Fall ended on a strong note with a good showing at SoCal Warm Up for Smaug. We brought two teams, Team Hip and Team Bro. Because we lost Sean Ryan as a try-out tourney, we had me and Bishop captain Team Hip as a tryout team with all the guys trying out for the A team that we wanted to watch more closely. Arby and Knuckles captained team Bro, which had more returning A-teamers, but with both teams having a full 30 people, they ended up being pretty evenly balanced.
Hip went 4-1 in pool play, losing at 8 AM to a UCSD Z team in a pretty sloppy game. We won games against USC, Redlands, Irvine and Arizona Y (who was more of their B team). This put us in the 5-8 bracket on Sunday, which mercifully started at 11 AM, so we got to enjoy ourselves Saturday night. It was windier Sunday morning, and we faced a Long Beach team with only 10 guys that ran zone every point. It was not a very fun game. We played an extremely fun game against the Squids Rick Roll team, which had a lot of hucking and exciting plays. We scored the last point of the game, but hard cap ended us at 11-10.
Team Bro went 3-2 in in their pool, beating UCSD Y, USD and Northern Arizona, but dropping games to SDSU X and Arizona X. On Sunday in the 9-12 bracket, they lost a tight game to Azusa Pacific, who also ran a lot zone, per usual, but had also picked up three ringers from SLO who were looking for a team to pick up with. In the last game, they lost a tough game against Claremont on universe.
SDSU Y ended up winning the tourney over Arizona X. SDSU has had an extremely successful fall, and are looking to be dangerous this season. I am pretty surprised to hear that they haven't been accepted to the SB Invite yet. I think people remain skeptical of fall tourney results, though, which can produce some pretty odd results. It's all about the season.
We've finally (almost) set our A team. We're still waiting to see BSOD and Avatar, who spent the quarter abroad, and Syntax, who had the flu during Warm Up and couldn't play. Otherwise, Smaug will look something like this:
Attica
Avatar
Bishop
BSOD
Da Vinci
Eraser
Falco
Fawkes
Knuckles
Machina
Mongoose
OJ
Pagoda
Rachet
Scarecrow
Spectre
Syntax
The Arbiter
The Curse
The Flood
The Fuzz
Thor
Turok
Vector
Vonage
Whiplash
Zodiac
The squad is really big this year, athough Thor recently had ankle surgery to fix a severe high ankle sprain that he suffered at WarmUp, and he might be gone for the season. We made an effort to bring more youth to the team, because next year Smaug is losing 12 guys to graduation/eligibility. Still, competition for playing time will be stiff, and we expect everyone to earn their way onto the field at every practice.
We have 3 new players who we're really excited about. Our true rookies are Mongoose and The Fuzz. The Fuzz is the shorter of the two, and extremely quick with good field sense and sick lay outs. Mongoose is smart athlete, with surprisingly good disc skills and nice hops. Whiplash is new to the program, too, but he played a year with Santa Cruz' B team and transferred to UCLA, so he'll have 3 years in the program. He got probably 5 or 6 sick lay out D's over the weekend. The most important thing about our three rookies is that they have great work ethic, and I think all of them will contribute this year.
What really excites me about this team is our overall team athleticism. We have a lot of speedy and tall receivers, and a good squad of huckers to get it to them. Our D lines are going to really get after it, and we have a relatively large number of guys that we would be comfortable putting on the other teams best player.
We lost a lot of experience last year - lots of guys with high level club experience. They will be tough to replace, but I think our ceiling this year will be as high as we we want it to be. Last year, we were knocking on the doorstep of getting there. If people decide that Smaug's success is important to them, and put in the necessary work in the gym and throwing outside of practice, we can make a lot of noise this year.
We're running two different offensive systems this year, a vert stack borrowed from Strike-Slip and a split-stack borrowed from Condors. The vert stack will be very systematic and put our handlers in position to play aggressively and control the game. The split stack will open up a lot of space in the middle of the field and will give our cutters more freedom to take over with their athleticism.
The Southwest will be tough this year. There's a good chance we will only have 2 bids after UCSD and UCSB struggled at nationals last year, but the UPA is still working on a new plan to make the regular count for bid allocations, so we've been working hard to be ready to go in January.
Squids, Tide, Arizona and Colorado are the big dogs in the region, but the next level of teams have a lot of talent and will be a threat every time we play them. CSULB, SDSU, Claremont, SLO, UCI, and Colorado State are all dangerous, and I'm sure I've forgotten another good team or two.
I can't wait until January when we finally get to play as one squad at Santa Barbara. Until then, make sure that you're working out over break, and if you want to see us do well this year, call up a Smauggy and make sure they're doing the winter break workouts.
