parinella's blog

2011 mid-year recap

2011-07-07T08:40:00.000-07:00

Last year, of course, I had surgery in March and spent the rest of the year recovering. I managed to play in six tournaments anyway, but at only somewhere between 50% and 85%. I was still feeling a little stiff at Nationals, and I was definitely not at full strength due to the seven months of inactivity pre- and post-surgery.

But by springtime, I was back to 100%, though of course 100% ain't what it used to be. I did some sessions with a personal trainer through an online coupon, then I discovered a cardio/core group workout in town and have been going once or twice a week since then. Add in the usual basketball/softball/tournaments/other workouts and I'm actually feeling pretty strong these days (again, see above 100% comment).

Because it was free, I applied for the World Championship of Beach Ultimate team, and got picked for the Masters team. When applying, I thought that I probably wouldn't go if selected, but once the selection actually happened, I got a bit stoked about it, so I'll be heading to Italy this August.

My frisbee season kicked off at another Italian beach tournament, Paganello, which is like Spring Break but with a four-day ultimate tournament thrown in. I played again with the team known this year as Los Rabbit. We had 17 players, up from about 11 two years ago when we lost in the finals as Los Ox. (The team won last year as Los Tiger but I couldn't make it.) This time I spent the day in Milan on my way there and walked around the city. I'm always impressed by the huge churches, in this case the Duomo, which when built was supposed to be able to accommodate all 40 000 of the city's inhabitants. As always, hanging out with friends and taking part in the event's festivities are a large part of the tournament. We had cocktail hour at the seaside hotel every night, including one night where the hotel had a wine and cheese party for its guests (we assumed at first that there was a private function, but then we found out it was for us, fresh off a late game). The big tournament party as always featured lots of people wearing weird costumes to fit the theme.

This was the tournament where I felt most like a role player. I belonged on the team, and I could have played more without the team getting worse as a result, but I could have also played less without the team getting worse. PT was fairly even in pool play (we never called subs), and I was moving and playing very well. Prior to the quarterfinals, for some still undetermined reason, I completely hit the wall and felt like I was running in very thick and deep sand. I couldn't even play without feeling like I couldn't make it through the point if we turned it. (I did get a layout block early but am pretty sure it was gift-wrapped for me by the thrower.) I took myself out of the game because it was so close and we had lots of options. I recovered a bit for the semis later that day but still felt pretty crappy. Even the next day after a relatively calm Sunday night, I still felt like crap, so in some ways, my performance in the finals should rank among my career highlights, even though I only played 4 or 5 points (about half of our O points), since I had to go all-out just to play (and I distinctly remember hearing myself breathing fast while running down the field). Anyway, got my first Paganello championship. Perhaps my biggest accomplishment, though, was in making my flight back despite the Italian transportation system doing its best to thwart me. Don't believe it when you hear "at least the trains run on time."

A few weeks later was the White Mountain Open. Rain forced us to move to a multi-purpose sports facility in Quechee. But never before had I seen a combination driving range/inclined polo field. We started off the day with only 7 players and added two late in the first round. We played well enough through 1.5 games before collapsing. I had to start calling timeouts to give us some extra rest. (It didn't help me that I had done a particularly hard cardio/core workout the day before.) We got a few extra people on Sunday and that made a big difference, and we stormed back to take 9th place. At 13-13 in the finals we threw it away in their end zone, but Alex made the defensive play of the day. He ran "full speed" into an opponent and his girlish yelp of pain/fear threw off the cutter enough that he stopped his cut to see what was going on and the disc (which was in the air) hit the ground. We punched it in, then got a break to win 15-13.

Next was the GM qualifier. One of the teams bailed and blamed the USAU for their not knowing what was going on, so we played only two games. Again I had a hard cardio/core the day before so was a bit fatigued, but it didn't matter. Our whole team played a bit sloppy. We won, though, and qualified for the GM championship, which is this weekend in Ohio.

A few weeks later was the Boston Invite. The Masters RC was able to work it out with the TD that we could have a pool of Masters teams on Saturday, thus counting as a Masters tournament that will require one fewer team at fall Masters Regionals in order to avoid the anti-wildcard. We had our best day of DoG Masters in quite some time, winning all four games, including 15-10 against the Canadian team GLUM (who weren't at full strength). We played a team of Dominicans + Brodie + a couple other Americans in the 9-24 pre-quarters, jumped out to an 8-4 lead, and limped home to a 14-12 win. This put us in the 9-16 quarters against Mephisto. We were already starting to lose players and so did open subbing. We started out well, going up a break, and even had a second break but it was called back on a pick that the defender would have had no chance on, we turned it, and they didn't look back. We were then scheduled for two consolation games, but we were down to fewer than 10 people who _could_ play and nearly 1 who actually _wanted_ to play, so we discussed with the other teams and arranged it so that we didn't have to play and the teams who wanted to play could play.

And as I mentioned, this leads us to today. We are seeded 2nd in the GM tournament, with a likely semifinal matchup against Surly. Top seed and defending champ Old And In The Way is most likely not going to be as strong as last year due to having to leave Colorado this year (and the rest of us will not have to acclimate). It's always a pleasant change to go from playing against young kids who are eager to lay out into you to playing against old guys who are even more afraid of hurting themselves.

Value of a top player

2011-03-25T11:23:00.000-07:00

I got a comment on the previous thread and posted a response but wanted to make a new post about it:
I would like to hear your statistically informed opinion on the following thought experiment: assume that there are thirteen players of roughly average (on the scale of all ultimate players) and equal ability (compared to each other). The fourteenth is a player of outstanding ability--someone widely thought to be one of the best players in the game.

They play a pickup game in which everyone is trying their best to win. What is the probability that the team with the elite player wins?

Hey, good question. I did some simulations about 15 years ago for a UPA Newsletter article. I will use the chart in there to make estimates.

(First, what is an "average" ultimate player? What is the average income between a homeless guy, Joe the Plumber, and Bill Gates? When you have such a range between high and low, "average" becomes a funny concept. I'll assume "average" is someone who would fit in nicely on a low-level regionals team.)

Two teams that score at equal rates will of course win an equal amount of the time (with a slight advantage to the team that receives in the first half, but we'll ignore that). A team that has a 5 percentage point advantage (e.g., 40% vs 35% of the time they touch the disc, they score) will win 65-75% of the time (with the bigger advantage when the percentages are at the lower end). A 10 point advantage goes from 76-87.

With the average groups, I'll assume that teams score about 30% of the time. Top Open teams playing against top Open teams in moderate wind might be around 50%. What effect does this awesome player have?

First, I think the effect on defense will be less than on offense. He will get some poach blocks but since there is no star on the other team he won't be able to thwart their offense. Let's assume he gets 3 additional blocks but otherwise has no effect on their offensive efficiency (such a player at the elite Open level would be possibly the best player in history). Previously they were 15/50 in a game to 15, change that to 15/53, that's a drop to only 28.3%. To lower their % to 25%, he'd need to get 10 blocks a game.

