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SFUC Tournament - Sunday

2009-03-05T13:29:00.000-08:00

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

2009-03-05T13:10:00.000-08:00

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)

2009-02-27T11:52:00.000-08:00

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

2009-02-10T20:45:00.001-08:00

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

2009-01-29T11:52:00.000-08:00

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

2009-01-22T13:04:00.000-08:00

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

2009-01-16T15:00:00.000-08:00

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

2009-01-07T11:32:00.000-08:00

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).

SFUC Week 6

2008-12-25T14:05:00.000-08:00

Sorry this took so long, I might've had a good write-up if it was timely...
We played the top ranked, undefeated team and beat them.
Boom.
I threw one of the best backhand hucks of my life. Caught a few goals. The whole team was rollin.
Unfortunately, I'll be missing the next game because I'll be on a family vacation. Seems crazy that they scheduled a game on Dec. 30, right?

SFUC Week 5

2008-12-11T16:41:00.000-08:00

Moral Hazard faced an extremely tough team this Tuesday against the Mudslingers, and unfortunately we ended up with our first L. After a quick perusal of their roster beforehand, I was pretty confident that we would be able to cruise. Unfortunately, there are apparently still a good number of Jam/Brass Monkey/Mischief players whose name I don't recognize. In addition to having a few of those guys, the Mudslingers had a couple Fury women as well.

The bad guys started the game on a quick run, getting 3 easy breaks with a simple zone that we made a few silly mistakes against (i.e. drops). We stormed back with a big run of our own to take a 6-4 lead. I was in my element, scoring a few easy goals on big ass hucks and assisting on another that I caught just on the goalline. I was doing a decent job on Mischief's Adam Leventhal, who killed us over the course of the game.

My decent job was not to last. I got broken up and down the field by his around backhand that he released just next to my right thigh, under my outstretched arm. He also surprised me with a few deep cuts that I released him on, thinking he was out of his thrower's range. They went on another run of their own, bringing the score to 10-8 Mudslingers. As Slap pointed out, it was a game of runs. Unfortunately, we couldn't uphold our end of the bargain by making a final run.

We scored to bring the score to 12-11 Mudslingers, and pulled. They slowly worked their way downfield, with us taking away the killshots but giving up the unders. Somewhere past half field, Leventhal got the disc and looked for that around break yet again. After being on the field with him on probably 80% of the points, I had finally figured out the throw and got all of the throw with my cleat for the D. I did my usual move of slowly trotting to the middle of the field to set a stack and then sprinting deep when I saw Shy pick up the disc out of the corner of my eye. But he holstered it!! Devastating. I didn't actually get too open on the cut, but knowing that he trusts me with that type of look in any game situation I figured the throw would come anyway. Somehow we turned the disc, and they punched it in for the game. Oh well.

Better to lose now than to roll into playoffs with the undefeated target on our backs. How's that for getting ahead of ourselves? Ha.

At any rate, this was definitely the poorest performance by the whole team in general and by me in particular so far this season. I wasn't getting anything on offense; my double moves that usually get me wide open deep weren't working for whatever reason, either because my defenders were fantastic or because my all my toes were literally numb... but I'll blame the former. Because my fingers were similarly frozen, I was hesitant to cut under when our stack was stagnant, as it constantly was this game. It was a frustrating game to look back on and realize that I could have made things a lot easier for the whole team by just running in a straight line to the thrower. Time for some author-reader interaction: How can I keep my fingers warm in the cold? Any cold weather players out there (Midwest, Northeast), I'm looking at you. Hand warmers? anything?

We were also hurt a lot by our roster makeup for the game. We were missing our best player, Jam's Kevin Buchanan (who I didn't realize was still playing for them until I just looked up their roster...), as well as Whit and Claire, two of our strongest players. The biggest problem was that with them all absent, throwing cutters were forced to handle, leaving a cutting corps without great downfield throws. Additionally, we had our best attendance yet from the bottom half of the roster.

All in all, it was a disappointing game, but still fun as hell. I was certainly not feeling down at any point in the game as I might if the Braineaters had been in a similar game.

Bonus feature: Those who know me know that I carry a handkerchief with me wherever I go out of necessity, even on the field. Well, it came in handy on Tuesday in a non-nose function, and I won't be using it again. Figure that one out.

Link I would be remiss in not sharing: Over at Shy's Blog, he has started an absolutely incredible feature called Best of my College Ultimate (lose the acronym, buddy) in which he goes back to some of the Braineaters' most significant and exciting games and recaps them all with the help of his videoographic memory (did I just make up a phrase?). Word on the street is when he regains access to the corpus of game footage that was partially lost in a hard drive crash, these recaps will be accompanied by the relevant footage. Awesome.

SFUC Week 4

2008-12-03T14:42:00.000-08:00

Week 4, Game vs. Pork Barrel Projects.
They featured Jam players Ryo Kawaoka and Justin Safdie, the 2000 Callahan winner, and Fury's Erin Percival.
Compared to my first two games with Moral Hazard (I missed one to go watch my Trailblazers lose to the Warriors at Oracle) where we absolutely mopped up a couple teams with ease, this game was tense, cold as balls, and managed to be sloppy and high level at the same time.
The temperature had to be in the mid 40s or so, which is extraordinarily cold when you are used to playing in Southern California, or Northern California in the summer. Additionally, there was dew all over the nice FieldTurf fields, making it tough to change directions and to grip the disc. From tossing with Shy before the game, I could tell that my throws would be terrible this game. I ended up only throwing one turnover, but it was more due to a ill-executed rushed throw by me to a fast break cutter in the end zone who wasn't making it easy on me. The cold did severely affect me though; I was looking off in-cuts that were anywhere near a defender because I had absolutely no touch on my flick. I was reduced to looking upfield for about 2 counts and then turning to look dump.
Segue! Our dump game was singularly pathetic this game. Throwers were refusing to look to the dump even when they were uncovered and nothing was open downfield. This led to about four turnovers in the first half. Furthermore, the dumps weren't getting open. Not moving, not getting separation when they did move. It was frustrating to watch when I wasn't in.
Despite that shortcoming, it's clear that our team is chock full of ballers. We have some incredible throwers, cutters, and defenders from both genders, and our weaker links are not great liabilities.
The first half of the game was full of these dump errors, in addition to the normal turnovers that can be expected in a frigid league game. They were outplaying us with easy swings and openside cuts, and our huck game was off. Cutters were getting separation, but the throws weren't coming out high or far enough, probably due to the temperature. Slap was making huge bids as normal, but things weren't going her way and her frustration was showing. (I think she is the most outstanding [as in her abilities stand out] player in the league so far from what I've seen).
The second half was a different story for us. We started generating turnovers and cleaned up our offensive game quite a bit. The game had some contentious calls, but they were all resolved in a nice League fashion. We went on a little run to push the score to 10-8 in a game to 13, and traded to win 13-11.
Besides the lack of any throwing capabilities, I had a blast this game. I love going up against the Jam and Revolver men, and now that I am getting my legs back under me I was doing some good things out there. I had probably 4-5 / 13 goals, and played good defense on Safdie downfield and worked hard on the mark shutting down the ubiquitous break mark throws that Pork Barrel Projects were getting against us.
My clear personal highlight of the game was putting a major hurting on Justin Safdie in the air early in the second half. I made a lil double move from the back of the stack and took off toward the right back corner with Safdie about 5-6 yards trailing. The throw went up at a tough angle for me, a high floaty outside-in flick to the middle of the field. I changed my course, and Safdie was able to catch up easily because of the float. He is a lot bigger than me and managed to get his bulk on me to box me out when the disc was floating down. At the last moment I disengaged from his box out and went up high and early and snatched it in the end zone. I love it. To be fair, he got me earlier when he was at the back of the end zone and his thrower put up a blade to him and he boxed me out and skied me. To be really fair, I got him even earlier when the huck to a deep cut I made on him was a five foot high laser and I snatched it from right in front of his face.
The most exciting sequence of the game was at 12-11, game point, they had the disc on the goalline on the far right sideline coming out of a timeout. My man was the iso at the front of the stack. Everyone was setting up after the timeout, and I was standing up watching both teams mill around waiting for them to stop so we could play. Next thing I know, my guy is sprinting to the left cone for a catch while everyone continues to get set in the stack. I call violation, he argues that since our marker tapped it in it's in, a small discussion ensues with everyone on the field, disc goes back. I have no idea what the actual rule there is but it seems like sending it back is the only fair way to settle it. ANYWAY, they tap it in and get a swing across the field and toss a little throw for the score, but IN COMES SHY LIKE A FLYING WALRUS to get the layout D and save the goal! I am making terrible deep cuts like crazy trying to end it, we work it up the field in spite of that, and I get a short goal for the win.
Delicious.

