humboldt ultimate classic kickoff [day 1]
every year, our first tournament is club sectionals. in each of the last three years, we've had the good fortune of having this tournament on campus. this means leisurely morning, maybe a bite at commons before the first round, and playing in the comfortable shadow of the steele and sullivan dorms on the north end of campus.
what this really means is that club sectionals is not our first "tournament" experience. to really experience a tournament, we need to get out of portland and into to the rest of the northwest. we need uncomfortable hours in a smelly van, massive quantities of italian food on saturday night, and late returns to town in a heap of exhaustion. we need to be packed like sardines on a living room floor, we need to sneak into foreign showers, we need to experience new places as a team.
reed ultimate has never gone to humboldt as long as i've been a part of the program, and our first trip down to arcata was a pretty memorable one. the drive down took us along the coast and through the redwoods, mostly in darkness. we listened to the first presidential debate and then fought over music selections for the next six hours. when we got to arcata, we found that the fields were green and soft, the sun was out, and the hippies were everywhere. we were welcomed with a number one seed, a first round bye, and absolutely no field food.
game 1: puget sound.
our first game was against the university of puget sound. this team has been fighting a long hard road towards being competitive among the other small northwest schools. they've never had a real stud on their team, which i would argue is often the biggest catalyst towards the development of a successful program. in this particular game, they had a tall receiver who was pretty competitive downfield against our defenders, and a relatively solid handler who did the majority of their offensive work for them.
from the outset, it was hard for us to get rolling. we made a number of simple mistakes in the first half that allowed puget sound to hang around at the break. they scored the first point and we responded with two of our own. they came back with two more, and we rattled off three in a row before trading two points each just before the half. the game was one of minor runs; neither team had really asserted itself to begin the game. our defense struggled largely as a result of individual defenders having a hard time seeing both the disc and their man at the same time. our handler defense was quite a bit sluggish, and we allowed their handlers to come from behind cutters too often. this allowed the handler to pick the side he would cut to, and we were often left hanging on the other side. they received the disc with favorable momentum upfield, and were able to hit cutters with deep throws.
after a 7-5 halftime lead, we kind of crumbled to start the second half, letting them back into the game and a 7-7 tie. again, a game of short runs took over: we responded twice to bring the game to 9-7, and then gave up three straight to fall to 10-9. after expending our second timeout of the half, we rattled off four straight scores to take the game 13-10. their top handler dropped the pull on game point for us to take the win.
the most impressive aspect of this victory was likely the even distribution of playing time and scores. most of the returners played eleven of the twenty-three points. josh, david, bryson and russell each played 13. each of the freshmen played at least five points. no single player scored more than two times: josh, joe and sam each led the way here. one thing we're going to have to learn over the course of the season is how to relieve the burden on our top players by spreading the wealth among the rest of the team. if we can have solid possessions that involve our new players on offense and defense, we'll be in a much more comfortable situation later in the year.
some individual performances to point out: from early on in the game, david controlled the line of scrimmage as a handler, making fantastic breakmark throws--for goals in two cases. joe was easily the most dominant player on the field with the disc in his hand, throwing six goals--most of these in the first half. we were able to shake off puget sound and storm into the second round on a roll.
game 2: uc merced
this game could have been very stupid, and for one half of the participants, it was. imagine playing a team shod mostly in tennis shoes instead of cleats, where 33% of the handlers are wearing sunglasses and the same percentage of the cutters are girls. we were staring at what you may describe as the polar opposite of a fierce opponent. with this in mind, we decided to change the style of game management for the better.
joe and bryson sat almost the whole game. tevon played the most points (8) and freshmen controlled things from the outset. we jumped a 7-0 halftime lead, with two all-freshman points closing out the half. andrew had a pretty spectacular layout d on an in cut and generally decided he was going to bid all over the field for the rest of the game.
offensively, stephen took it upon himself to quarterback the offense, throwing four goals and scoring one to boot. we were able to move the disc quickly and efficiently, if not a bit chaotically. the impressive aspect of our win was the solid hands and throws of our new players. nobody had more than one turn (except david who threw two, as a result of miscommunication), and we generally took very good care of the disc.
there's not much more to say about this game. it was exciting to watch in light of the fact that our young guns were able to roll over a team they should have beaten easily. no story here except for this: reed college has traditionally been plagued by a mindset that causes us to play down to the level of our opponent. we didn't let that happen in this case. we showed up, we won easily. we moved onto round three without making things dramatic.