Let's pause for a minute and consider what a superstar team would do against this team. I'd guess 15-1 or 15-2 is a fairly typical score for a game like this, though there is a question of whether they are trying their best to win, if for no other reason than they have 4 games that day (but so does the other team, and I'll guess they aren't in as good shape so would be further from peak efficiency). If they had 5 turnovers, that'd only be 75%. So, adding 7 elite players to an average team would take you from 30% up to 75%. I suspect that most of the benefits come from the first one or two, and almost nothing from 5-7. (Dennis suggested 20 years ago that the highest marginal value is provided by the second player, because that gives the first player someone to throw to). So, to get those 45 percentage points, I'll say it's 14, 14, 9, 4, 2, 1, 1 for each added player.

That puts the O efficiency at 44%, D efficiency at 28%. That means the O will score 15/34 times instead of 15/50. The other team will score 28.3% of 33 times or 9.3 goals. Set the point spread at 5.5.

Using a Pythagorean exponent of somewhere between 4 and 6, which my earlier research has suggested, that gives an expected winning percentage of 87-95%. Interpolating my table would give an estimate of about 93%.

Also, IIRC, a 40 point difference in RRI translated to a 1 point difference in expected score.

Dorkapalooza, baby, Dorkapalooza!

2011-03-08T18:24:00.000-08:00

I attended the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference (SSAC) last week. I really wanted to go last year but wasn't sure when my surgery was going to be (it's a year ago tomorrow), and by the time I tried to sign up, it was sold out. This year I got in early.

For those of you who have been under a rock these last five years, the SSAC, termed "Dorkapalooza" by ESPN's Bill Simmons, brings together bigwigs from across professional sports and focuses on what the data can and cannot tell you. Somewhat surprisingly, it seems that much of the focus is turning toward the squishier side of things. One talk suggested that they could predict achievement and likelihood of arrest for NFL players based solely on what they said during pre-draft interviews. (I missed most of this one, but they had one dimension that was Distrust and two that dealt with how players handled nuance.)

The biggest problem was in trying to figure out what to attend. Except for the opening and closing panels, there were always five sessions going on at once. (Some or all of these will eventually appear on the web site; all were filmed.) The big ones were all panels with a moderator and four speakers. My favorite panel was the Referee Analytics hosted by the Sports Guy and featuring noted bad-ref-hater and Dallas Mavericks' owner Mark Cuban, longtime NFL ref Mike Carey, controversial author Jon Werstheim (who claims that most of home field advantage is due to referee bias), and sabermetrician Phil Birnbaum (who has rebutted (and confirmed) many of Werstheim and co-author's claims on his blog). Cuban muzzled himself a bit for fear of being fined yet again by the NBA (this was a frequent source of joking during the panel) but still managed to let his opinions be known. One of his pet peeves is that he feels (and Werstheim's book "Scorecasting" asserts as well) that NBA games are not called consistently over the course of the game. Carey couldn't stress strongly enough that in the NFL, a foul is a foul is a foul (though he did differentiate between grasping a jersey at the point of attack and doing so away from the play). Another interesting point brought up was whether refs profiled based on past history and whether it's more fair to do so or not.

The opening session was moderated by Malcolm Gladwell, author of the book "Outliers" which focused on talent and how people become experts. His book cited the "10 000 hour rule", that a person (who is talented above some threshold level) still has to do focused practice for 10 000 hours to truly become an expert. I calculated that I have only about 6000 or so hours of ultimate (counting games as 1 hour and practices as 2 hours, figuring that much of the time I'm at the field is down time). So does this mean that there are no experts at ultimate or other amateur sports? I've often wondered (not that it's even a meaningful question) how the best ultimate players rate compared to other sports, each within their sport. Obviously ultimate players aren't as good at ultimate as Tiger Woods is at golf, but where would they fall? My gut feel now is that it's somewhere around scratch golfers or low single-digit handicap (pros are 5-10 better than scratch), which is to say pretty damn good, but with inconsistencies and weaknesses and probably no aspect of their game truly world-class. (There are something like 25 million golfers in the US.)

Anyway, good discussion at this panel, which included Houston Rockets GM Daryl Morey (one of the founders of the conference), NYG DE Justin Tuck, former NBA coach and current announcer Jeff Van Gundy, and training scientist/CEO Mark Verstegen. It was pointed out that talent can be a curse if the talent possessor relies too much on the talent during their development and doesn't hone the other skills that will be necessary when he gets to a high enough level. (In some cases, like with Tracy McGrady, talent alone might be enough to be a perennial All-Star but still be considered an underachiever, and that if he had had "a desire to practice", he could have been one of the best ever.) I really liked a quote from Van Gundy: "Soft, stupid, or selfish. You can be ONE of these, but not TWO." The most amazing statement I heard was that the panel thought that intelligence was more necessary for defense than for offense, the reason being that stupid players will make mistakes that are easily exploited and if this is on defense, the whole D will fall apart. This contrasts with my image of ultimate, where the guys who can run but don't know the game or aren't skilled get put on D, while the O players have to recognize patterns and feel the flow of the game and identify the open field space. I felt that intelligence is more useful on offense to do these things and to be able to recognize those defensive mistakes as soon as they happen and punish them. Perhaps this again speaks to the immaturity of ultimate, that "punishing mistakes" is not a given for elite players.

There were a couple underlying themes throughout. One is that the pro teams aren't especially interested in ranking the players from top to bottom with a single metric but are more interested in the marginal production they will have on their team in a particular role. Mike Zarren of the Celtics maintained that the Kendrick Perkins trade actually made them more likely to win this year and was not a trade for future considerations (and that they felt really bad trading him since they all liked him so much, but hey, it's a business). Another theme was that you need not only play-by-play data but inside information (blocking schemes, pass coverage responsibilities) to make sense of what happens on a lot of plays, and that pro teams are hoarding this information (except for baseball, which is doing amazing things with Pitch F/X, Hit F/X and Field F/X). A final theme, mentioned above, is that teams are trying to get analytics on what might be better thought of as psychology. How can a team decide whether Player A or Player B is more likely to develop based on their personalities? They are trying to quantify this to improve their drafts and their development systems. This was a big topic in the opening panel. I felt that the panel seemed to place too much of the blame on the players when they fail to develop to their full potential and not enough on the coaches or on the specific player/coach/organization interaction. I'm not sure how they would measure this, but how much of an organization's success at "developing talent" is due to making smart personnel picks and how much is due to having a good organization? What if JaMarcus Russell had been picked by the Patriots instead of the Raiders?

One final theme is that all the panelists were gracious except for Aaron Schatz of Football Outsiders, who seemed irritated that all these idiots were preventing him from being known as the smartest man in football and that all these little people at the conference would deign to bother him. I talked to Mike Carey for several minutes one-on-one at the reception and discussed my own observing experiences and asked him how they deal with certain tough issues like profiling. (He said that they call everyone equally but did admit, I think, to focusing more on certain matchups where fouls were more likely to occur.) I chatted for several minutes with two of the golf panelists. (Mark Broadie, who developed the "strokes gained" formula, told me that all handicaps actually have about the same first putt distance on average but the pros will be hitting it to that distance with their five irons while the hackers are doing it with their chip shots.) I chatted for a couple minutes with basketball stat guru Dean Oliver about ultimate (he is friends with some West Coast ultimate players). I made acquaintance with one of the MIT Sloan students whose team won the AECOM business case contest and he was friendly.