Catching Up

2008-12-03T12:41:00.001-08:00

Loyal readers,
I apologize for having disappeared for a month despite bloggable goings-on going down. Excuse: I had a temp job, which didnt leave much time for anything else. I don't know how real employed adults can find time to keep detailed blogs...
What you missed:

1. Sean Ryan.
Braineaters got 6th place I believe, losing a stinker to SLO in which SLO played great and Claremont refused to make adjustments against a team that was beating them with a strictly open-side offense. On Sunday, they lost a total barn-burner to the Slugs in a placement game. Maniac established himself as the preseason favorite for Claremont Callahan nominee in my eyes. Boo of the weekend: Weston taking my bag to a car from the fields without my knowledge, leading to an 8 hr period in which I was separated from my boys.

2. SoCal Warmup.
Braineaters got 5th place. In Santa Cruz they didn't look especially great in their wins, but San Diego was a different story. Claremont really takes care of business on Saturday, dispatching opponents with ease as the Hodags and refusing to play down to the competition. The Hodag theme was executed awesomely. Markham jumped past an absent Maniac in my Callahan book with his typical break mark throws to space that the cutter isn't expecting but can bring in easily because they are so perfect. And his pulls were ON. Quarterfinals on Sunday sucked big time. USD had few capable throwers, but one little guy that was jacking huge flick hucks with no qualms. I think he was probably literally 9 for 9 or so, with many of the completions coming on huge skies over our guys. We struggled against their basic zone, with no movement anywhere on the field. My prescription: the handlers need to get together and play mini with each other to develop short chemistry.

3. Homecoming
I went home to Seattle with Rachel for Thanksgiving/my birthday. It was dope. Caught a Husky Hoops win, good times with family, and a blowout joint birthday party with me, Greg, Kevin, and Sam. Lost to Greg in 1-on-1 hoops. Fuck me.

4. SFUC Winter League.
I am playing on an SFUC Winter League team, weekly games in The Shitty. My team is awesome; 4-0 so far, and I get to play with Claremont stalwarts Shy, Whit, Claire, Abby, and assorted other ballers. I'll start posting game recaps today through the future, I promise.

5. Cultimate
I here from a little birdy that Cultimate has some more tricks up their sleeves, but I passed on hearing the details for the sake of ruining my night. We shall see.

6. RSD
Slow right now... not much going on in the Fall I guess.

7. Birthday Presents
Wall-E DVD. F yeah. Already watched the movie, and then the movie again with Director's commentary, and the Audio Mixing feature, and the new short.
Allagash Curieux
Chimay Premiere
Bike Lock
Bike Light

photos from Daniel Bobrowsky (Maniac) 's Facebook Albums.

Casino Royale

2008-11-16T21:43:00.000-08:00

To those who haven't already made the mistake,
Re-watch Casino Royale before you watch Quantum of Solace.
Trust me

The UPA thoroughly trashes C1, and I agree with everything they say.

2008-11-04T19:20:00.000-08:00

One very important thing to remember that I'm afraid some people forget is that the UPA isn't some sinister organization that claims to have certain interests but operates a different way (I'm talking about the NCAA here, that doesn't truly act in the best interests of student athletes). Instead, the UPA is a democratically run body that merely tries to enact the wishes of the electorate. So stop hating on the UPA.

http://upa.org/upa/about/publicstatements/CollegeUltimate

The UPA statement is as follows:

Over the weekend of the UPA Club Championships (Oct 30-Nov 3) representatives of the Ultimate Players Association (UPA), including active college players representing various playing “constituencies”, met with Matt “Skip” Sewell and Cyle Van Auken of Cultimate, Inc. to discuss Cultimate’s proposed plans for college Ultimate for the 2009 college season and beyond. While the two organizations share several elements of a vision for what collegiate Ultimate will ‘look like’ in the future, we have differing views on how college Ultimate should be structured for the 2009 season. The UPA has serious concerns about the feasibility, fairness, and repercussions of Cultimate’s current plans for the 2009 college season, and do not believe that these plans have the long-term interests of a large majority of collegiate players (or the broader Ultimate community) in mind. Therefore, the UPA is advising its collegiate members to forego participation in select competition structures being created by Cultimate for the 2009 college season, including the following:

	The National Collegiate Ultimate Association (NCUA), a college only governing body for Ultimate
	Multiple tiered championship series that include an exclusive top open division called Conference 1 (C1) which includes 25 college open teams selected by Cultimate, as well as other divisions for men and women’s players

As currently proposed, Cultimate’s C1 events would conflict directly with the UPA’s 2009 College Championship Series – which will definitely proceed - and teams would realistically only be able to participate in one championship or the other. C1 teams, concerned about the proposed changes and the potential for conflicting championships requested that Cultimate and the UPA collaborate to find a solution that would serve the college season best both in the long and short run. At the players behest, and because many of Cultimate’s plans coincide with the UPA’s five year strategic plan, the UPA entered into good faith discussions with Cultimate. In January 2008 the UPA approved its 5-year Strategic Plan, which included several goals for the organization that are in line with Cultimate’s plan for the college division including:

	Plan and implement a Division II College Series
	Developing relationships with college club sports administrators
	Implement a UPA College Regular season
	Adjust the sectional/regional boundaries and adjust the bid allocation system for the college division
	Expand the observer's role in competitive Ultimate

You can view a more detailed document describing the timing of these changes to the UPA Collegiate Series (as well as a history of UPA enhancements to college Ultimate and important player feedback data on desired changes) here.

With our Strategic Plan in mind, and the belief on the part of the UPA that many of the ideas espoused by Cultimate were firmly in line with these strategies and would be beneficial to the growth of the sport, the UPA came to the meetings with Cultimate with a proposed framework within which the UPA and Cultimate could work hand in hand with college players. The goal of this work would be to achieve the changes that the college players desire within a time frame that allows the changes to be properly planned and implemented, and that allows third parties such as Cultimate, to provide services that they are best equipped to provide while ensuring fairness for all of the players and teams affected by the changes.

As part of its proposal to Cultimate, the UPA noted that it is already in the process of convening a working group to restructure the college series, and proposed that Cultimate suspend its plans for the 2009 college season and actively sit on the group along with UPA representatives, college players, and other stakeholders to develop the plans for College Ultimate. The UPA believes that the final product that comes out of this work group could contain similar elements to those contained in Cultimate’s current proposal, but with modifications that address the outstanding issues with the current proposal, as well as an implementation time-line that allows for player feedback and sufficient advance notice. Cultimate, as event management professionals, could help ensure the college competition structure would be conducive to businesses that could provide valuable services to college players and the UPA. This work group (which Cultimate is currently invited to be a part of) will be fully formed during November, 2008 and will have developed preliminary plans by December 31, 2008.

Any changes to the college division that are both already widely desired by the college division and logistically feasible would be experimented with or implemented in the 2009 UPA College Series. These changes would likely be limited to expanding the observer role (i.e., increasing the types of active calls) and/or minor adjustments to the bid allocation system. Larger changes that require either more player feedback or a greater lead time to players before the changes are enacted will be implemented in the 2010 season. This likely includes regular season games with meaningful impact on the post-season, larger adjustments to the bid allocation system or the regional structure, and additional tiers/divisions of play. The UPA is confident that changes could be made on this timeline that are not only acceptable, but desired by players. At this point, it appears that despite the desire of college players to have a single championship in 2009 and the UPA’s efforts to include Cultimate in planning for 2010 and beyond, Cultimate will continue with their plans for the 2009 college season. The UPA, as the representative of the vast majority of College players, has significant concerns about Cultimate’s current plans for the 2009 season: Feasibility: Cultimate communicated that their current plans would require 8 full time and 5 part time staff. Cultimate would be expanding from 8 college events in 2008 to approximately 20 events in 2009, including three 80 team tournaments in a period of three weeks. The plan is predicated on hundreds of smaller teams that have not typically been willing to attend more expensive events being willing to pay fees of $25/player to attend these events. The UPA is significantly concerned about the feasibility of Cultimate running its proposed events and providing the level of quality that would be deserving of that player fee.

Based on its expertise and experience in development of the existing eligibility system, the UPA believes that Cultimate is not equipped to handle the enormous challenge of verifying college eligibility. The UPA has developed its eligibility system, records and infrastructure over 25 years. Without clear eligibility rules, a robust process to verify eligibility, and an established system for handling eligibility disputes, the UPA is concerned with Cultimate’s ability to ensure that the competition is truly collegiate.