game 3: lewis and clark
in our third game, we played a surprisingly humorless lewis and clark team. the only recognizable faces on the opposing sideline were ct, mitch, joel, and sam. i'm fairly certain ct will never graduate or leave the team, but i was almost positive that mitch had gone onto bigger (but not necessarily better) things. it's a lot of fun playing these guys every year. we've seen a lot of great players trickle through their system. in my sophomore season (2005), courtney and joe durst destroyed us at college sectionals. 2006 was extremely competitive and each of the last two years we have run with them neck and neck.
this year looks more like a reed kind of year. i like when those winds are blowing towards the southeast.
the highlight of this game was the lc boombox. fashioned like an old school ghetto blaster but with the ability to play an ipod, this thing sat on their sideline during the whole game, except when i drifted over there to steal it from them. this was the kind of thing that used to be relatively common horseplay in the old days. at sectionals in 2007, we stole humboldt's boom box during our warm up lap, and in the '06 years, lc and reed had a disc that was stolen back and forth for a span of about a year and a half.
unfortunately these young punks have no sense of humor, no sense of history. "back in my day" things used to be different. someone should tell them: laugh! be merry! it's the reed/lc rivalry!
well, i guess it's only particularly merry if you're on our side of the field this season.
again, we saw a solid distribution of playing time across the board. russell played like the stud that he thinks he is, which i've been waiting on for some time now. at one point, he threw a filthy filthy inside out back hand to joe, who was cutting upline from the open side handler position. joe received the disc and threw a perfect continuation backhand to andrew for a layout score. it was one of the sweetest sequences of the weekend. i wish i had the opportunity to see russell's face after initiating this flow. cupcake also threw a pretty nasty "i'm going to pivot flick side but throw the i/o" backhand to josh, at which point sam turned to me, made some sort of ridiculous facial expression, and exclaimed "what?! what?!?!? are you fucking kidding me?!" yeah, i was impressed, too.
we can talk all about the big plays this game, and there were many of them. bryson caught a callahan in the second half, sometime after mitch had decided to take off his cleats and give himself a permanent breather. we took half at 7-2 and never really looked back, winning the game 13-6. it was the most one-sided clobbering in the rivalry since lc trounced us back at sectionals in 2005 (the year before that, reed was the victor). it should be noted that the last time either team had a halftime lead like this one was the 2006 club sectionals, where reed came back to win 13-12 on double game point. we did a great job of keeping them out of the game and avoiding the eerie parallel.
perhaps the best play of the whole weekend was a glimpse into the future. erick cut upline and, receiving the disc from another handler, threw a fifty yard flick huck to wes who, borrowed cleats and all, ran it down with no defender anywhere in sight. josh ran out and gave him a big hug and i wanted to point at mitch and ct and tell them that they were going to have to get used to that for the next three years.
russell threw four scores but had three turnovers. his style of play lends itself to fantastic displays or near misses. joe had a couple of ds to go along with three assists, two scores, and three turns. again, joe impressed with his solid and fundamental play. it's pretty impressive to have that kind of impact after playing only 9 points in the whole game. gester scored in his third consecutive game, showing that timing and cutting really pays off when we get close to the goal. and who the hell would have thought that sam would put up three assists, two scores, and no turnovers in eight points of playing time? a more efficient line wasn't posted over the course of the weekend.
game 4: humboldt x
in the long history of reed ultimate, humboldt has always been a step ahead of us. as few as four and five years ago, humboldt wiped the floor with reed. we'd be fortunate to put up five or six points, but it was immediately evident that they were the better team in almost every case. last year's sectionals was the event that saw us get the closest to humboldt we've ever been, before blowing an 11-10 lead to lose 12-11. humboldt will always be a team against whom we can measure our progress. they have been steady and consistent over the last number of years, and the development of our program is exhibited by our relative success against the buds.
we started this game on defense. the buds scored first. then reed. then the buds, then reed, then the buds. humboldt got their first break to take a 4-2 lead, but we traded back and got the break to bring the game to 5s. we stayed on serve for the rest of the half and went into the second half with a 7-6 deficit.
