Colorado Cup Preview

Friday afternoon we’re headed for Boulder for Colorado Cup. We’re the two seed at the tourney, and the one seed in our pool, which looks something like this:

1. Strike-Slip
2. 99 Problems
3. Double Black
4. Sprawl
5. Riverside 1
6. Blackfish

I don’t put too much stock in the seedings since it’s still pretty early in the series and most teams don’t have much of a resume yet. 99 Problems and Double Black are both Denver area teams, so they’ll have a home field advantage. 99 Problems is listed as a combination of players from Bad Larry and Slow Dance. Sprawl is from AZ, Riverside 1 from Austin, Texas, and Blackfish is from Vancouver. I’m pretty interested in playing a team that flew in from BC for this tournament. Anyway, none of the teams have much of a history on score reporter so each game will be a mystery box.

A1 is Prairie Fire, a bunch of good Kansas guys who beat Johnny Bravo twice at a tourney in the early season. I really hope we have a chance to play them at some point because they look to the be the team to beat in the open division.

Our practice this weekend looked much improved over previous weeks, and I think we’re finally starting to gel a little better. We had about 17-18 on Saturday, but we split into an O-line and a much bigger D-line. As far as I can tell, the O line will be some combination of Buhl, GVP, AJ, Linux, Keith, Bobby, Alan, Me, Concord and maybe Korb. There will probably be some other guys who weren’t at practice, too. It’s an interesting combination of young and old guys, and pretty Smaug heavy. It makes sense to have young legs and smart veteran handlers together on the line together. It’s interesting that they’ve gone with younger guys over some of the more experienced players, but it’s good that they have confidence in us.

I like the idea of having a small O-line and a big D-line. Offense is less fatiguing, and chemistry will be key for our efficiency. I like that we have some ballers and big throwers on the D line, too, and hopefully they will be playing most of our points at the next few tournaments. We did an interesting drill where the O team played savage and had to score 9 points before the D team (who had lots of subs) could get 5 break points. It definitely sucked for the D line, but it was pretty effective. I feel like were finally starting to get the motion vert offense, and it’s definitely helped by our increasing familiarity with each other as players. Ultimate is such a repetitive game that it’s key to know your teammates habits, abilities and tendencies. It seems sort of obvious, but I think it’s still undervalued.

Strike-Slip reminds me of Smaug in that there’s a lot of talent, but not many dominant athletes that are going to come up with huge plays. This is probably why the captains went with the vertical offense, which is very methodical and workman like. That said, there is still a ton of talent on the team, and every practice I feel lucky to be playing with these guys because it’s by far the best team I’ve ever been on.