Fairness: Cultimate has announced the selection of 25 teams to compete in its C1 division. There is no clear qualifying structure for these 25 teams and several historically successful teams including Arizona and Dartmouth have been left out. Furthermore, there is no comparable women’s C1 division that would receive the type of VIP treatment that the open C1 division receives in their plan. It is our understanding that Cultimate has promised different amounts of money to each team that commits to playing in C1. Beyond the ethical issues of paying college athletes “appearance fees” in their events, Cultimate has acknowledged that these fees are currently being funded by the player fees from players on non-C1 teams participating at Cultimate events. While the goal of defraying costs for the highest level teams for marketing purposes is not unreasonable, doing so using the dollars of developing programs is neither fair nor good for the sport in the short or long run as it will only slow the growth of these developing teams.

Long Term Impact on Sport Infrastructure: The sport of Ultimate, while rapidly growing, is still small. Pooling resources through a single central governing body Ultimate remains a more efficient approach to grow the sport (it will require the same tools and services to operate youth and club Ultimate). Currently, player dues from all divisions go toward the development of the sport in many areas including coaching, observing, rules, youth and college team development and marketing. As most divisions have the same or similar requirements, continuing to have one governing body provides significant economies of scale when it comes to the infrastructure needed to market and support the sport. The UPA’s fledgling observer and coaching programs would both be significantly hampered if the full college division were split from the remainder of the UPA. Resources invested in growing youth Ultimate create not only a growing fan base for college players, but also directly impact college Ultimate only a few years later by adding to the pool of skilled athletes. In addition, as the UPA is player-governed by an elected Board, decisions about how to spend the organization’s pooled resources is up to players. For example, if players choose to spend association resources to offer financial incentives for participation or to spend additional money on television, they can submit proposals or vote for candidates that represent that position. The UPA is concerned that under Cultimate’s governance, players would at best have a limited role in deciding how their money was spent. Splitting the resources of the community and having a significant portion of those resources controlled or influenced by a for-profit business will have a negative impact on the growth and development of the sport.

Based on the fact that there is insufficient time to confirm (and indeed, doubt about) the feasibility, fairness, and long-term impact of Cultimate’s proposed alternative series, the UPA is committed to running the 2009 UPA College Championship Series within the basic structure that existed in 2008. While College representatives have communicated that their chief concern was that there were not two parallel championship structures, the UPA is sufficiently concerned that Cultimate’s structure is neither feasible nor beneficial to the sport. Therefore, the UPA must continue to host its College Championship Series, even if that means that there are two competing structures, in order to provide all teams with the opportunity to compete in a competitive structure that is sustainable, fair, and most beneficial to the sport as a whole.

Despite the UPA’s efforts to convince Cultimate to hold off on its plans to implement a separate competing championship and work with the UPA to develop a collaborative plan for 2010, Cultimate has decided not to wait.

While the UPA is concerned about the position in which this places the players, it does appear that determination as to whether there will be two competing championships in 2009 will be up to the college players. The UPA encourages college teams to:

	Reject the current C1 plan for 2009
	Participate in the 2009 UPA College Championship Series
	Work with the UPA by engaging in the process to develop a new model for the college division as committed to by the UPA as part of the strategic plan, and
	Encourage Cultimate to do the same

During the meetings with the UPA, Cultimate has communicated that should a critical number of teams reject their current proposed structure, C1 would not succeed in 2009. However, Cultimate WOULD still continue to run the events that it ran in 2008. The UPA accepts responsibility for the fact that we have not done a sufficient job of communicating our plans for the college division as spelled out in the Strategic Plan (please see web links earlier in this message). However, we have clearly heard the feedback of hundreds of College players and captains over the past several weeks and are committed to move forward in an expeditious and transparent manner. The UPA’s continued growth and success over the past 25 years has resulted from the fact that we have largely remained ACCOUNTABLE to the players (because the players are the UPA), and we commit that we will not fail the trust that has been the backbone of our operation since the inception of the College division. The UPA is committed to providing a competitive college structure that serves all college teams who hope to compete in intercollegiate Ultimate in a way that is fair, sustainable, and transparent. The UPA also believes that within its current structure and long term vision for the sport, well-run, for-profit businesses such as Cultimate, VC Ultimate, Ultivillage, Five Ultimate and others that provide valuable services to the players can and will thrive.
Thanks for your time and for your dedication to our sport. Mike Payne, UPA Board of Directors, President
Peri Kurshan, UPA Board of Directors, Vice President
Sandie Hammerly, UPA Executive Director
Will Deaver, UPA Championship Director

Last updated 11/04/2008 - 19:13

In which The Jughead picks every single Open Nationals game

2008-10-29T20:58:00.000-07:00

Click the picture for the full-size view.

Comments:

Jam is better than everyone is giving them credit for. Just because their roster is somewhat static does not make them "old" like the last DoG teams.
Sockeye is great, perhaps as good as they've ever been, but they're not invulnerable. I see them losing a game along the line, but not during bracket play.
Who will get heckled the most? All signs point to Skip "non-profit" Sewell.
Will Ironside be damaged by their Regionals slayings, or is it a sign of them being fully gelled? I predict the latter.
The hype of Bodhi isn't enough to get them W's against the best club teams.
Sub Zero will disappoint.
Pool E is gonna be ridddddiculous. Power pools at Nationals are insane. In a good way.
The bottom 4 seeds will not win any games against top-12 seeds.

LSAT Results - No Ultimate Content

2008-10-24T17:40:00.001-07:00

So I was minding my own business on a balmy Oakland afternoon, sitting in a cake of dried sweat from my first workout in months, when I found out that LSAT scores were being released a few days early. I googled a little to find some message board that confirmed this tip (seriously, who are these people that hang around standardized test message boards?).

I was Facebook chatting with my LSAT friend KD when I got the new message notification in Gmail. From: "LSAC SCORE." Subject: "Your October 2008 LSAT Score." I couldn't bring myself to open it. It was a feeling more intense than waiting to see your semester report card or final exam score in one of those classes where it actually mattered.

I switched tabs back to Facebook chat.
"oh shit I got an email"
"didnt open it yet"
"i feel like i am staring down the firing squad"

Back to Gmail. I opened the e-mail cautiously. I had just started to make a little chart with what emotion I would feel for any of the scores in my potential range. Too late. I scanned the e-mail. The first line with any numbers jumped out at me. It had low digits in it. I panicked for about a quarter of a second before I realized that was just my account number.

Next line down.

"Your October 2008 LSAT score is 169. The percentile rank is 97."

Yyyyeeeaaaaahhhhhh baby! Better than any of the 5 practice tests I took. Higher than approx. 48,500 of the other approx. 50,000 that took the exam. If I had gotten 170 I would've been over the moon. So 169 was a close door prize.

This calls for some Joose!

Chimp+Asian Game Show+Segway

2008-10-20T16:54:00.000-07:00

I'm so easy to please.

Suggested Nationals Seeding

2008-10-17T14:02:00.001-07:00

Two posts in one day! Neither about The Abomination!
These seedings reflect my power rankings merged with Regionals finishing order.
Note: I personally am against the thinking of the RSD posters who base most of their seeding on head to head matchups, like in the Mixed Seeding post where there are many reasonable candidates for the #1 seed but somehow people decided Hooray was the top choice pretty much solely because they beat Mischief once. If you think Mischief is so great, maybe you should put them first.

1. Sockeye
2. Ironside
3. Johnny Bravo
4. Revolver
5. Jam
6. Ring
7. GOAT
8. Sub Zero
9. Truck Stop
10. Doublewide
11. Chain
12. Condors
13. Bodhi
14. Machine
15. PoNY
16. El Diablo

This seeding obviously leaves Chain underseeded, but they deserve the low seed for not taking care of business at Regionals. Also, I think Bravo "deserves" the 2 seed based on their performance this season, but I am not restricting my seedings by that measure.

This seeding would give pools of:
A: Sockeye, Sub Zero, Truck Stop, El Diablo
B: Ironside, GOAT, Doublewide, PoNY
C: Bravo, Ring, Chain, Machine
D: Jam, Revolver, Condors, Bodhi

C would be the clear pool of death, but I think the other pools are all pretty fairly stratified.

Pre-Nationals Power Rankings

2008-10-17T13:23:00.000-07:00

Here are my power rankings among the 16 qualifying teams, along with a few notes.

Tier 1

1. Sockeye. A convincing undefeated Regionals cements Sockeye in the top spot.

2. Ironside. Ironside ran roughshod through Sectionals and Regionals, beating Bodhi 15-2 at Sectionals and beating PoNY and GOAT 15-5 and 15-8. They are definitely showing signs of gelling more and more over time. The only question mark is whether the addition of Kurt Gibson, who hasn’t been playing with them, will help them with his talent or hurt them by disrupting what Ironside has been working out together over the club season.

3. Johnny Bravo. I am still very high on Bravo, but I think Beau being an absentee member of the team can only hurt them. He looked out of sorts at Labor Day, and spending the summer away from Colorado can’t have helped him get better meshed with his team.