the pace of the game was fast and furious. players were running hard all over the field. humboldt had a pretty devastating combination of a tall kid in plaid shorts and a recent graduate who was very tough for us to shut down. we played passable defense and looked to our offense to roll us along. i was most impressed with the way that we moved the disc. time after time, we looked off risky deep throws in favor of swinging the disc and moving it down the field with short and concise passes.
reed was led in the second half by its seniors and its captains. bryson showed up huge in this game with three big scores and an assist to go with just two turns and a d. david was solid and composed. i can't tell you how comfortable i felt when the disc was in his hands. he made opposing defenses pay by throwing three goals and scoring one for himself. his only turnover was made up with a d late in the game.
the buds broke us to start the second half, and we traded back and forth, never getting closer than one goal down. they took us to 11 9, and then the game turned. we played with a noticeable passion and with a fire that i haven't seen in this kind of situation before. we saw their players feeling more and more sluggish on defense and responded by turning up our energy on offense. it was almost like something clicked in our heads collectively: they were on their heels and we saw the opportunity to strike. they struggled to move the disc and we made them pay. at 11-9, we scored two consecutive goals to tie the game at 11s. humboldt scored to make it 12-11, and it was the last goal they would get.
back to our seniors. joe put on a performance that left me shocked on the sideline. historically, joe has always been a major offensive threat, but he's never really dominated a game to the point that it was clear he was the best player on the field. in this game, he did that. joe handblocked humboldt's best thrower in the first half and got a layout d on an under cut that put us in prime position for the win. offensively, he had six turns (that's part of the burden of touching the disc more than anyone else), but threw seven goals and added a score of his own. humboldt didn't have much of an answer for joe.
and then, there's josh o'rourke. i feel like he should probably just have the word "fuck" somewhere in his name. it should be legally changed to "fucking josh o'rourke" or "josh motherfucking o'rourke" because when he turns it on, nobody can keep with him. with us down, 12-11, josh cut break side for a throw from joe to try to score. he laid out past his bidding defender and caught the disc, doing a face plant directly into the turf. as we screamed on the sidelines, he stood up and spat out a mouth full of grass. we had tied the game and wouldn't look back. josh scored each of the last three points for us, and we rolled over humboldt by scoring five of the last six to clinch the game, a perfect 4-0 day, and the top seed heading into the championship bracket on sunday.
i always knew that ballers ball, but i had never seen anything quite like this.
[to be continued...]
what this really means is that club sectionals is not our first "tournament" experience. to really experience a tournament, we need to get out of portland and into to the rest of the northwest. we need uncomfortable hours in a smelly van, massive quantities of italian food on saturday night, and late returns to town in a heap of exhaustion. we need to be packed like sardines on a living room floor, we need to sneak into foreign showers, we need to experience new places as a team.
reed ultimate has never gone to humboldt as long as i've been a part of the program, and our first trip down to arcata was a pretty memorable one. the drive down took us along the coast and through the redwoods, mostly in darkness. we listened to the first presidential debate and then fought over music selections for the next six hours. when we got to arcata, we found that the fields were green and soft, the sun was out, and the hippies were everywhere. we were welcomed with a number one seed, a first round bye, and absolutely no field food.
game 1: puget sound.
our first game was against the university of puget sound. this team has been fighting a long hard road towards being competitive among the other small northwest schools. they've never had a real stud on their team, which i would argue is often the biggest catalyst towards the development of a successful program. in this particular game, they had a tall receiver who was pretty competitive downfield against our defenders, and a relatively solid handler who did the majority of their offensive work for them.
from the outset, it was hard for us to get rolling. we made a number of simple mistakes in the first half that allowed puget sound to hang around at the break. they scored the first point and we responded with two of our own. they came back with two more, and we rattled off three in a row before trading two points each just before the half. the game was one of minor runs; neither team had really asserted itself to begin the game. our defense struggled largely as a result of individual defenders having a hard time seeing both the disc and their man at the same time. our handler defense was quite a bit sluggish, and we allowed their handlers to come from behind cutters too often. this allowed the handler to pick the side he would cut to, and we were often left hanging on the other side. they received the disc with favorable momentum upfield, and were able to hit cutters with deep throws.
after a 7-5 halftime lead, we kind of crumbled to start the second half, letting them back into the game and a 7-7 tie. again, a game of short runs took over: we responded twice to bring the game to 9-7, and then gave up three straight to fall to 10-9. after expending our second timeout of the half, we rattled off four straight scores to take the game 13-10. their top handler dropped the pull on game point for us to take the win.