Another favorite topic was on the "optical tracking" in the NBA. They put three cameras per half-court in a few arenas and captured 25 frames per second and so were able to track where everyone was all the time. Some interesting stats they came up:
A tip-in attempt is 22 percentage points lower in shooting average than a putback.
Every 1.5' in extra shot distance costs 1 percentage point.
A contested shot is 12 percentage points lower than an uncontested one from the same distance.
Defenders space themselves from the shooters close to optimally, so a shooter who steps back costs himself as much by having a longer shot as he gains by being more open.

I really enjoyed listening to Mark Cuban, who seemed to be on every panel. As befits a self-made billionnaire, he seemed quite sharp and tech-savvy and any fan should love to have him as his team's owner (though the Mavs do not use statistical process control on their metrics, he said). I do have to admit that I don't like the "game experience" that Cuban and other places offer these days, with the nonstop lights and loud noises that aren't part of the game-viewing experience. He seems to feel that it's about way more than just the game, that he needs to offer entertainment (in addition to a quality team playing basketball) in order to draw in fans and keep them. If you want to talk about the game, you can do it afterwards.

I was never quite sure from what perspective I was supposed to be listening during the conference, whether as an individual ultimate player, as an ultimate team leader, as a regular sports fan, as a wannabe sports stats nerd, or as an engineering metrics and stats guy. One of the presentations on some analytics software would have needed to have been modified only slightly to be presented at work, and they seemed even to have borrowed their "Analytics Maturity Model" from the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI), which specifies best business practices for engineering organizations and with which I deal with frequently (we're undergoing a CMMI appraisal right now, in fact). I do occasional little studies with baseball or basketball stats (most recent one was to examine whether NBA players and coaches target round scoring numbers like 40 or 50 points (they do; there are about 50% more 50-52 point games than would be expected based on the number of all other high scoring games) but nothing too rigorous or involving too much database diving, though I keep telling myself I'll start one day (and could even justify the time as professional training).

All in all, it was a fun and worthwhile use of $275 and a vacation day. I brought home some insights, possibly some tips for work, and a heightened interest in sports. I did not bring home any ideas on the ultimate ultimate stat, and indeed have come to the conclusion that this stat is impossible to obtain due to sample size and context issues, but there is still hope for evaluating some strategic questions.

Hall of Fame

2011-01-14T10:19:00.001-08:00

This will be short.

1. Congratulations to all the inductees, but especially to old teammate Jeremy Seeger. Seeger was phenomenal in so many ways. He was the best I saw at reading the disc, was a great disc-catcher, had superb throwing form, and was versatile enough to play anywhere on the field, in addition to the normal great qualities you'd expect in a Hall of Famer.

2. Dobyns should be in the Hall already. The few teammates of mine that have offered an opinion to me agree. I understand why there is debate and agree that negative spirit/sportsmanship/cheating/whatever could be enough to push someone below the qualifying line, but my opinion is that his impact was so great that any reasonable evaluation of his negatives would be outweighed.

Two links

2010-12-01T07:12:00.000-08:00

What motivates athletes . Article is about professional athletes, but it applies to ultimate players, too.

Cheating. I read it all, but still can't figure out whether he is advocating or confessing
or mocking or making atonement. I'm not nearly as offended as I thought I would be when I saw the title "How to Cheat to Win". (Of course, it's much better to cheat to win instead of cheating to lose by two.) Very interesting stuff, some of which could have come from even the most honest player who has been around.

Nationals 2010

2010-11-02T14:27:00.000-07:00

"'If I wasn't done before, I'm done now.' ... I think there's a good chance I've played my last competitive ultimate game, and I can live with that, but I'll be really disappointed if I can't golf or play softball." Me, November 6, 2009.

Ok, I guess that wasn't accurate. Another year, another Nationals.

Physical report: Hard to estimate exactly, but I felt like I was at 80-90%. I haven't yet regained explosiveness on a first step. I didn't feel slow when sprinting but I didn't feel like I was lighting it up, either. In fact, I'm not ever sure I reached "top speed" on the weekend. I felt like there was a chance that any muscle in my legs might seize up at any moment, but never did during the day, only at night (and frequently during the night). At times I felt weak, at other times out of shape, but I made it, playing pretty much all the O points again, though with a less primary role. This was definitely the strongest I've felt all year. My neck muscles are sore now, and though I'm not aware of doing it, I'm told I still look pretty stiff doing certain things out there.

Wife and son stayed home this year. Just me and 1500 of my closest friends.

Tournament was fine. We could have done a little better, could have crumbled and done worse also. Our most important pool play game turned out to be our first one against Real Huck. It was hot, humid, and windless. We got one break early in the first half, had another break called back on something dubious or possibly just unrelated, and that was it. The O held serve the entire first half but got broke coming out of the half, again a little later, and once more at 14-13. This game turned out to be for 2nd place and the much easier crossover in the quarters.

Next up was Boneyard. The D's inadequacies continued, aided by the continuing lack of wind. Boneyard's hucks didn't seem to come on particularly good cuts, but due to good matchups or throws or something, they caught them anyway. O had one bad streak in the middle of the first half but otherwise played well. 15-9. I wasn't all that worried, as though we were 0-2, it was "a good 0-2", as I told others. There was still a lot of familiarization and improvement left to do.

Final game was against Rumble. I can't remember any specifics of the game, just that it was clear before the end that we would win. Some threatened to retire on the spot if we lost or if the D didn't play better. Though it was tempting, it was more important to do well, and we got that first W.

Friday first game was against #1 seed Beyondors, though that seed wasn't justified since they left behind most of the guys who were there last year. This game was tight. We got an upwind break to take half 8-7, were close to about 10-9, then ran off a few to win 15-10 and clinch a realistic chance to win in the quarters, as this guaranteed that we wouldn't match up with Surly.

Second game was uneventful. They were winless, and we were locked into 3rd place. Both of the other games in our pool mattered, with Boneyard taking out Real Huck for 1st, and Beyondors outlasting Rumble to make quarters.

Onto the quarters then. We once again were paired against Glum. Though they had beaten us four in a row dating back to 2009 Regionals, each of those games was winnable, and we hadn't faced them in a game as important as this, so I thought we had a better than might be expected chance. We started off ok, though our second goal was a crazy quadruple helix hammer from Karlinksy to me. The D had several opportunities for a break but couldn't convert, and the O hit a rough streak that proved to be the difference. The game was a little chippy, but already the details escape me. I don't attribute this failing memory to age or having been there a thousand times but instead to it being Masters and me just not caring as much.

The beer tent was already closed by the time we made it over there, so we just headed back to Siesta Key. We wanted to catch the beach, but felt obligated to pull into Mr. Big's. I had made the mistake on Wednesday of stopping there "just to see who was there" on my way back from the captains meeting, and due to a couple carbombs and a couple Guinni, I didn't make it to the grocery store, and as a result, we ate McDonald's every day for breakfast. This night, there was the usual crowd but they were in the parking lot. We said hi, walked in, and kept on walking out the side door and sneaked into the car. They eventually saw us and I almost had to run one of them over to avoid them, and off we went to the beach.

There, tragedy struck once more. While we were swimming, Alex's hat disappeared. I assumed that he had merely left it in the car or back in the room, because that is how he rolls, but he kept insisting that he had had it. Eventually he was proven correct. Thus followed a sleepless night worrying, but we learned that his hat was safe and sound and indeed became so popular that it decided to start a Facebook page. Please friend it.