Tier 2

4. Jam. Jam lost to Sockeye and Revolver at Northwest Regionals to take the Northwest’s 3^rd bid. However, I still think that they are the best team outside of the big 3. The loss to Sockeye is acceptable; it’s Sockeye. The loss to Revolver is frightening for them, but they have handled Revolver fine over the rest of the season and the blustery weather in Burlington will not be present in Sarasota.

5. Chain. Chain has had some very unimpressive games in the series. The 16-14 Sectionals victory over El Diablo and the loss to a scrappy but not excellent Doublewide at Regionals are cause for concern. It remains to be seen whether their excellent regular season and talent or their spotty series is the more accurate assessment of Chain. We’ll find out in Sarasota.

6. Revolver. Revolver is a very good, but not great, team. I think they probably hit their ceiling at Regionals. Not to say that they peaked at Regionals, but I don’t see them improving to a point where they can beat more than two of the above teams at Nationals.

Tier 3

7. Ring. Ring put together a strong series to go along with a good regular season, but I can’t see them breaking into the semifinals.

8. GOAT. They had a good series, putting the hurt on Bodhi twice and giving Ironside its toughest test. I think they’ll have a tougher run at Nationals this time around though since all the other teams know the scouting report on them by now.

9. Sub Zero. Sub Zero has a fair amount of talent to go along with the sickest website in the game, but their results have not been too impressive. They were relatively poor at Labor Day, took care of business and nothing more at CHC, and went totally untested through the series. They certainly have a higher ceiling than #9, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see them finish in the 10-11 range either. Best use of flash in a roster since the 2002 Brains site.

10. Truck Stop. Truck Stop will do fine at Nationals, finishing somewhere among these tier 3 positions, no higher, no lower.

11. Doublewide. I know they won South Regionals, but this is a power ranking, not a seeding. They have been inconsistent in the past. I’d like to see them do well but I don’t think it’s in the cards.

Tier 4

12. Condors. Talk about an up and down season. They’ve beaten Jam 2x, Truck Stop, and GOAT, but have lost a bunch of unimpressive games as well. I hope my Condors buddies can take better than 12^th, but I don’t predict that they will beat more than 2 top 11 teams. I do think, though, that they are much better than the bottom 4 teams.

Tier 5

13. Bodhi. Young enough to possibly pull off a couple of big news upsets, too young to finish top 10.

14. Machine. Ugh.

15. PoNY. Ugh. Riding their former Sockeye player through nationals won’t work out so well, considering he was not a big part of their success (from what I saw).

16. El Diablo. Who knows.

Initial Conference 1 thoughts

2008-10-15T13:16:00.000-07:00

I am fervently anti Conference 1.
I am temporarily boycotting 5 Ultimate, which is aiding and abetting a crime against college ultimate.
I suspected Cultimate was awful in the past couple years with all the tournament bid bullshit politicking. Now I know they are a pox on college ultimate.
I don't know, but am curious about how Cultimate plans to make a profit off of this, with no bid fees. Do they expect that non C1 teams will also attend and pay premium prices for tournaments that disenfranchise them and have not been shown to be a superior product to college-run tournaments?
I hope if C1 does happen (though I am optimistic it will not), teams like UCSD and Stanford will still host high caliber tournaments even if they do not play in them.
~~I am disgusted on a personal level with those that go along with this for now, just like I am with McCain supporters.~~ This has passed.
Obviously, as I posted on RSD, the selection process was a complete sham. This is NOT a whine about Claremont not making it; it is about ~~shitty~~ non-elite (elite being perennial quarters teams like Wisconsin, Florida, Colorado, Georgia, Stanford, Carleton, Texas, and maybe teams like Oregon and Michigan) teams with no track record, or has beens, like Western Washington, UCSB, UCSD, UNCW, Kansas, Illinois, Minnesota, and pretty much the whole NE.
Why does Cultimate insist on lame names for their big ideas? i.e. NCUS, Conference 1.
I imagine that Florida's endorsement of C1 will be a warning sign for those teams invited. They don't have a whole lot of social capital right now with Brodie running the team.

Not much going on...

2008-10-09T23:58:00.001-07:00

except
1. Took the LSAT on Saturday. Had a near brush with disaster as "police activity" shut down the freeway for 40 minutes and I showed up late, but it worked out in the end as everything was behind schedule anyway. Shooting for a 170, but we'll see come October 27th.

2. First Regionals weekend. I had to take the LSAT while my squad was battling the finest teams in the country in terrible weather in the good ol NW. Highlight: Shy handblocks Tim Gehret on one goalline and skies him on the other one all in the same point. Not bad, but not THIS: Anyway, we could only get 9 guys (plus Ollie and Joaq) up to Burlington which is a bummer, but I am excited to get my hands on the sweet jerseys finally.

3. Looking for a job. Any suggestions?

4. Apparently Beau lives in Oakland now. Not that I am excited about running into him at the store or anything.

5. Decided to give Google Reader a chance. I love clicking on the same 57 (literally) links over and over again (truthfully) but perhaps this will take away an excuse to spend so much time on the old comp.

6. Trying to beat Minesweeper with a custom grid: Expert size, 145 mines instead of 99. My best so far is 140.

7. Almost done with the Sopranos. I think I can admit that it is better than The Wire, and while I still am very fond of Dexter, Sops is right up there with it. Hm, that is a lot of violence.

VP Debate Thoughts

2008-10-02T19:28:00.000-07:00

Northern California Sectionals Day 2

2008-09-24T13:57:00.000-07:00

My apologies in advance for a less detailed Day 2 recap than Day 1, but I guess that’s what happens when I wait a week and a half to post.

Game 5 (Semifinals): Jam (6-15).

Just like the game with Revolver, we were pretty excited for this game. It’s always fun to test yourself against the best, of course. Well, the game started out disastrously, and I’m not sure why. We got broken something crazy like 6 times to start the game. Whether we were running strings, horizontal, or zone O, we kept making uncharacteristic mistakes and Jam was capitalizing on all of them. Jam really brought the defensive intensity on the downfield cutters, making the cuts that had been easy against every other team (including Revolver) ineffective. And when we got a good deep look up, we either botched the throws or the defenders were fast enough to reel in and get D’s. The second half was a little better as we were able to get more offensive flow, but we got totally crushed (as is evidenced by the score). This either means that Jam is way better than Revolver or that we just crapped the bed against Jam, but I’m inclined toward believing the former for now. On the positive side, I had a couple more filthy skies. The first was on zone O. We got the disc over the cup and I had a step on Taylor Cascino who was playing deep deep. The throw went up toward the back of the end zone. Greg Husak came bearing down from one of the wings. I went up early and grabbed it high over Cascino and with Hollywood right on my back. A few points later we were in zone O again, and a throw went up to the deep middle of the field. Cascino was the deep again, and this time I absolutely killed it, just ripped it down over him. That play almost made the beating they administered worth it. HA. As for personnel, they were without Bart Watson (wearing flats) and Damien Scott (not there), but I believe the rest of their roster was playing. I was especially impressed with how good their roster was top to bottom. The guys I didn’t recognize actually impressed me more than the “name” players like Boo, Idris, Namkung, etc. with the exception of Gabe Saunkeah who has got to be their best player. I came away more impressed with Jam than I have ever been before, but I am still skeptical that they’ll be able to overcome the dynamism of Sockeye and Bravo at nationals.

Game 6 (Backdoor): Berkeley Y (15-5).

Uh, we won easy. If anything memorable happened, I forget what it was. Instead, enjoy the smooth moves and smooth grooves of The Chi-Lites!

Game 7 (2^nd Place Play-In Game): YR (8-15).

YR proved once and for all that they are the superior team, taking the rubber match in a 3 game series of blowouts. The game came down to battle of O lines vs D lines (naturally). I think that with us, our top players play on the O line and then whoever is fresh ends up on the D line. This works out fine when our O line is scoring all our points and the D line only needs a couple breaks to win. Unfortunately for us, I think the opposite is true for YR. In my mind, their D line is superior to their O line AND to our O line (at least during this game). They kept getting breaks, so we weren’t giving our D opportunities to break for us. Our D was doing a decent job of getting turns but didn’t have the personnel necessary to punch in breaks. On the other hand, their D line was in so much better shape than our O line that once they got the disc it was off to the races for them. It was tough for me to go out with a loss to a rival like this, but the blow was softened by knowing that they definitely deserved the victory—not just because they outperformed us, but because they have all clearly invested more time, work, care into their squad than we did into ours.