the most impressive aspect of this victory was likely the even distribution of playing time and scores. most of the returners played eleven of the twenty-three points. josh, david, bryson and russell each played 13. each of the freshmen played at least five points. no single player scored more than two times: josh, joe and sam each led the way here. one thing we're going to have to learn over the course of the season is how to relieve the burden on our top players by spreading the wealth among the rest of the team. if we can have solid possessions that involve our new players on offense and defense, we'll be in a much more comfortable situation later in the year.
some individual performances to point out: from early on in the game, david controlled the line of scrimmage as a handler, making fantastic breakmark throws--for goals in two cases. joe was easily the most dominant player on the field with the disc in his hand, throwing six goals--most of these in the first half. we were able to shake off puget sound and storm into the second round on a roll.
game 2: uc merced
this game could have been very stupid, and for one half of the participants, it was. imagine playing a team shod mostly in tennis shoes instead of cleats, where 33% of the handlers are wearing sunglasses and the same percentage of the cutters are girls. we were staring at what you may describe as the polar opposite of a fierce opponent. with this in mind, we decided to change the style of game management for the better.
joe and bryson sat almost the whole game. tevon played the most points (8) and freshmen controlled things from the outset. we jumped a 7-0 halftime lead, with two all-freshman points closing out the half. andrew had a pretty spectacular layout d on an in cut and generally decided he was going to bid all over the field for the rest of the game.
offensively, stephen took it upon himself to quarterback the offense, throwing four goals and scoring one to boot. we were able to move the disc quickly and efficiently, if not a bit chaotically. the impressive aspect of our win was the solid hands and throws of our new players. nobody had more than one turn (except david who threw two, as a result of miscommunication), and we generally took very good care of the disc.
there's not much more to say about this game. it was exciting to watch in light of the fact that our young guns were able to roll over a team they should have beaten easily. no story here except for this: reed college has traditionally been plagued by a mindset that causes us to play down to the level of our opponent. we didn't let that happen in this case. we showed up, we won easily. we moved onto round three without making things dramatic.
game 3: lewis and clark
in our third game, we played a surprisingly humorless lewis and clark team. the only recognizable faces on the opposing sideline were ct, mitch, joel, and sam. i'm fairly certain ct will never graduate or leave the team, but i was almost positive that mitch had gone onto bigger (but not necessarily better) things. it's a lot of fun playing these guys every year. we've seen a lot of great players trickle through their system. in my sophomore season (2005), courtney and joe durst destroyed us at college sectionals. 2006 was extremely competitive and each of the last two years we have run with them neck and neck.
this year looks more like a reed kind of year. i like when those winds are blowing towards the southeast.
the highlight of this game was the lc boombox. fashioned like an old school ghetto blaster but with the ability to play an ipod, this thing sat on their sideline during the whole game, except when i drifted over there to steal it from them. this was the kind of thing that used to be relatively common horseplay in the old days. at sectionals in 2007, we stole humboldt's boom box during our warm up lap, and in the '06 years, lc and reed had a disc that was stolen back and forth for a span of about a year and a half.
unfortunately these young punks have no sense of humor, no sense of history. "back in my day" things used to be different. someone should tell them: laugh! be merry! it's the reed/lc rivalry!
well, i guess it's only particularly merry if you're on our side of the field this season.
again, we saw a solid distribution of playing time across the board. russell played like the stud that he thinks he is, which i've been waiting on for some time now. at one point, he threw a filthy filthy inside out back hand to joe, who was cutting upline from the open side handler position. joe received the disc and threw a perfect continuation backhand to andrew for a layout score. it was one of the sweetest sequences of the weekend. i wish i had the opportunity to see russell's face after initiating this flow. cupcake also threw a pretty nasty "i'm going to pivot flick side but throw the i/o" backhand to josh, at which point sam turned to me, made some sort of ridiculous facial expression, and exclaimed "what?! what?!?!? are you fucking kidding me?!" yeah, i was impressed, too.
we can talk all about the big plays this game, and there were many of them. bryson caught a callahan in the second half, sometime after mitch had decided to take off his cleats and give himself a permanent breather. we took half at 7-2 and never really looked back, winning the game 13-6. it was the most one-sided clobbering in the rivalry since lc trounced us back at sectionals in 2005 (the year before that, reed was the victor). it should be noted that the last time either team had a halftime lead like this one was the 2006 club sectionals, where reed came back to win 13-12 on double game point. we did a great job of keeping them out of the game and avoiding the eerie parallel.
