontested unders. Playing hungover sucks.

Highlights: Now for the good stuff. The plays my teammates were making were seriously ridiculous. Frazier started off the game with two circus catch goals. Spencer had a few nasty plays, especially his picturesque toe-in goal at full extension. Brad was playing like he was LeBron James against those GQ guys, making a half dozen mind blowing plays. On one, Shy threw a full field huck that rode the right sideline the whole way. It looked like it was gonna fall out of bounds, but it softly fell toward the line. Brad and his guy were running under it, looking like they were already out of bounds. The defender bid and misssed, and Brad somehow got his feet back in bounds then reeled it in. Obviously words dont do it justice. On another play, he got a sick layout D on a bounce pass that I can't believe he saw coming. Claire made a sick catch in the back of the endzone on a bullet of a scoober falling away from her that Shy threw. Shy's hucks were so on point in this game, it was like he was flinging out laser guided missiles. Bombs just hitting the cutters in stride. He also threw the prettiest punt ever. The stack was 5 people standing in a clump 20 yards away from the disc, with no one cutting. At stall 9 he ripped a massive OI flick that floated down like a perfect pull at the opposite end of the field, allowing the cutters enough time to run under it, but unfortunately they couldnt reel it in.
Man I wish someone was taping this game!

Game flow: We were again missing Kevin Buchanan (AWOL), and Whit (back). We also missed Slap and J9 for the first 6 or 7 points, which led to the bad guys jumping out to a quick 2 break lead. We eventually reeled them back in, and pulled away for a 13-10 victory. There wasn't much back and forth to the game, as they dominated early and we did late.

Chippiness: For some reason, this game had some strange moments of chippiness. I felt like the other team was arguing some pretty standard pick and foul calls pretty aggressively and disrespectfully. There was one time we had the disc and a soccer ball rolled onto the field. We played through it, throwing a swing pass before everyone stopped to get the ball off the field. They insisted that they had stopped because of the ball, just to take back a swing pass. We obliged. Later, they had the disc near the end zone and the same thing happened. A soccer ball rolled across the goalline, some people stopped and some didnt, and they caught the disc in the end zone. Our player guarding the receiver asked for it to go back because of the ball, and this time they argued about it like they hadnt previously called the same thing against us. Ridic. Worst of all, Makuck had a run-in with one of their guys. Makuck had fouled the guy on the mark and not contested. After the disc was in another players hands, his guy said to him something along the lines of "you did that on purpose, didnt you." When Makuck ignored him, the guy kicked him in the leg from behind to trip him up. That really has no place in ultimate. Bush!

SFUC Week 8

Our game yesterday was a great way for me to get back into the swing of things after spending the last week+ on vacation with my extended family, who are finally all of drinking age. I had a blast, but sitting around the pool and beach all day doesn't do much to keep you in shape it turns out...

My conditioning work I had done pre-break is definitely lost, which is to be expected. Luckily, I am still in far better shape than I was at the beginning of the season. My cardio was gone, but my legs were alright, if nowhere near where they were 2 weeks ago.

To the game. We played against the Community Organizers, who featured Tyler Grant of Mischief and Greg Marliave and Charles Denby of YR. I was looking forward to matching up with Greg, who had given me the business in our YR-SCUC matchups this summer. The terms would be somewhat different this time I figured, as he wouldn't be in prime conditioned shape, and I wouldn't be woefully out of shape or fighting a stomach parasite or debilitating hangover, or going against team D that made my normal cuts less tenable. As it turned out, we were only matched up for maybe 1 point the whole game.

The task of guarding and being guarded by Tyler Grant fell to me. I have heard a lot about him being perhaps the best man in co-ed since he was in his Mischief days, but don't remember much about seeing him play this club season. It turns out that he is about my height, but carries quite a load compared to me. He is far quicker than me in the first couple steps, and just a little faster than me at top speed. It was clear that he was the single player most central to his team's gameplan of all the team's we have played so far.

We decided that it would be best to make him beat us with the disc under rather than deep, so I spent a lot of the game being run ragged by him in the space in front of the stack. This led to him catching a ton of uncontested 5-8 yard passes, but I was always there to put on a good mark pretty quickly. I did a good job of taking away his breaks and making him throw short throws toward the open sideline rather than up the middle of the field.

When he would take off, it was pretty tough to stick with him because he would change directions and get up to speed so quickly. Luckily, it was pretty easy to predict when he was about to really bust deep so i wasn't caught unaware when he would kick it into 5th gear. Even more luckily, there wasn't anyone on his team with good enough deep throws to get him the disc when he would get open downfield. Of course, he did catch a couple deep bombs, but generally they didn't have the horses to get it to him.

One thing they did do, though, was look to him exclusively at the goal line. I did a pretty great job of sticking with him on front stack iso's, considering his quickness advantage. In fact, I think he didn't catch any iso goals on me, or even get open in that situation. One situation they burned me on repeatedly were blades. If he was out in the lane in the end zone, I would let him get deeper than me since a short blade is so rare in that situation.

It was clear that as their main threat, though, they would find any way to get the disc to him. There must have been 6 or so throws like that made, early in the count so that they weren't necessarily desperation looks. On some of them I was sagged off enough that he caught them with no trouble. On 2 or 3 of them, though, I was close enough to be able to time my jump by looking at his eyes as I ran toward him to catch up, and either deflect the disc or distract him into a drop.

As far as the deep matchup went, he sort of got me on one that I could only catch up enough on a huck to get skied without a real chance at the disc. I made up for it a few points later, though, when I baited a lesser thrower into hucking to him when I had bettter position. The disc was floating in front of us with me between him and the disc. I went up high and ripped it down, but I don't know how close he was to getting it since he was behind me and never touched me.

The game itself was a lot of fun. We broke on the first point, which was important since there is no mirrored half in SFUC. After trading a few, we got another to go up 5-3, then traded to 7-5 before we ran off a bunch to move the score to 11-5 or so in a game to 13. At this point, they threw a zone at us. Three points in a row, we threw away hammers and were promptly scored on. Then we settled down and moved the disc a little better before turning it and getting scored on. 11-11. Ugh.

Very reminiscent of many Braineaters games we had that followed a similar formula of Big Lead, Other Team Zones Its Way Back, We Pull It Off In The End. Notable ones include Pittsburgh at Stanford Invite 08, UCLA at SIQ 06, SDSU at SIQ 08, and more that I am sure will be pointed out in the comments.

I moved to popper because I had been standing still on the wing doing nothing as our handlers swung til they turned the previous 5 points. Things went a little smoother, and we scored to make it 12-11 and then broke to win. I don't think zones will be a real problem for us in general though, because we were playing without Whit and Kevin Buchanan, two of our top and most experienced throwers.

I had a strong game overall considering how out of shape I was, doing a reasonably good job on Tyler and scoring a bunch of goals myself to go along with a backhand bomb i threw for a score, and no turnovers, as usual.
(8 cousins + 2 randos).