Wrap-up

And so ends my 2008 club season. Though SCUC will be making the trek up to the Great Pacific Northwest to fight the good fight, I will be sitting in a cramped desk somewhere in Hayward taking the LSAT. Too bad the regionals date wasn’t announced until after I had to decide which sitting of the LSAT to take…Perhaps I am cursed as a club player. My freshman year the Brains played at sectionals, and I had a sprained ankle and couldn’t play. My sophomore year I finally had learned how to throw a flick, and we were HOSTING club sectionals. On the first or second point of the first game on Saturday, I laid out for a deep goal and jammed every one of my fingers on my right hand into the ground, tearing ligaments in my ring, middle, and index fingers. There went that sectionals, and that flick. Junior year I played! And we almost beat PBR Streetgang, a nationals team! My senior year was my first playing with a real club team, Monster. I had been fighting various injuries all summer – knee problems, Achilles problems, and a dull ache in my foot. None of it was stuff I couldn’t play through, but I went to the doctor to make sure there was nothing serious. Well, this quack told me I had a stress fracture in my foot…but refused to give me a bone scan. I dutifully stayed off it at sectionals and regionals as I had to watch Monster not play up to our potential. Soon after, I saw my uncle, a great doctor himself, at some family function. He took a look at the foot and told me it was metatarsalgia, which basically just means that one of your metatarsals hurts. The cure? Wear a little pad in my cleat under the ball of my foot. Problem solved, infuriatingly. And now this year, playing with a fun group of guys who are all ballers, I have to miss regionals in my own backyard.

Bop City.

Foreshadowing....?

2008-09-22T11:51:00.000-07:00

Day 2 Recap coming soon

Northern California Sectionals Day 1

2008-09-19T09:01:00.001-07:00

The pressure to post about Sectionals has come to a head thanks to a shoutout from cultimate.blogspot.com, which means I’ll be getting vicarious Ultimate Talk hits for the first time since DLK’s blog went under. Although perhaps those readers might be more interested in the Labor Day post below than in reading about SCUC/the Scum Bags…

Game 1: Berkeley Y (13-5). What a delightful way to start a tournament. Not being too concerned with my immediate impact on this game, I took the slow cleat-up, slow warm-up that has been my modus operandi for the club season. I suppose this stems from the fact that I don’t have the same level of motivation with this team that I did with Claremont where I was a leader both on and off the field. Anyway, we lost a Bear Ninja Cowboy battle for jersey color meaning that we didn’t get to sport our new ~~jerseys~~ white t-shirts with ScumBagz (or was it SamBagz? SourBagz) stenciled on them by an intoxicated Yeager the night before. Incidentally, Bear Ninja Cowboy is one of my least favorite things in ultimate, right up there with 1. People fouling intentionally, 2. People not knowing the damn 11^th edition rules, and 3. People on blog comments who bash others for posting anonymously even though no one knows who the hell you are just because you put some nickname or even your real name out there (looking at you here “Handy”). There are usually 1-2 people on the team that suggests BNC that are in to it, and usually 0 people on the suggestee team who are. Whoopee. Even worse, they declined Shy’s offer to play Dick or Balls! The game itself produced only two memorable moments for me. The first was Shy getting a huge layout D near the goal line on the first point of the game. The second: even though Berkeley had one the BNC in order to go white, one of their kids was wearing Cal yellow. Our team was wearing all sorts of darks since we have no real jerseys yet, so it annoyed me a little that this guy was wearing a dark. I borrowed an identical shade of yellow jersey from Gomez and ran onto the D line specifically to guard this guy. I figured I would get to show this guy who is yellow boss and shame him into changing by shutting him down. Besides, I think he was a B-teamer. We pull, they come out in vert stack, my man at the front of the stack. We are literally wearing the same color jersey, everyone on our sideline is having a good laugh, and I am feeling pretty good about how clever I am. I front the guy because I don’t want any short breaks going to him from the handlers. He immediately sprints deep. Burned. Huck actually hits him in stride, easy goal. I shamefully walk back to the sideline and take off the yellow when no one is looking. In retrospect, I guess it WAS hilarious. Just not in the way I had planned.

Game 2: J-Men (15-9). This game was ostensibly a grudge match for the blip that occurred in Chico. This time we didn’t play like idiots and release their cutters deep when their huckers had the disc. That one simple move led to an easy victory. Now, allow me to rant about a certain J-Man. I considered devoting an entire post to this guy but decided that might be excessive. I am talking about #44. My first encounter with this guy was at the Stanford Invite Qualifier in 2006 (which we won, and subsequently won 2 pool play games and made quarterfinals at the Invite… sound familiar?). The details are mostly hazy, but he managed to turn our whole team against him. First he ridiculously undercut Stout on a huck, leading to the famous exhortation “YOU need to learn some body control!” Later, he did something (I forget what) that caused the SMIN (Sweetest Man In Ultimate), Gordy, to curse at him. An incredible feat, to be sure. Flash forward to this summer… We are playing the J-Men at Chico, and this guy keeps bulldozing people. They love to put him in the cup and on swings he works up his speed and just bowls into the thrower. Everyone’s upset, and on the sideline Shy tells the story of this guy from the Qualifier. Well, the floodgates open and all sorts of people from different playing backgrounds have angry stories about this guy. Then, the Rhino highlight video from Chico comes out . There’s the one shot of him SHOVING a Rhino player (at 1:00), and another of a really dangerous attempted tripping (at 1:24). Now imagine this: game point at sectionals, somehow this guy is guarding me and I burn him deep. The throw goes up and is floating down near the back of the end zone, meaning I have to slow down to avoid running out of bounds. The disc is floating up there right in my peak jump range, with #44 bearing down on me from behind. Needless to say, I am terrified of getting my neck broken on the way down as I get rammed. Instead of jumping high and snatching it, I take a little hop, grab the disc at the last second, and brace for impact. Luckily I caught the score just in time, so #44 opts to merely run into me and bump me for a few yards instead of wrecking me in the air. Success! I was going to end this tangent by saying ‘I don’t actually know the guy, he must be alright,’ but then I re-watched the tripping in the Rhino video at 1:24. What a sack of shit.

Game 3: Revolver (9-15). This game was a LOT of fun for our team. I was worried that we might come out and crap the bed since the SC guys are so into Revolver, but we came out very strong. Our offense was doing pretty well and our D was fantastic, getting layout D’s and scoring breaks. We were as close as 7-6 before they pulled away. Highlights: Jaycuzzi getting a sick poach layout block near their goalline on one of the first points of the game; me just roofing Ian Ranahan on a huck. I’ve gotta say, it was one of my dirtier skys; getting to matchup against some of the players I look up to like Seth Wiggins, Martin Cochran, etc. Lowlights: I am always surprised when people at such a high level make the same types of bad calls that low level college ultimate players make. I threw a goal, but I had to contest a stall on Sherwood when he pulled the classic “Seven, Eight, Nineten! Stall!” Luckily the proceeding swill I threw up on the restart was sooo bad that Revolver didn’t see it coming and we scored anyway. Another example: I’m marking Seth force flick at mid-field. I’m a little too close so he calls disc space and I drop a count. He pivots into me and we make solid contact, then he pivots back to flick and calls the pivot foul after looking upfield for a whole count. Sure I fouled you earlier, but you cant go back later and call when it’s no longer affecting you. No big deal, but I was just surprised. This game made it clear that the difference between a team like SCUC and a team like Revolver has more to do with fitness and game pace then skill. I felt like we were matching them in defensive intensity and in throwing, but we weren’t proficient with the disc when guarded by such good athletes, and forced bad quick throws. To me, this means for next year working on plain old conditioning and on being comfortable with the disc with an elite mark on while cutters and dumps are all well defended.

Game 4 (Quarterfinals): Missing Little White Girls (15-12). This game was against a bunch of retired Bay Area players (or so I was told. I don’t yet have face and name recognition with Bay players as with NW and SW players). They definitely had the throws, and were good athletes if not in shape. I recognized Jason Seidler, but no one on their team was in domination mode. I don’t remember many specifics about this game, besides that it was good and clean.

TD Critique: The tournament left some things to be desired. I’m not sure who ran it, but when I attend a tournament, these are some things I expect: food (bagels/bananas), water (there was water on day 2; not sure if there was on day 1 but if so it wasn’t publicized), cones (Joaq had to put up his own cones on day 1), and an airhorn or at least some time of round notification system. It was strange that despite lacking all these amenities, there were port-a-fields for all. Let them eat cake! Still, I appreciated the 2 hour per round format which allowed for full games and breaks between each game.

All Star series teams are the new black

2008-09-10T14:06:00.000-07:00

We've all heard about Thompson High, ladies and gentlemen. The story goes that the vast majority of Rhino from last year decided to take a year off from the intense dedication required to make an elite club team, and to play for a new tournaments-only team.
Apparently their model has been copied. I bring you: NPR. Their roster is stocked with Black Tide's best players from the near past (Rory, A-Bomb, Jameson, Ethan, Tyler, Charlie) as well as Old Man Brown. I predict they give SDU a big fight in the first round with SDU pulling out the game by virtue of their pickups of the Smith brothers and old favorites like Kubiak and Big Mike. They'll crush everyone else in the pool and lose to Condors in a close game in semis.
You heard it here first.

