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).