To add insult to injury, someone pranked our room by getting in and locking the bedroom doors (they were the kind with the push-lock). We couldn't pick the lock, and ended up sleeping on the pullout couch in the living room and on the cushions from the couches. I wouldn't have slept well anyway, as I was waking every half hour or so to cramp.

Consolation games on Saturday. This was the first time since 1991 that my team was eliminated with a full day of games yet to play. (Lost in quarters in Open a couple times but those were first game Saturday; Open semis losses don't count either since there is only one game on Sunday; would have to be pre-quarters loss in Open (or worse) or quarters loss in Masters (or worse).) We played. We tried to get the second game for 7th/8th place played to 11 instead of 15, but our opponents insisted on 15, then started pulling our lame and/or bad travel calls in the second half. It was irritating enough to make me fired up and I got loose finally after previously trying merely hard enough to avoid getting hurt.

On Sunday, I actively watched the Open finals for the first time in years. I'd been "consulting" with Ironside this year, attending about a dozen practices, mostly just offering observations to their coaches and trying to find something worthwhile to say occasionally. It turned out to be a lot harder than I would have thought, to come up with something actionable. If I had been paid, I would have felt like I was ripping them off. But I did feel somewhat invested in the team, and so in the finals, every looked-off open throw or broken-off cut or blown deep coverage really hit hard. Revolver played a great game, Ironside didn't. It will be a good learning experience for the team, remembering what it was like to know that it was theirs but they just didn't take it. Historically, these are the exact circumstances in Boston (A team just misses, B team doesn't make Nationals after maintaining its distance from the A team for a few years) that lead to a major shakeup, but I suspect that this won't be the case this time.

I don't know what's next. I was glad to be able to play again, and occasionally play well. As I said several times, I am 45, and I did just come off major surgery seven months prior. Unlike previous years, I don't have strong feelings either way about whether to keep playing, or to just get the band back together one more time for Grand Masters, or see if there is enough interest in the 2000-2006 DoG to get something going. It's all good. As the great poet Bill Belichick says, "It is what it is."

Back on the horse

2010-07-17T16:29:00.000-07:00

Last weekend saw my return to ultimate with the Grand Masters Nationals in Boulder. As you know, I had some tingling in my arms on occasion dating back to last year's GM tournament, then there was that little temporary paralysis thing after regular Nationals, and finally a four-level cervical laminoplasty to decompress the spinal cord on March 9. I had eased into things in the four months after surgery, going to Disney World, doing a tiny bit of exercise, a couple games of softball, a round of golf, snorkeling/diving, and a bunch of soccer in the yard with the boy, which can actually be a bit taxing. The most I ran was a set of about 10 20-30 yard striders, just enough to get to a full stride but nowhere near a full sprint.

So I went into the tournament unsure exactly what I could do. I promised my doctor's office that I wouldn't dive (not that I'm ever really flinging my body around). I ended up hitting the ground maybe three times, once catching a pass and twice after the pass aided by my defenders, but never too hard.

On Saturday, I definitely eased into things, playing maybe 1/4 to 1/3 of the points (we had something like 18-20). Even more than usual, D was very hard. I never could sprint or accelerate very hard. At times it felt like I was running in water because my legs were so weak. I lost between 5 and 10 pounds over the last six months as my muscle mass pretty much disappeared. I saw a picture of myself from behind and was amazed by how slight I appeared. Offense wasn't nearly as bad, as I could pick when I wanted to run, and I figured out that I really didn't need to sprint so hard as often as I usually do. I even ran deep a few times.

We cruised through Saturday. The winds really picked up in our last game, and I had a couple throws that showed a lack of practice. I hadn't thrown very much this year either; I hurt my arm or shoulder throwing the softball a couple weeks prior and it had hurt to throw a forehand so I took it easy. This weekend, too, I took it easy, staying away from pulling and overheads, which figured to put a little too much stress on the neck/shoulders.

I really didn't even feel very tired after Saturday. When I woke on Sunday, my quads were sore, but not fatigued. The lack of real sprints makes it a lot easier on the body (I can see Alex and Dennis nodding as they read this, having been aware of this their entire careers).

Sunday was again hot. I noticed that today in Boulder it hit 103, close to an all-time high (though it appears that the records might only date back to 1990). Quarters were against Atlanta's Ball & Chain. Our O clicked, scoring nine times without a turnover, and we got enough breaks to win 15-8. We did notice that there D was putting more pressure on us in the second half. I was back to full-time O duty, playing all nine points as a receiver, though much less often as a primary in the play.

Semis were against the local Old and in the Way. Alex underthrew me deep on the first O point, thus removing the pressure of knowing we hadn't had a turnover all day. We still scored, then got a break a couple points later. We gave the break back at about 5-5, but then got it back on a misread and took half, 8-7, receiving to start the second half. OAITW's D was definitely better, forcing us to take more passes than in any other game, though we still managed to score on 6 of 7 points. I don't remember the specifics of the rest of the game, but we gave a break back at maybe 11-10, then two in a row at 12-12 before getting one last goal to make it 14-13. They then had an overthrow on the last point, but one of their other receivers was alert enough to track it down, and a couple passes later, we were eliminated. Overall, 2 breaks for in 13 chances, 4 breaks against in 15 chances.

The team played well enough on the weekend, though it's always disappointing to lose, especially when leading by 2 in the second half.

I was able to contribute a lot more than I expected to. Other than the wind game, my throws were sharper than I thought they'd be, and I was able to get open a lot more than I thought I would, though I found that certain cuts that relied on a good first step didn't work. It didn't feel like other first tournaments of the year, though, since I tend to feel exhausted and winded and sore in those, and in this one I was just weaker, as if I had aged five or ten years suddenly.

Well, it's good to be back and out there.

Field Vision

2010-05-28T07:49:00.000-07:00

I have a new column on Field Vision up at the Huddle.

Here is the opening paragraph as a teaser:
How do we make decisions? In many real-life examples we create a list of choices and features, maybe take some data, rate how each option stacks up in each feature, and coolly select the optimum choice. In ultimate you don't have the time to go through this whole process. You have to rely on your trained inner self to figure out what to do based on internalized guidelines.

Comments? This was based on a presentation I gave at the Ultimate Coaches and Players Conference in 2007.

Now on the Huddle

2010-04-12T05:41:00.001-07:00

I will be among the many authors on The Huddle this year.

My first piece is titled "Chain: The New DoG".

Comments about this or the other articles welcome here.

post-post surgery

2010-04-02T08:01:00.000-07:00

It's now been 24 days since surgery, and I return to work on Tuesday. I plan to go back full-time, but I will have to see whether I will be able to work from home occasionally or if I would want to scale back temporarily to a 32 hour week.

I am feeling remarkably well. I've been taking about half of the allotment of pills (Oxycodone and Diazepam), one of each twice a day, but those are probably not necessary at this point, just a little help. We had a few friends over last weekend so I stopped taking them 8 hours prior so I could have a few beers without worrying too much about side effects. When I picked up my prescription, I had to ask the pharmacist several times and in several different ways about the interactions between alcohol and those drugs. His first answer was "don't", but as many of you have probably experienced with injuries and doctors, I eventually said something to the effect of "I am planning to do a stupid thing. What can I do to minimize the effect of this stupidity?"