Labor Day Ruminations

2008-09-03T15:15:00.000-07:00

Labor Day is the most under-appreciated American holiday. We get a Monday off late every summer to honor our nation’s top ultimate players, but mere dozens make the trek to Santa Cruz to witness the proceedings. I was one of those few this past weekend, and I decided to share my observations and thoughts with all you un-committed fans out there.

Teams (Ranked by strength)

(Tier 1) Sockeye – I have seen a fair amount of Sockeye over the past few years both because I am a Seattle native and because they are the centerpiece of most ultimate media out there. Let me tell you – they are not a very fun team to watch play offense. Their cutting scheme is absolutely unique in all of ultimate. Though they start out of a horizontal stack, they don’t seem to strictly follow any rules about cutting lanes beyond the fact that they never get in their fellow cutters’ ways. Guys like Sammy C-K and Mike Caldwell simply don’t stop running. They do what all n00bs are trained to do: sprint your deep cut, then when you can tell the throw isn’t going up, sprint back in, and repeat. Whereas most players in the game do that once or twice at a time per possession, the Sockeye cutters are content to sprint non-stop while their handlers play pitch and catch until something opens up downfield. It seems to me that discipline and conditioning, rather than throwing skill and athleticism, is what sets the Sockeye cutters apart. The handlers are all extremely proficient at keeping the ball moving until a downfield cutter presents himself as being WIDE open. As a result, you don’t see Sockeye get D’d on under cuts, but they still sometimes fall into the trap of hucking at times that aren’t perfect (like every other team) because they have cutters like Ray Illian and Alex Nord that are really hard to look off deep. Their offense is all well and good, but it is their defense that makes them the best team in ultimate. They just have so many d-getters, and all of them (except perhaps Rehder) are good enough on the turn to be O-line players for any club team. Ryan Winkelmann, and especially Nate Castine, stood out as the most productive defenders for Sockeye this weekend. A friend of mine very familiar with Sockeye told me that “Castine might be the best player on the team.” I didn’t believe him at the beginning of the tournament because the last few times I had played pickup with him (at least a year ago) he was good but undisciplined and played with a cockiness that led to turnovers. That stuff is long gone. He balled so hard this weekend, throwing sick pulls, getting D’s, and being a proficient small ball player on the turn. The only way I can see Sockeye not winning the championship this year is if their offense lets them down. Because they strive so hard to be perfect, they sometimes throw a turn before they are ready to strike to the end zone, and sometimes get impatient and try to make the perfect throw to covered deep looks. These deep looks are the types of throws that the Buzz Bullets thrive on, but Sockeye isn’t experienced enough with that style to succeed with it.

Bravo – Bravo is probably the overall most ballinest team out there right now, but I’m not sure that will translate to a title. Parker Krug is the most exciting handler in the game, which is wonderful to watch but can lead to doing too much. Popes looked especially strong this weekend, showing disc skills that I don’t recall seeing at Regionals last year. Chicken is also a much better-rounded player than he was in college, where he didn't excel outside of handling. At Labor Day he showed that he is also an explosive defender and a decent cutter as well. Will Deaver is an unstoppable squirrely under-cutter, but was a zero threat deep. Mac Taylor is totally sick. He is interesting enough to watch based solely on his angular body bending in crazy ways, but he is also a visionary downfield thrower. The Most Famous Man in Ultimate, Beau Kittredge, was a big disappointment at this tournament. He played less than half of the points when I was watching, and totally failed to enforce his will on the game. It seems to me like he must have been coming off an injury or is out of shape, but opinions don’t equal fact reporting (Match Diesel controversy)! He was no better than average on D besides as an incredible deep help defender. Frankly, he plays defense like me. We both seem to want to make plays deep, so we end up letting cutters under without too much struggle. This is of course something that I assume neither of us are happy with. Also, when his man fades to the break side deep, he often stays in the open-side lane, leaving a lot of hammer options. On offense, I never saw him get a huge sky and only once saw him "beausprint" past his guy for a huck. Not sure if those things didn’t happen more because of him or because of what his throwers look for. I felt bad watching Big Jim going out there on offense every point. He was getting looked off all the time, and looked visibly frustrated at some points to me.

(Tier 2) Ironside – When I watched Boston, I was somewhat unimpressed at first. But they kept winning. And then they played Sockeye, and I didn’t think they looked to sharp. But they won. It took me until semis, but I have come around on Boston. Their offense was pretty boring, but they had some serious studs on D. On O I was disappointed by Goldstein, who made a ton of absolutely bitchy calls. Boston had some monsters on defense, like Steve Kolthammer, Colin Mahoney, and Will Neff. Like Sockeye, it seems like their D is what makes them one of the true elite teams. Their success was all without Kurt Gibson, too.

JAM – They will likely make semis, and maybe beat Bravo or Boston or Chain there, but I don’t think they have a chance to win the championship. Their floor is perhaps the second highest besides Sockeye, but I don’t see them as consistently great enough to have the same ceiling. Their personnel has been pretty static for the past few years, and I don’t see them making the jump because they aren’t bringing anything new to the table. They are a fun team to watch though, as they play a pretty baller style. Many of their “name” players are still legitimately great, but I think their style isn’t conducive to maximizing the team's talent.

Chain – Chain has great talent and did very well at Labor Day, but for some reason I get the vibe that they do not have what it takes to get to semis unless they have an easy road, in which case they could. They have some superior talent: Dylan Tunnell, Asa Wilson, Ben Spears, Kid Hammond, the awkward looking but effective Joel Wooten, and of course, Josh Ziperstein. Zip brought the heat consistently on D, but I think he was underutilized when Chain had the disc. I don’t think they lack heart or anything, but for some reason have not put it together.

Furious – I didn’t watch any Furious games at length, only gleaning that when the Condors wanted to get into a bitch call fest, Furious was more than willing to join them.

(Tier 3) Revolver – Most of the fellas on SCUC are obsessed with Revolver. They looked strong, but I don’t see them as a threat to crack semis at nationals (assuming they can make it out of the deadly NW region). Still, I think they are definitely one of the top 8 teams in the country.

Ring – Ring was a lot of fun to watch for two obvious reasons: 1. They huck it at any sign of daylight, and 2. They are a bunch of hothead idiots. No one stood out particularly to me, probably because I didn’t know their players going in. Still, it was interesting that a relatively little guy #7 was matched up on Beau on both O and D, and Beau either didn’t choose to or wasn’t able to exploit the size matchup. I did see one play on universe point that was very strategically impressive. Bravo had the disc to win maybe 5-10 yards out of the end zone in the center of the field coming out of a timeout. They came out in a vertical stack – an obvious front-stack iso situation. Ring's strategy was to front the iso, with the next two stack defenders playing a side of the stack instead of a particular man. Those two defenders were able to watch the iso until he picked a direction. The iso cut to the backhand side with just a little space on his defender, and the backhand stack defender came flying in with a huge bid to get the D, which was called back because of a close foul. But the strategy had still worked. The iso was going to cut to either cone, and playing against a good team like Bravo, you can’t hope to just contain them and wait for them to make a goal-line mistake. So they went proactive, guaranteeing themselves at least a chance at a game-changing D by throwing a surprise double team at the iso cutter. They could be a strong quarters team at nationals, but I also wouldn’t be surprised to see them get down on themselves if they start poorly, leading to a low finish.

Sub Zero – I was excited to see Hodags: Club. Their defensive intensity lived up to the hype, but their offense was a little flat. Their only victories were against Truck Stop and Rhino, and they didn’t put up close games against their other opponents. They weren’t interesting enough to make me want to watch them over other teams. I’ve always been impressed by Rupp’s pivots in the handling corps, and Jack Marsh’s persistence while cutting.

GOAT – GOAT showed the same offensive strategy as Ring, but wasn’t as effective overall. I didn’t watch much of them, but their cutters did not appear to be especially strong for that type of offense. I would be surprised to see GOAT back in the semis at nationals.