perhaps the best play of the whole weekend was a glimpse into the future. erick cut upline and, receiving the disc from another handler, threw a fifty yard flick huck to wes who, borrowed cleats and all, ran it down with no defender anywhere in sight. josh ran out and gave him a big hug and i wanted to point at mitch and ct and tell them that they were going to have to get used to that for the next three years.
russell threw four scores but had three turnovers. his style of play lends itself to fantastic displays or near misses. joe had a couple of ds to go along with three assists, two scores, and three turns. again, joe impressed with his solid and fundamental play. it's pretty impressive to have that kind of impact after playing only 9 points in the whole game. gester scored in his third consecutive game, showing that timing and cutting really pays off when we get close to the goal. and who the hell would have thought that sam would put up three assists, two scores, and no turnovers in eight points of playing time? a more efficient line wasn't posted over the course of the weekend.
game 4: humboldt x
in the long history of reed ultimate, humboldt has always been a step ahead of us. as few as four and five years ago, humboldt wiped the floor with reed. we'd be fortunate to put up five or six points, but it was immediately evident that they were the better team in almost every case. last year's sectionals was the event that saw us get the closest to humboldt we've ever been, before blowing an 11-10 lead to lose 12-11. humboldt will always be a team against whom we can measure our progress. they have been steady and consistent over the last number of years, and the development of our program is exhibited by our relative success against the buds.
we started this game on defense. the buds scored first. then reed. then the buds, then reed, then the buds. humboldt got their first break to take a 4-2 lead, but we traded back and got the break to bring the game to 5s. we stayed on serve for the rest of the half and went into the second half with a 7-6 deficit.
the pace of the game was fast and furious. players were running hard all over the field. humboldt had a pretty devastating combination of a tall kid in plaid shorts and a recent graduate who was very tough for us to shut down. we played passable defense and looked to our offense to roll us along. i was most impressed with the way that we moved the disc. time after time, we looked off risky deep throws in favor of swinging the disc and moving it down the field with short and concise passes.
reed was led in the second half by its seniors and its captains. bryson showed up huge in this game with three big scores and an assist to go with just two turns and a d. david was solid and composed. i can't tell you how comfortable i felt when the disc was in his hands. he made opposing defenses pay by throwing three goals and scoring one for himself. his only turnover was made up with a d late in the game.
the buds broke us to start the second half, and we traded back and forth, never getting closer than one goal down. they took us to 11 9, and then the game turned. we played with a noticeable passion and with a fire that i haven't seen in this kind of situation before. we saw their players feeling more and more sluggish on defense and responded by turning up our energy on offense. it was almost like something clicked in our heads collectively: they were on their heels and we saw the opportunity to strike. they struggled to move the disc and we made them pay. at 11-9, we scored two consecutive goals to tie the game at 11s. humboldt scored to make it 12-11, and it was the last goal they would get.
back to our seniors. joe put on a performance that left me shocked on the sideline. historically, joe has always been a major offensive threat, but he's never really dominated a game to the point that it was clear he was the best player on the field. in this game, he did that. joe handblocked humboldt's best thrower in the first half and got a layout d on an under cut that put us in prime position for the win. offensively, he had six turns (that's part of the burden of touching the disc more than anyone else), but threw seven goals and added a score of his own. humboldt didn't have much of an answer for joe.
and then, there's josh o'rourke. i feel like he should probably just have the word "fuck" somewhere in his name. it should be legally changed to "fucking josh o'rourke" or "josh motherfucking o'rourke" because when he turns it on, nobody can keep with him. with us down, 12-11, josh cut break side for a throw from joe to try to score. he laid out past his bidding defender and caught the disc, doing a face plant directly into the turf. as we screamed on the sidelines, he stood up and spat out a mouth full of grass. we had tied the game and wouldn't look back. josh scored each of the last three points for us, and we rolled over humboldt by scoring five of the last six to clinch the game, a perfect 4-0 day, and the top seed heading into the championship bracket on sunday.
i always knew that ballers ball, but i had never seen anything quite like this.
[to be continued...]
posted by Fish at 2:13 PM
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