My neck is still a little stiff and sore. It hurts a little to yawn, as it seems to stretch the incision. I was having a little difficulty swallowing for a few weeks, partly because I don't chew my food enough, but that seems to have finally passed. I had the staples removed after two weeks. It was a little painful to have them pulled out (see 15 second video at bottom). The cut seems to be doing ok. Sleeping hasn't really been much of a problem. I am aware of waking up once or twice a night to shift positions, and I frequently have weird dreams, but overall it's about the same. I've been more tired than usual, and was taking 2- or 3-hour naps for the first two weeks on most days. The last few days, I've gotten up at my normal time and have struggled to get out of bed. I think as long as I go to bed early these next few weeks, I should be able to manage a work schedule.

The weirdest part of the recovery is what passes for exercise now. If I walk faster than about 2 mph, my neck (both muscles and what feels like the spine) gets sore. Just this week I started riding the stationary bike in order to get my heart rate from about 75 bpm to about 100 bpm. The other day, I was playing Mario Kart Wii while riding the bike, and noticed that as I was trying to drive faster in the game, I was pedaling the bike faster, hard enough that I actually broke a sweat. I don't think my body is ready for that yet, though, so will need to back off. There is no exact timetable, but I'll be able to do more stuff gradually. I don't know yet when I will be able to run. There is a chance that I would be able to play at the GM event in July, assuming we are going to be able to put together a team, but wouldn't be able to contribute more than a token amount.

In general, life has been a lot slower these last few weeks. I've been home by myself for most of the past week and a half and haven't felt the need to rush around very much. Usually I am incredibly micro-efficient, but now am willing to take four trips to the car to carry in groceries where normally I would take them all in at once. I don't know if this lingering will carry over once I return to normal life, though. I've been trying to be "productive" in my down time, not necessarily getting anything done, but trying to avoid useless surfing or excessive game playing.

All things considered, though I would rather have skipped this whole thing, I've been pretty lucky with it.

A Pound of Advice

2010-03-24T19:50:00.000-07:00

I was looking at some of the Huddle stuff and remembered that one of the best pieces of advice I ever published came when I queried my teammates in 1998 or so on the little things that made them better. Some of the answers are dated or pithy, but I think most can still apply. Enjoy.

Question 1: What single event or realization was most important to your development as a player?

Lenny Engel, aka The Guy With the Horns, #58

My development as a player on a team bound for a National Championship was a realization of the importance of knowing the strengths and weaknesses of the players around me. The team earlier had broken into fairly distinct groups of offensive and defensive players and I found myself on the defensive squad. My strengths were clear to me and I assumed my teammates but it was not until I began to understand the strengths of my teammates on the defense that I began to make greater strides in my own game. I believe the rest of the defensive unit similarly began to improve because collectively our understanding of each other increased. This greater understanding of our individual games identified the team's gaps created by our weaknesses. Once we began to fill these gaps we began to have greater success. It was at that point that new defenses became easier to assimilate into our repertoire and our ability to change defenses in mid-point improved. This was more than mere experience. I believe there was a conscious effort on the team's part to learn about each other's game. It was more than identifying someone fast to cover a handler or be a point in the zone, or someone tall to play deep. Understanding the nuances of each other's physical and mental skills played a large part in our ability to create and then implement new defenses. Knowing each other as well as we did enabled easier communication and movement. We could identify a team's weakness earlier and focus on it by creating opportunities for the person having the best ability to expose the vulnerability. Our team of seven individuals was capable of playing a very complete "team" game. Our own weaknesses remained hidden because each of us complimented another's strengths and covered a weakness. At our best, in the 1995 and 1997 Nationals, we forced teams to play to our strengths while rarely exposing our weaknesses. We were able to play the dozen or so different defensive schemes at almost any point in a game. Our understanding of each other made much of the defense's success possible and improved my game and utility on the field.

Steve Mooney, aka Moons, #00

Quitting soccer and taking up Ultimate. Hell, in soccer is filled with short fast guys who don't use their hands.

Michael Cooper, aka Coop, #28

I've often reflected upon what it is that has made me a good ultimate player. Ironically, I was initially drawn to ultimate for its non- competitive aspects. I had never considered myself particularly athletic, despite an enthusiasm for sports or rather activity in general, but have come to admit that I do in fact have abilities that are well suited to playing disc. One of these is understanding the gestalt of the game, which allows me to anticipate the flow both on offense and defense and react accordingly. Of course, being six feet tall, and loving to run and jump, helps too! As for things that have made me a better player over the years, I'd say they are a single- minded commitment to training (some say this has resulted in the rash of injuries I’ve endured over the past several seasons, but I don't fully agree), a willingness to learn from others and fit into a team concept, and a desire to push the limits of my body and mind (the rush from which for me is one of the prime reasons I continue to play). In terms of rising to the elite level, I'd say, "Don't do it too soon". The experience I've gained on teams other than DoG, in situations where the onus is to make things happen, has been invaluable. One of the important realizations I made after making the transition to the top level was that it is not possible to be totally dominant--everyone is skilled. When covering someone, I attempt to take away their first choice, and maybe their second choice, and let them beat me with their third option if they can. The other important thing I've found is that it _is_ possible to maintain one's integrity at the top, and still play to win.

Bob Lobel, #8

It took me some time to make the realization that there is really very little difference between players who are at the top level of the game and those at the next level. As a younger player looking up, the difference seems huge and insurmountable. I remember looking up at Jay Seeger, Kenny Dobyns, Steve Mooney, Dennis Warsen, (as well as many others playing at the elite level) and thinking, "what does it take to get there?" and "how could I possibly compete at that level?" As I came along and improved, the athletic differences became more subtle, and my confidence in my abilities allowed me to make the transition to the next level. So when I look back at where I was and how I evolved as an ultimate player, I now realize that the athletic differences between the elite players and those at the next level are very few. The important factor in making the transition, therefore, is developing confidence in your abilities, and realizing that your athletic abilities are comparable to those of players you look up to. Oh yeah, you need to train hard, too.

Jordan Haskell, #70

When Earth Atomizer (the most overachieving team in ultimate history) started taking stats. Shortly after we started taking stats, people started looking at, or even just remembering, their own turnovers and actually analyzed them. Most people, after looking at their turnovers, were of the mindset of "what the heck was I thinking when I threw that!!". The team attempted to eliminate or minimize those type of turnovers and we were much better for it. Personally that went a long way in helping my game as well. The game is not hard, just complete passes and leave the turnovers for other people.

Watching Ricky Pretzfedler play handler. He was always calm, cool, and collected with the disc. Never concerned about the D. I wanted to be more like that.

Getting Cut by Earth Atomizer: I was a fat load but thought I could play. I quickly realized, after getting cut, that I was fat and slow. I lost 30 pounds that winter and came out "Gangbusters" in the spring. I was a new man with new inspiration. The rest is history. From being cut by Earth to......

Billy Rodriguez, #19.