Truck Stop – I watched a fair amount of TSGH games to support friend via osmosis Brian Stout, and they were fairly frustrating to watch. First off, let me say that Brian was perhaps THE most impressive player I saw over the course of the whole weekend. Second, I think his talent is nearly wasted on this team. BS : Truck Stop :: KG : Timberwolves. I think he would push a team like Ironside over the top as a championship contender. He pulled on every single D line, and was the most consistent D generator when his team went man. His decisions with the discs were safe and explosive. I didn’t notice him throw any turns and I did notice him connect on some great hucks. I think he could stand to be more assertive cutting, because his hard cuts were unstoppable and productive. Microcosm of Truck Stop for the weekend: on D on universe point versus Furious, Brian gets two near layout D’s on Mike Grant, before getting a massive layout block on him near the end zone. Truck works the disc a little, not looking to Brian, and then throw an awful huck that is soundly D’d but comes back on a questionable receiving foul call. Then that same hucker drops a swing, and Furious grabs the win. Ugh.

(Tier 4) PoNY – Eh. Watched a little bit of them but didn’t come off with any big impressions. They had an impressive universe W over Boston, but I didn’t catch much of it.

Doublewide – Doublewide is a lot of fun to watch. They aren’t as huck happy as GOAT or Ring, but they always manage a few ridiculous skies from smaller guys when I watch them. Always.

Condors – The Condors were a lot of fun for me to watch because I have played with and against so many of their guys, but they honestly didn’t show much to suggest that they’ll finish in the top 10. Most of their players seem to me better suited to be members of a 9th-16th level team, and only a few would get playing time for a top team such as Sockeye or Bravo. It seems like the Black Tide pipeline that made the Condors great in the past years has dried up. Not only is less high level talent coming out of Goleta, but some recent Tide greats like Alex Roedel, Asa Wilson, and Rory Orloff are not Condors. It seems like they miss A-Bomb especially, as they now don’t have anyone with that killer endzone instinct. I would also question some of their personnel decisions, like offensive and defensive deployment (I wont name names though). Standouts in my eyes were Jeffy Silverman, Steve Dugan, and Danny Karlinsky. The O cutters were a weakness.

(Tier not elite) Rhino – I did not watch a single point played by “Rhino.”

Pullers – 3 men stood out as the best pullers: Nate Castine and Jeremy Cram for Sockeye, and Will Neff for Boston. Cram has the most raw power, throwing up gigantic outside-in backhands that manage to float and blade at the same time. Neff has an incredibly smooth delivery for a lanky guy, and his IO pulls consistently fell to the back half of the end zone with good float. Castine showed versatility, getting good distance and float out of IO and OI pulls and still getting down on D quickly.

Jerseys – I am always interested in jersey designs. A few caught my eye. Great jerseys: Sockeye (very professional looking with the logos and the number and team name placements), JAM (I like the two-tone front and the enlarged tower), Doublewide (My favorite, I love the horizontal pinstripes), Rhino (sharp colors, I like the outlined numbers), GOAT (started a whole trend with their uniforms from last season and are building on it). Jerseys I hated: Ironside (the Ironside logo looks like its Microsoft WordArt. Pathetic), Johnny Bravo (the old archetypal Patagonia jersey with tiny front logo on a weird shade of blue is no longer interesting), Truck Stop (They don’t even have a logo… or an allusion to a Glory Hole. Super boring), Sub Zero (I don’t actually hate these but the frost effect on the numbers is wildly overdone, so that I couldn’t tell whether one guy was 0, 1, 8, or 9), Chain (awful logo, and lame shade of red).

Starting 7 All Star team
Offense – Handlers: Ben Wiggins (Sockeye), Tim Gehret (Sockeye), Damien Scott (JAM). Cutters: Mike Grant (Furious), Mike Caldwell (Sockeye), David Popiel (Bravo), Mac Taylor (Bravo).
Defense – Handlers: Gabe Saunkeah (JAM), Nate Castine (Sockeye). Cutters: Brian Stout (Truck Stop), Josh Ziperstein (Chain), Seth Wiggins (Revolver), Steve Kolthammer (Ironside), John Hammond (Chain).
What line do you think would be better?

NBA 1989 All Star Rap Video

2008-08-28T15:53:00.000-07:00

Discos Calientes Recap

2008-08-22T13:43:00.000-07:00

This post will be split into 3 parts: Part 1, The State of the Jughead; Part 2, Discos the Bad Half; and Part 3, Discos the Good Half.

Part 1: The State of the Jughead

This section is both a bit about me and an awesome set of excuses about why I stunk up the fields at Chico. At first I didn’t want to make any excuses for my play, but in the past few days since the tournament I’ve realized that this time, it’s fair to make excuses because of the specific circumstances.

So, I returned from my trip to Central America last Friday night. The trip was a blast, etc. Our flight from Miami to SFO was delayed a couple hours, so we ended up missing the last BART and having to beg our housemate for a ride. We got back to the house around 2:30 AM, unpacked, and went to bed. I didn’t end up falling asleep until 4:30 AM. I woke up at 6:30 to get a ride up to Chico with Joaq and Shy (Joaq, my oatmeal bowl is still in your car and I need it back!). So there’s my first excuse: 2 hours of sleep following a day of traveling.

I also had a cold. Big deal, you might say. Well, this one is a doozy. All week long I have been blowing my nose constantly. The insides of my nostrils burn from all the wiping I have done. That’s my second excuse.

The final excuse is the most legitimate of them all. I seem to have acquired an intestinal parasite in Latin America. Want to know about it? It’s called Blastocystitis. I’ll save you the trouble: even Google doesn’t really know about it. A search brings up 570 results with not much information. But I’ll tell you what I know about it: it makes you crap your pants off. I was bad enough at the tournament, having to go all the time throughout the day. It’s been even worse this week. Every meal I eat only stays in for a few hours. Because I can’t absorb enough nutrients, I eat even more. Needless to say it’s a nasty cycle.

So that’s that. 3 excuses for my poor play in Chico. Oh, and I had Scabies too.

Part 2: Discos the Bad Half

Game 1: Last Call. I think most of the players on our team hadn’t heard of Last Call and looked past them a little bit. We came out a little bit sloppy on offense, throwing Casper hucks to no one, and our defense wasn’t generating turnovers. It was a decent game, but Last Call just out-executed us to take a 13-9 victory.

Game 2: YR. This was one of the most pathetic games I’ve participated in in recent memory. Even worse than Darkhorse v. D’oh at Potlatch. Worse than anything from this past college season. I really was in a daze during this game. I absolutely dropped an easy huck, and was playing pathetic defense. I think the 95 degree heat combined with my dehydration from the parasite and cold came to a head here, and I shouldn’t have been playing in retrospect. After slogging through one hell point midway through the game, I didn’t have anything left in the tank. I collapsed under our tent and laid on my back for the rest of the game, breathing heavily the whole time. I felt my body temperature must have been through the roof. The rest of SCUC wasn’t as bad as I was, but the whole team was extremely sloppy and YR dispatched us without much trouble, 13-7. Two personnel notes: 808 claims to have thrown 0 hucks and 0 turnovers over the course of the whole tournament. Bob, my heart breaks for you. Also, I have been impressed by Greg Marliave these two times we have played YR. I hadn’t previously noticed him play, but I like the way I have seen him play this season.

Game 3: J-Men. This was one of the strangest experiences I’ve had at an ultimate game. Still feeling week from the previous round, I mailed it in for this game, expecting a quick and easy victory. Both offenses came out really hot, throwing huge hucks to wide open receivers. I wasn’t paying close attention to the game, and neither were my teammates who were participating. It was clear that the SC boys who have seen the J-Men so many times had such little respect for them that they wouldn’t deign to try hard against them. Before anyone knew what was happening, hard cap was on. TomTom almost caught the game-winning score on a bid in the corner of the end zone, but the disc slipped off his fingertips as he cramped up. Despite the fact that the J-Men were hucking every possession, we left one of their biggest guys in the end zone. Huck, score, game. Besides being a travesty of an effort by SCUC, this game was further marred by our attempt to cheat the caps and extend the game when it was clearly over already. This game was a perfect way to close out “The Bad Half.”

Part 3: Discos the Good Half

Game 4: Monster. By the final round of day 1, the temperature had cooled somewhat. After such a long break, I was feeling good again, and somehow the boys were able to put the previous 3 games behind them and come out strong. The game was very reminiscent of good ol’ Claremont-UCLA games of the past. We came out fast, put a big hurting on Monster, and coasted to a blowout victory. 13-4, I think. It was fun for me seeing a few of my former teammates like Peaches and Biclops, but I am frankly shocked that this team chose to call itself Monster. I believe there were 3 or 4 returners from the previous season, and the team transformed from being adult studs to college players from UCLA and Irvine, most of who I didn’t recognize at all. Highlights of the game were me throwing two really nice flick hucks to Steve Scardato, who did his part in absolutely flying to pull them out of the sky. Good way to put the Bad Half behind us and move on.

