I wrote up some short instructions for Smaug after this weekend. Our sideline D talk can be much more productive. These are few of my favorite ways of helping. If you know of any other ways to help from the sidelines, please let me know in the comments section.
1. The most important thing is to just be saying something. Even just yelling to run hard is better than saying nothing.
2. Tell your guy where the disc is on the field. Tell him whether it's far side from your voice or near you. This is a good thing to do when your defender is on a cutter so he knows how to adjust his positioning. He knows to play tighter or to sag off a little bit because the disc is not in a threatening position. You can yell "HOT" at the person when he is clearly the focus of the handler or when you can see a dangerous situation developing. eg FAR SIDE, FAR SIDE. MIDDLE. NEAR SIDE. HOT.
3. If you are talking to the dump defender, tell him what the handler is doing. The most important thing is to tell your guy whether the guy with the disc is looking at his offender or not. Echoing the stall count is helpful, and also saying where the disc is going (up, break, etc.) eg: NOT LOOKING, NOT LOOKING, STALLING 4, 5, LOOKING, LOOKING.
4. If your guy is on the mark, be sure to tell him where the receiving threats are on the field and where his marking emphasis should be. The words INSIDE or AROUND are the standard. Also, as you see the stall count get above 5, remind the person on the mark to shift his emphasis on taking away the around and pressure the dump throw.
5. Old school: yell "UP" calls. Yell HUCK or BREAK if it applies. Also, if a person is in power position, yell "POWER, POWER"
6. If there is one dude who is hucking a lot, every one should echo the call "HUCKER" when he gets his hands on the disc.
7. Special situation: If a team is being very successful with their huck looks, 1 person should stand at each of the front cones of the endzone that we're defending and help out the defenders as they come into the deep area. Make sure to tell them where the huck is going when it goes up. ie: LEFT LEFT or RIGHT RIGHT or SHORT or BLADEY. This is the only situation in which you are excused from following the play on the sidelines.
Monday, January 25, 2010
Friday, January 22, 2010
SB Invite Preview
Tomorrow morning we drive up the 101 to Santa Barbara. The tournament is notorious for having bad weather. This year, it rained for a week straight, from sunday at Leiout until Friday night. Weather reports say that there is only a small chance of rain over the weekend, but I know better than to believe them. I'm bringing all my tights and trash bags in preparation.
Black Tide lost all of their grass fields because of the week of rain, so only 12 men's teams are playing this weekend. Fortunately, we were seeded high enough to make it in, but CSULB got screwed over again, getting un-invited from their second tourney this year. That really sucks.
Because they're going to have to shoehorn in all the men's and women's games onto the artificial turf fields, the schedule is going to be pretty wacky. We're playing Colorado and Davis in pool play, with cross over games until 10 PM at night. One nice thing about losing the fields, at least, is that we get our first game at 10:40 instead of 8 AM.
Colorado and Davis. I'm excited about playing both of them, but they will be tough games. It's time to see what we've got.
Black Tide lost all of their grass fields because of the week of rain, so only 12 men's teams are playing this weekend. Fortunately, we were seeded high enough to make it in, but CSULB got screwed over again, getting un-invited from their second tourney this year. That really sucks.
Because they're going to have to shoehorn in all the men's and women's games onto the artificial turf fields, the schedule is going to be pretty wacky. We're playing Colorado and Davis in pool play, with cross over games until 10 PM at night. One nice thing about losing the fields, at least, is that we get our first game at 10:40 instead of 8 AM.
Colorado and Davis. I'm excited about playing both of them, but they will be tough games. It's time to see what we've got.
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Lei Out 2010: Success
Mah Na Mah Na! rocked Lei Out. Definitely the best one I've been to. Im still recovering.
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
Back on the Horse
Sorry for the long break between posts.