No single event was a watershed for me. Rather, the opportunity and willingness to play lots of ultimate, anytime, anywhere, made me a better player. Although the chance to watch and learn from some of the greatest players in the game -- Kenny Dobyns, Pat King, Dave Blau, Steve Mooney, Jeremy Seeger -- has been a huge positive factor, it was the four years of playing on mediocre teams at small tournaments in places like Denton, TX, Hunstville, AB, New London, CT, that had the biggest impact on me. I think most of the best players in the game at some early point in their careers just played and played and played.

Alex deFrondeville, aka The Count, #1

The single most important event in my frisbee career was probably getting cut from Z (the Boston team in 1988). I have engaged in some fruitful speculation to wonder what might have become of my Ultimate career had I made that team, and, let me tell you, it's not pretty. Instead, I made Earth Atomizer that spring, went to Nationals twice with them, and then was part of the Earth-Big Brother merger, then DoG, and the rest, of course, is history.

Jeff Brown, aka Dick, #34

My first layout block (from behind/reach around, I still remember it vividly). It was during a Philly summer league game. I had never played organized ultimate and never laid-out. I guess it was a pretty good block because the team went crazy. I figured I should keep doing stuff like that...

Jim Parinella, #88

Figuring out that I could throw it away just as well as anyone else. When I was younger, I used to play in fear of making a mistake, so I wouldn’t get involved in the offensive flow as much as I could have. I looked at players on good teams and the good players on my team and was in awe of them, often without good justification. Eventually, I learned to have a healthy disrespect for them and a healthy respect for my own game, and it was suddenly a lot easier to play. One particular moment that stands out was being with MGUS for the first Cuervo series. MGUS had some good players, but no one that I was in awe of, and I thought we were going to get crushed when it counted. But we beat Windy City and New York pretty handily to qualify for the finale, and should have made the finals against the best teams in the country. Then I realized that it wasn’t so tough after all, if only I got more involved.

Eric Zaslow, aka Zaz, #6

My rise to DoG's ranks and the continuation of my career have been slow and steady (much like my play). When I think back on more than twenty years in the game -- longer than anyone else on DoG -- I see a continual growth. There have been no epiphanies, just a commitment to improving. Perhaps the most formative moments came in 1984 when Marc Cote and I used to go out to the high school football field and throw for distance for 45 minutes each day, between math and physics. Important there, too, was that Marc could always throw farther than I. That made me want to get better.

Zaslow’s Alter Ego, aka ZAE, also #6 I entered college with a nickname far cooler than my actual self. Without this moniker, I never would have gained acceptance at one of the most socially competitive schools (Dartmouth), and would have completed my school days as an academic and athletic outcast.

Question 2: What is it that you do best that others could improve if they knew how?

Zaslow

My strength is my backhand, particularly the pull. When I pull poorly, I know why -- usually a lack of focus, which keeps me from maintaining good form. Knowing when you haven't gotten it right is the essence of learning, or so Socrates would say. Keep the inside-out slant!

ZAE

One must learn how to mask one's mediocrity.

Rodriguez

I think there are three things I do well on the field. First, defensive positioning is SO important to good defense. If you use your feet and your head to get to the right place relative to the offensive player, you've done 90% of your job as a defender. Blocks are great, but when a thrower looks off a pretty good cut because the defender is in the right place to make the throw look a little iffy, that wins games. Second, I time my cuts pretty well. Many players don't understand that you need to be open both at the right place AND at the right time. It's what NFL people mean when they talk about receivers who run crisp routes. A lot of people have the speed, agility and quickness to get away from someone; but you’re not truly "open" unless you do it at the right time. Finally, I think I stay focused well. I think what separate good players and great players is not skill, but focus. The talent on most of the top teams is fairly equal. But the team with the most players who are willing to dig in and push themselves for an entire cut, an entire point, an entire game... that's the team that will bring home a championship.

Brown

Take control of the defensive situation. Force the offense to do what you want them to do instead of reacting to them. And above all, never lay back or lose focus on the field, always stay energetic and always be on your toes.

de Frondeville

Lead the cutter away from the defender. When someone is cutting somewhere, throw
the disc so that the cutter will get there first. For instance, if someone is
cutting straight at you, typically their defender will be behind them, but on one
side. Lead your man slightly to the other side when you throw it, so the defender
has to go around your player to make the block. I'll often flare my cutters even
when they're running straight at me. This also applies to a side-to-side cut. Lead
your cutter with a little bit of float, so that he has to run to the disc. Don't
alway try and throw the disc to hit him on the money, because you lose a little
margin.

Ted Munter, #17

Watch the game with a purpose. Most players yell for their teammates or just casually observe until they get in again. But every time you're out is an opportunity to watch the players you are likely to cover or who is likely to cover you. I try to look at one or two specific things. Where do they like to throw from and what kind of jukes do they make? This might not get blocks for you, but you can try to take the player out of his or her comfort zone. More importantly, I think, it helps you focus both on the sideline and when you are in the game.

Mooney

Listening. Sure, we all fill a room with drivel. But if you listen to input, then you have something to say in the next huddle.

Question 3

What do you know now that you wished you knew five years sooner?

Zaslow

What I know now, that I wish I knew ten years ago, is that club ultimate is fun. Back in college in the late eighties, I had a real distaste for the club scene. I witnessed a lot of foul play, and this kept me from joining a club for several years. I think I would have gotten better sooner -- at a younger age -- had I been exposed to a more enjoyable club scene. I thank Dave Meyers for encouraging me to get out there and mix it up with the boys of the Northeast. Another thing I have learned through playing with such talented teammates is that each of them has analyzed every tiny detail of the game. Good play comes from the best application of basic principles (throw complete passes; get the disk; try to prevent your man/woman from getting the disk) to a myriad of situations. If you know that everyone on your team is thinking this way, then you will know that when you come off your man on a gambit, they'll get your back! Or, if you pass up the glory play, they will notice, and appreciate, your poise.

ZAE

Bill's trysts; that Deborah Norville would wind up on "Inside Edition"; two words: Mach III; the miracle that is Parker Posey; how big a role confidence plays in sports, arts, politics, society; the fate of talk show also-rans Tempestt Bledsoe, Keenan Ivory Wayans, Magic Johnson, Carney Wilson, Chevy Chase, Mark Walberg, Gordon Elliot...; and what one night in Brentwood would do for mass media, race relations, and public jurisprudence in America.

Rodriguez

The thing I wish I knew years ago was how great the weight room is for you. Lift, lift, lift. Lift some more.

Brown

The game is mostly mental and most players don't sprint. Sprinting is the key to O and D.

Munter

I wish I had known to move to Boston five years earlier. And I didn't know until recently how important it is that a teams top players lead by example. Sounds obvious, I know, but when I was one of the top players on my former team, I wasn't always in shape, or didn't always believe in my teammates. Playing on DoG as a bench/role player, I see how central it is that our best players are not only the most skilled, best athletes, they also want it the most and prepare--mentally and physically--as hard as they can. I often hear captains of teams talk about needing to find a role for their players. But the best player on your team has a role too. You can be the kind of star who makes the team better--think Michael Jordan, Larry Bird, Jerry Rice--or who, despite all your skill and athleticism brings the team down.

Mooney

That it's not about winning... it's about having Billy Rodriguez on your team.

Haskell

Just how hard it is to stay at the top. How everyone will come after you when your on top. Just how much fun it is to beat those teams and how good it feels to win. That "championships" are a fleeting thing. When I'm seventy I gonna wish I had more.