Game 5: Rhino (only day 2 game). This game was pretty awesome. Our game plan did a great job of getting them out of their comfort zone. Our offense, led by Yeager at his best, came out really hot. Incredibly, by the time the score was 5-5, there hadn’t been a single turnover by either team. We took half up one break, 7-5, as Dom Captain of Slocore fought his way upline for the score. We maintained our lead for a few coming out of half, but then Rhino came creeping back. Come the endgame, there was a score dispute. Unlike the J-Men game, this time we were right, but somehow we went with Rhino’s claimed score. So it was universe point, and we were on D. Unfortunately (in my eyes), we had been going with a very open rotation the whole last quarter of the game, which might have contributed to Rhino’s comeback. We took the line with the score at 13-13, game hard to 15, with an open line. Before the pull, both teams agreed that the score was actually 14-14 (incorrectly). When I realized that this was universe point, I asked Yeager if we could put a true universe line on, but he declined. So in the end Rhino beat us by one. More important than whether we won or lost, though, was reminding ourselves that we are members of the second tier of NW teams, behind the Sockeye’s and JAM’s, together with Rhino and YR. When we aren’t playing like assholes (v. YR at this tournament), we are a damn good team (YR scrimmage, game v. Rhino). I am very confident about our chances of doing well in the series. Assuming we ever get an official date for sectionals.

Now that I have gotten this recap out of the way, I can finally get back to my routine of watching TV, eating, and pooping.

Hiatus

2008-07-30T20:02:00.001-07:00

Rachel and I will be in Belize, Guatemala, and El Salvador for the next two weeks.
Peace.

YR Scrimmage

2008-07-22T15:01:00.000-07:00

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.

Potlatch - Day Two

2008-07-11T17:33:00.000-07:00

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.

Potlatch Recap Day One

2008-07-10T10:34:00.000-07:00

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?

First Poll

2008-07-02T15:43:00.001-07:00

I've been curious about who is reading this blog. Let me know in the poll on the right.

Solstice Recap

2008-07-02T13:12:00.000-07:00

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.

Love In This Chuck E. Cheese

2008-06-25T21:01:00.000-07:00

A shoutout for Whale Cancer

2008-06-19T21:12:00.001-07:00

Chris McCoy, ladies and gentlemen...

Solstice PreviewNOT

2008-06-18T22:02:00.000-07:00

It looks like I'll be heading into Solstice this weekend somewhat blindly... I don't really know any of my teammates besides Joaq and Shy, their overall playing style, their individual playing styles, etc. On the plus side Joaq told me that the Slugs typically played a 3-4 pass longball O this year, which kind of gets my panties wet. I guess we did that with the Brains this year unofficially (pull catch, feed shy, feed maniac/markham, feed The Beast or sometimes lil' ol' me).
I also don't know anything about pools because the goddamn UPA website is down longer than they predicted (looks like my last post was right on point, huh?).
I don't even know what our team name is. Jaeger Bombs? Yeager Bombs? Revolver B?
I don't even know what colors to bring! pleasebeorangepleasebeorange
I don't know who we're staying with, I don't know what the Lou Burruss special rules are this year, and I don't know what role I'm supposed to fill.
But I DO know just a couple things:
1. It'll be a sweet sweet claremont reunion.
2. I'm out of shape like whoa.
3. I will still ball out of control if this club team is willing to put up some bomb bombs, and I think they will.

The New Ultimate Time

2008-06-08T18:22:00.000-07:00

By the time I got involved with serious ultimate, Ultimate Time was mostly a thing of the past. Games start (pretty much) on time these days, and tournaments don't have to adjust round times as they go. The "new" Ultimate Time relates more to increasingly professionalized aspects of ultimate. Here I am talking about Sockeye, the UPA, and Ultivillage.
Sockeye has begun to present itself as a professional style team. They have advertising on their uniforms, they put their numbers on the front of their jerseys as well as their back to increase recognition, they self cover their own team news, and even sell team merchandise online. They've also begun to make promises that they haven't come through on (I promising I am not bashing them or any others, just pointing out an observation I've made). I consider myself to be one of the biggest ultimate fans out there, so it was with great anticipation that I awaited the news about who made the team and who was cut: "Personnel decisions will be made immediately after play ends on Sunday. The full 2008 roster should be announced by Tuesday, June 3rd" (From the Sockeye website).
The UPA undertook its most ambitious project since I've been aware of them with their Revolution. Of course, the conclusions of their survey were not released any time close to the deadline announced by the UPA. This is the most troubling of my three examples, because they are only organization that is expected to serve an audience well, as an organizing body.
Ultivillage has made numerous promises of "coverage of ___ will begin ___," and frequently doesn't follow through with those promises. The great thing about Ultivillage, though, is that you will eventually get what you pay for, no matter the timing. And it was great to see the same-day coverage Rob provided at college nationals.
I just want to re-iterate that despite these timing shortcomings, I am a huge supporter of all three of these groups, and wish them the best (along with a little punctuality!).

Howard Cosell on Ultimate

2008-06-03T17:19:00.000-07:00

Funny little video of Howard Cosell praising the merits of ultimate, found on the Revolver website.

In Seattle

2008-05-28T17:53:00.001-07:00

I'm in Seattle for a week and a half (until the 6th). It's getting in the way of me getting started in the Bay Area with club, but I think I deserve some time at home after graduating. Missing Cal States when I just moved to the East Bay sucks, but I'll survive.
Hopefully I'll get to play some ultimate with the Airtight homies, or at least the UW kids.
And I'll DEFINITELY get to play some late night neighborhood disc golf with Greg, with a Joose or two in tow on the way to the Knarr.

D-III Ultimate Media Panel final results

2008-05-23T14:45:00.000-07:00

In lieu of finding enough money to fly the Braineaters out to Ohio for D-III nationals (which basically looks like a who's who of non-regionals qualifiers), I've created the OFFICIAL D-III rankings, voted on by the D-III Ultimate Media Panel (DUMP).
After tallying all the votes, here are the final DUMP standings (1st place votes in parentheses, 4 points for a first place vote, 3 points for a second place vote, etc.):

1. Carleton (1) - 4
2. Claremont - 3
3. Las Positas - 2
4. Wisconsin-Whitewater - 1
also receiving votes: Claremont-B Conchblockers

There you have it, folks!

Another Weak Future Post

2008-05-20T15:17:00.001-07:00

Thought of another topic for future rumination:
Cordiality between opponents and myself and my teammates has increased greatly over my four years as a Braineater. Is this because after four years, i've personally developed relationships with other teams, or is it a broader phenomenon (within California colleges at least).

Lamest Spike in Ultimate

2008-05-20T15:10:00.000-07:00

For some reason I have grown weary of the super-hard turfed scoober/thumber that bounces and skids: UV's Round 4 reel had a few of them. The tiny kid who played for CU last year did it a lot too, which especially bothered me because he only seemed to catch goals because his defender was always poached off him. I don't know where Daze's footage of last years SW championship game is, but there are a lot of examples there.

Clearly, the spike of the future is the Jughead Memorial Toe-Tap, coming soon courtesy of Markham Shofner to a field near you.

Future

2008-05-15T17:31:00.000-07:00

1. Future of The Jughead Show:
-Posts about Senior Week, SW/Braineaters next year, Airtight/DarkHorse for Potlatch, YR/Joaqsquad/Whitteam for club this season, and if you and I are especially lucky a vain multimedia surprise.
2. Future of the Jughead:
-Unfortunately, I have no future, as I had to sell my soul to the UPA for this little hyperlink: http://upa.org/college/all-region/2008 . Here it is again: http://upa.org/college/all-region/2008 and one more time: http://upa.org/college/all-region/2008 . But, I am actually graduating on SUNDAY, moving to Oakland on Monday, then doing not much of anything until I decide to.

I'll leave you with this:
http://tinyurl.com/6lea7e
and this:
http://tinyurl.com/2g9mqh

Welcome to the Jughead Show

2008-05-08T01:34:00.000-07:00

Hello teammates, friends, and stalkers,
I've been an avid (obsessive) ultimate blog reader for some time, and I thought I would be remiss in not joining in the conversation now that I am done with college. I was inspired to finally start a blog while researching my final term paper for a history course. The books A Social History of the Media by Asa Briggs and Peter Burke, We the Media by Dan Gillmor, and Fans, Bloggers, Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture by Henry Jenkins really convinced me to add my voice to the mix. I might post the paper later if I think it's appropriate.

Anyway, my current conception of this blog is that I'll critique (positive and negative) the posts of other blogs I read, as well as significant RSD threads. Most likely there will be more criticism than agreement...

I'll also write a lot about my former team/brothers the Claremont Braineaters, my Seattle ultimate friends/teammates, and whichever team in the Bay Area I end up playing for this club season (Whit's unnamed mixed team? YR? This Santa Cruz team Joaq keeps telling me about? A more traditional club powerhouse?). And whatever else I feel like writing about.

Enjoy.