Finals hit, then Nicaragua, then the holidays, and then a whirlwind trip to San Francisco for new years. I didn't think much about ultimate from mid-December until now, and the rest was pretty rejuvenating. This semester is going to be a lot of work, and it was nice to pretend I'm a normal person for a little while.
We're practice and one track workout into the season so far. The SB Invite is three weeks and I'm really excited about our pool:
http://www.upa.org/scores/tourn.cgi?div=122&id=7110
We have Tide, Stanford and SLO, in that order. Tide and SLO are good regional match ups, and Stanford is a semis team from last and we will get to play with nothing to lose.
First, though, is Lei Out, one of the highlights of the year for LA ultimate. We're debating whether to move up into the A pools for a second year in a row. It worked out OK last year, but we will see.
Anyway, here are some pictures form Nicaragua:
Finals hit, then Nicaragua, then the holidays, and then a whirlwind trip to San Francisco for new years. I didn't think much about ultimate from mid-December until now, and the rest was pretty rejuvenating. This semester is going to be a lot of work, and it was nice to pretend I'm a normal person for a little while.
We're practice and one track workout into the season so far. The SB Invite is three weeks and I'm really excited about our pool:
http://www.upa.org/scores/tourn.cgi?div=122&id=7110
We have Tide, Stanford and SLO, in that order. Tide and SLO are good regional match ups, and Stanford is a semis team from last and we will get to play with nothing to lose.
First, though, is Lei Out, one of the highlights of the year for LA ultimate. We're debating whether to move up into the A pools for a second year in a row. It worked out OK last year, but we will see.
Anyway, here are some pictures form Nicaragua:
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
Fall Wrap-Up
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.
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.
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Sean Ryan Fail
I was so pumped to go up to Sean Ryan last week. We had been prepping and planning furiously, organizing rides, practicing zone and getting people pumped up.
Tuesday morning I got a text from Big Jake saying that he was forwarding us the Santa Cruz email. I thought he was referring to the captain's packet or schedule or something, so I thought nothing of it. After all my classes, I went to check my email and find this gem:
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: CSULB Ultimate <>
Date: Tue, Nov 10, 2009 at 2:42 PM
Subject: Fwd: Sean Ryan field Trouble
To: Smaug Ultimate <>
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Slug Ultimate <>
Date: Tue, Nov 10, 2009 at 12:24 PM
Subject: Sean Ryan field Trouble
To: [a bunch of teams not including Smaug]
Hey All,
The UCSC men's Soccer team make the DIII playoff tournament and decided to host the first round at our lower fields. This means, that in spite of the Ultimate team having the field reserved for the last two months, as of last weekend we are suddunly very cramped for space. In order to solve this we are cutting the number of teams we are inviting to twelve for each division. Im sorry for the inconvience, the 12 teams invinted were chosen based on past attendance and proximity.
Thanks for all of your intrest hopefully we can avoid being screwed by our university in the coming years.
Here are the teams invited, in seed order:
Stanford
UCSC
California-Berkley
California-Santa Barbara
California-San Diego
California-Davis
Las Positas
Humbolt State
Cal Poly-SLO
Claremont
Chico State
Santa Clara
--
Cassidy, Russell, Max
Slug Captains 09-10
Keep in mind that this is Tuesday and we're supposed to leave Friday morning. I spent the next few hours seething and trying to find the phone numbers of any of the UCSC captains to call them and get some more info.
I found 2 of their numbers, and called about 10 times with no answer. I left voicemails for them to call me. I wrote a very angry email to them listing our complaints and asking them to call me.
Still, it took until late that night before Arbiter reached one of them and asked if they could adjust the schedule to accomodate for the teams that got booted. No, they couldn't do that.
My complaints:
1. Not telling a team that's planning to move 30 people that they're spot has been canceled 3 days before they leave.
2. They said the reasons for cancellation were proximity and continuity. We've been going since 2005 [edit - Kiosk thinks since 2000]. UCSD and Claremont are farther away.