Question 4

What is the most important thing you would tell a player hoping to make the jump to the elite team level?

Chris Corcoran, aka Cork, #25

The best advice that I would give an up-and-coming Ultimate player would be to focus more on the mental aspects of the game. When you're on offense, think about where the other 13 players on the field are. Realize where the good cuts are and when it is your turn to cut. When you are on defense, also think about where the other 13 players are. If you can't shut down a player's every cut, decide where the most dangerous cuts are, and shut those down.

de Frondeville

It's better to be noticed than to blend into the background.

Zaslow

Right now, kids graduating college are much more in-the-know about disc, about strategies, and about conditioning than I ever was (am?). There are many sophisticated and talented prospects. But beyond the basics (and the basics get expanded each year), a player must have an internal fire and personal desire. Only you know the true strength of your conviction. For me, I was never in doubt about wanting to play. I don't feel like I'm forsaking the rest of my life when I put in the hours at the track and stadium (of course, without a rest-of-my-life, this statement has little weight!). As far as strategy for play is concerned: COMMUNICATE! Use the resources around you! Your teammates can help you learn, and you can help them. This holds for strategy sessions and for on-field play as well. We all know to call the disk up when it's thrown. Also call out switches; poaches; what the opposing defense is, if you've figured it out; what your defense is if people are confused; who is breaking long; who should be. If you don't know what to do, ask! When everyone knows what's up, everyone can respond to it. Also, negative information needs to be communicated, preferably in a positive way.

ZAE

``Pringles, pizza, and plenty of rest.'' That way, the player will be fat and slow and no obstacle to my fulfilling my own selfish goals.

Brown

Learn the difference between running hard and sprinting and the difference between a good throw and a bad choice and a bad thrown and a good choice. It is a game of choices and players must understand the difference between good and bad choices.

Munter

Don't get fooled by rhetoric. Talk is cheaper than a White House liaison, so don't say "this is the year" if you don't mean it. It doesn't matter if your goal is winning it all, making it to Nationals, or just making it to Regionals, you need to believe in yourself and your teammates. You can't kind of want it, because the team just above you has more skill or more experience. Winning Nationals is great, but primarily because it confirms that the goal you have set for yourself has been achieved. The worst feeling in Ultimate is watching some other team play the game you wanted to be in thinking about how your own team underachieved because they didn't prepare or didn't live up to their promises as teammates. To improve, to make it to Sunday at Regionals when last year went home on Saturday, to make it to the semi's at National's after going 2-3 at the big dance the year before, is HARD. You might hear first time parents say they wish raising that first kid was only as difficult as they had dreamed it was going to be. But getting up in the middle of each night with junior turns out to be something for which talk and imagination cannot really prepare you. Just as it's easier, even more fun, to be single, it is more fun to just hang out with your friends and repeat last year's performance. No hassles, no worries, no potential disappointment. If that is what you want to do, admit it and enjoy yourself. But if you get to your goal together, then the sore legs, the tough practices, the rushing from work, and the long hours will all be well worth it.

Haskell

The game is much easier than we make it out to be. Use your head. The mind is a powerful thing. Just complete your passes and leave all the turnovers for someone else.

Mooney

No, really... we're good guys, we're supportive and caring, and you'll have a great time on our team. Please... play with us... PRETTY PLEASE WITH CHEESE ON TOP. P.S. I'll carry your bags and buy you beer.

post surgery

2010-03-14T16:17:00.000-07:00

I put a few photos up on Facebook, but things appear to be a success. The surgeon really had nothing to say to me after the procedure, just something he does a few times a week.

Procedure: C3-C6 French Door (or Double Door) Laminoplasty. He didn't do anything else while he was in there, hoping that all the syndromes related to the central nervous system were related to the compression on the spinal cord.

Work and disability: Wow, they just don't want to get on record ahead of time for anything. I tried to ask how they would handle if I could only do part-time temporarily when I come back, and they all said, "We'll see." I said that there are two real dangers with being out for a long time: one, that they'll really suffer without me, and two, that they won't.

Tuesday: Surgery was pushed back to 11, so I had to show up at 8. Had to do a special antiseptic cleaning of everything but hands and genitals. At a little before 11, they gave me the first of my antibiotics and anesthetics, and I don't remember a thing for the next six hours. Apparently, they include an amnesiac in that first batch, derived for use on children in ERs.

Around 5, I woke up in a bed, with a view of a hallway vaguely similar to the view of the hallway from my desk at work. In my mind, I was working on a spreadsheet on my laptop, and somehow realized that I had to hurry up and finish it and save it because I didn't actually have a laptop. Then they took me to my room where my family could see me. My parents had had to go home by then to pick up the boy, but they returned with him later that evening. I was doing great at this point, feeling no pain but also not feeling like I was on drugs. Alex also came by to heckle.

I surprisingly slept well through the night, being switched once to sleep on my side. And they woke me every two hours for my vital signs. My pulse rate broke one of the Western Electric Rules, with eight points in a row above my historical average (based on the Novemember hospital stay) but other signs exhibitied normal variation. Root cause is probably a general decrease in health the last four months due to lack of exercise.

On Wednesday the pain started in earnest, though still it was never terrible. They asked for the pain on a scale of 1 to 10, and I suggested that they whack incoming patients in the ankle with a hammer and say, "ok, that's a 7, keep it in mind for later." THey typically didn't get my jokes. Nor do most, I guess, but that doesn't matter, because I'm usually the main audience for them anyway. They removed the cathether (I took a picture of it just to see it, but deleted it immediately because even I don't want to see a picture of that), and later on took out the IV. They still had a drip bag attached to the incision, and that bag continually filled up slowly. Managed to pee (it hurt due to the cathether, but that went away after about a day). Ate real food starting with lunch, though they told me to eat softer food. Wife came in and left, parents came in, co-worker came in and said by a vote of 5 to 3 that they had a card for me, Bim stopped by too because he was bored. Otherwise I chatted with my nice roommate who was in for a knee replacement. Did a lot of Facebook checking and appreciated all the well-wishes. They took out the pain button and gave me pain pills. Jordan Haskell also made an appearance.

Thursday was check out. They just needed to verify that I could walk up a couple stairs and that the X-ray looked ok. I also talked to the occupational therapist, but she was so good-looking that I couldn't concentrate on anything she said. She pulled a Constanza moment on me, when I mentioned that real men didn't use loofahs, and she said her fiancee used one. My neck was and is a little stiff, though it felt in part that it was due to lying on it with a brace in the same position as much as it was due to them making a four-inch cut and retracting the muscles in my neck. (I mentioned, and maybe it's the truth, that most of the recovery of surgery is not due to what they are fixing, but to what they need to do in order to go to what they need to fix.)

Made it out at about 1, took a nap in the afternoon. I've generally been feeling a little better each day, a little less pain, a little less frequent with the pain pills, but I am also now at the point that I'm bored with the whole recovery process and wish it to be done.

Finally got a shower yesterday and another one today. Took off the bandage after each one and got a couple photos today which I will share. Enjoy.

spinal surgery

2010-03-06T04:38:00.000-08:00

So I finally will be getting my surgery in a few days, on Tuesday. They will be doing a laminoplasty on C3-C6. Here is an animated video. The short story is that they cut through four of the vertebrae in my neck, cut a notch, swing it open, and create a larger spinal column so the cord has more room to move around.