3. Last year we finished in the top 8, beating squids and losing to Stanford 11-9. Crappy teams got in ahead of us.
4. It impacts teams that are further away more than it impacts teams that are closer. We have to plan more for the trip and commit to hotel reservations.
5. They couldn't man up and return any of my phone calls. I can understand that your school screwed you. At least be men and return my phone calls.
6. It seems like the right thing to do here because of the short notice would be to change around the schedule and share the burden between all the teams. Saying "F you" to 4 of the teams is not the better option.
The whole thing kind of took the wind out of my sails for the week. We were counting on Sean Ryan to be our tryout tourney for our A-team, and now we only have SoCal Warm Up before winter break, which were sending a split squad to.
I was so angry, and it was even more frustrating because we were totally at their mercy. There's nothing we can do about it, and it's not even likely that we'll play them this year because they're out of region.
Basically we had to bend over and take it.
Thanks Santa Cruz.
Tuesday morning I got a text from Big Jake saying that he was forwarding us the Santa Cruz email. I thought he was referring to the captain's packet or schedule or something, so I thought nothing of it. After all my classes, I went to check my email and find this gem:
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: CSULB Ultimate <>
Date: Tue, Nov 10, 2009 at 2:42 PM
Subject: Fwd: Sean Ryan field Trouble
To: Smaug Ultimate <>
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Slug Ultimate <>
Date: Tue, Nov 10, 2009 at 12:24 PM
Subject: Sean Ryan field Trouble
To: [a bunch of teams not including Smaug]
Hey All,
The UCSC men's Soccer team make the DIII playoff tournament and decided to host the first round at our lower fields. This means, that in spite of the Ultimate team having the field reserved for the last two months, as of last weekend we are suddunly very cramped for space. In order to solve this we are cutting the number of teams we are inviting to twelve for each division. Im sorry for the inconvience, the 12 teams invinted were chosen based on past attendance and proximity.
Thanks for all of your intrest hopefully we can avoid being screwed by our university in the coming years.
Here are the teams invited, in seed order:
Stanford
UCSC
California-Berkley
California-Santa Barbara
California-San Diego
California-Davis
Las Positas
Humbolt State
Cal Poly-SLO
Claremont
Chico State
Santa Clara
--
Cassidy, Russell, Max
Slug Captains 09-10
Keep in mind that this is Tuesday and we're supposed to leave Friday morning. I spent the next few hours seething and trying to find the phone numbers of any of the UCSC captains to call them and get some more info.
I found 2 of their numbers, and called about 10 times with no answer. I left voicemails for them to call me. I wrote a very angry email to them listing our complaints and asking them to call me.
Still, it took until late that night before Arbiter reached one of them and asked if they could adjust the schedule to accomodate for the teams that got booted. No, they couldn't do that.
My complaints:
1. Not telling a team that's planning to move 30 people that they're spot has been canceled 3 days before they leave.
2. They said the reasons for cancellation were proximity and continuity. We've been going since 2005 [edit - Kiosk thinks since 2000]. UCSD and Claremont are farther away.
3. Last year we finished in the top 8, beating squids and losing to Stanford 11-9. Crappy teams got in ahead of us.
4. It impacts teams that are further away more than it impacts teams that are closer. We have to plan more for the trip and commit to hotel reservations.
5. They couldn't man up and return any of my phone calls. I can understand that your school screwed you. At least be men and return my phone calls.
6. It seems like the right thing to do here because of the short notice would be to change around the schedule and share the burden between all the teams. Saying "F you" to 4 of the teams is not the better option.
The whole thing kind of took the wind out of my sails for the week. We were counting on Sean Ryan to be our tryout tourney for our A-team, and now we only have SoCal Warm Up before winter break, which were sending a split squad to.
I was so angry, and it was even more frustrating because we were totally at their mercy. There's nothing we can do about it, and it's not even likely that we'll play them this year because they're out of region.
Basically we had to bend over and take it.
Thanks Santa Cruz.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)