As I've been told, I have a complicated neck. I have bone spurs, a herniated disc, a very narrow spinal column to begin with, and another term or two I can't translate into English. I mentioned before that I first had symptoms last summer, culminating in the Trauma on the Beach, and that I had been asymptomatic since then. However, in the last month or two, I've had twitching in my calves most of the time, and after exercise I feel unnaturally warm. The calf twitching has been with me for many years, but previously only showed up after a full day or two of ultimate in hot weather. I had always thought it was due to depleted electrolytes, and maybe it was, but perhaps it's due to this. I've also had calf cramps at night dating back to at least last fall, and a few other things that I won't bore you with.

I ended up getting three official opinions. The first two were from neurosurgeons and recommended the laminoplasty, which goes in from the back of the neck. The third was from an orthopedic surgeon and recommended a complicated anterior-and-posterior approach, but after consultation with his neuro team, he too switched to this procedure. I recently read a medical article online where the study was to send the same five cases to 30 spine surgeons and see how much variation there was and whether that variation was predictable. For the case that seemed most similar to mine (Case 4), all recommended surgery, 22/30 recommended fusion (20 of which wanted to use plates and screws; mine wants to use thread), and about half wanted to go in from the back. What that means for me, I don't know, other than there isn't a single right answer. (In the simplest case, a one-level herniation, there was almost complete agreement. The others, less.)

I'll be in the hospital (New England Baptist) for about 2 days, out of work for 2-3 weeks, then will have various shades of green lights at 6-8, 12, and 18 weeks (on average; my mileage may vary). I have had precious little contact with the doctor himself, and interactions with the office were less than perfect. I mentioned this to the hospital during my pre-op screening, and they said they had frequently heard that about this doctor's office (which is run independently from the hospital). My final opinion on this office will depend on the success of the surgery, but these people are clearly used to being in a seller's market and don't have to worry about their next meal. {Insert right- or left-biased comment about American health care system here.} {I find it informative that in none of the three consultations or in my decision-making did the cost ever enter the picture. The cost to me is the same, and I have no idea what the full cost will be (well, I have some idea, maybe $20K). And since I'll have maxxed out for the year, I might as well get that Botox I've always wanted.}

And here are some additional pictures. One is the MRI, side view and a slice through the 5/6 disc. The other is a CT scan through the sixth vertebra, I think.

PS. HoF comments still welcome.

HoF -- what next?

2010-02-26T13:32:00.000-08:00

If you still want to comment on the viability of any of last year's candidates, go to the previous thread. There were so many comments, and some of them were just the same vitriol (I promise to delete any post that I feel detracts from the thread; you can disagree with me, just don't be a boor), that some felt it wasn't worthwhile to add their comments.

How would you like to see the HoF process change?
SCALE: What do you think of the concept of a voter giving a number for each category and adding them up? How would you structure such a scale?
TRANSPARENCY: Consider the ramifications of your suggestion, but what level of public display should the votes and discussions have? The selection process is public (though not too many appear to know all the steps) but all votes and vote totals are hidden. Should the Peer Review totals be publicized? Peer Review voters?
MONEY: This receives zero funding from the UPA and receives little or no effort from paid staff of the UPA. Should staff be involved in this?
VOTERS: In the first year, a small group that came up with the idea made the elections. Afterwards, there was an appointed committee (the Vetting Subcommittee, the ones who do the grunt work) plus all HoF members who cast the final votes. What would be a viable alternative?

Comments welcome.

hall of fame discussion is still going strong on previous thread

2010-02-19T09:12:00.000-08:00

Bump.

If you have a new topic to discuss related to the HoF selection process, enter it on this entry. Or please go to the last one to comment there.

Hall of Fame discussion

2010-02-07T09:06:00.001-08:00

Open board to discuss the Hall of Fame. Toad, you are welcome to add new thoughts, but you have made your point known, and so will be deleted if you don't cooperate.

To the rest of you, one topic as originally framed by Jacob on rsd is of particular note. I'll repost it from the previous post:
1) Should the leader of the best team of all time be excluded (even
temporarily) from the hall of fame if he demonstrated poor enough
sotg?
2) If the answer to question # 1 is "yes," then was Kenny Dobyns' sotg
poor enough to warrant exclusion? "

Other topics are also welcome.

Hall of Fame

2009-12-28T14:32:00.000-08:00

The UPA announced the latest class for the Ultimate Hall of Fame. Before we get to the main course, I wanted to express disappointment that for the third straight year, less than the maximum number (five) were elected. I think it's time to rethink the logistics of the final vote. Currently, the voters select up to five names from the Slate of Eight and the top five that get at least 60% of the votes are inducted.

Disclaimer: I was on the HoF Committee from 2005-2007, mostly because I was interested in the logistics and there was a vast shortage of people who were willing and available to do the work. I was the liaison for the Open Peer Review group, and cast my vote according to the voice of the reviewers. I have gotten to know some of the voters a little, and my impression is that they care a lot about spirit and character, but none could be characterized as "spirit zealots".

Any issues that arise are due to it being such a difficult process to come up with a Hall of Fame, especially in a sport like ultimate with no stats and no extensive media coverage. Players are spread out over time and geography but are asked to review all prospective candidates. One of the players inducted this year had his peak in around 1975, but 44 year olds are also eligible for the Hall. And in the old days, fewer teams made Nationals or made cross-country trips, so it would be harder to evaluate players from other regions.
There is also an issue, in my mind,
On rsd, jacob tried to bring a discussion to the discussion when he wrote:
"The only issues are:
1) Should the leader of the best team of all time be excluded (even
temporarily) from the hall of fame if he demonstrated poor enough
sotg?
2) If the answer to question # 1 is "yes," then was Kenny Dobyns' sotg
poor enough to warrant exclusion? "

This, of course, was followed by poorly-spelled diatribes on refereez and dischoops, and one whiny "of course Kenny was great, I knew him myself" supporter.

But these are exactly the questions to ask, and they can really be extended to the second best player on the third best team who was kind of a cheater but an otherwise nice guy, or whatever.

Despite him being a prick and a petty, bitter little man, I would have expected Kenny to sail in the first time he was under consideration. Gewirtz, him I thought would be the poster child for how big of a jerk you could be and not get elected.

(Regarding "jerk", I don't think it's simply a matter of whether someone was an ass. Some of my best friends are jerks, but that shouldn't be held against them here. If a baseball player doesn't speak to the media, that should have zero bearing on his HoF worthiness. If his surliness made him a bad teammate and caused him teams to underperform, maybe you count that. In ultimate, how much did a player's jerkiness affect the fairness of the contest?)

I guess there is a vaguely similar issue with the baseball HoF. Barry Bonds was an inner-circle HoFer before he ever took steroids. Rafael Palmeiro is a bordeline HoFer even with steriods (he has the career value no doubt, but is a little low on peak value). Mark McGwire has a solid HoF career and had some star years before steroids, but would it have been enough without steroids? (I'm assuming that taking steroids is neither automatic grounds for dismissal nor completely irrelevant, but instead is something that should be taken into account.)

I saw one especially good quote from a baseball writer. "Dock them slightly for character issues if you must, but ... if, 20 or 30 years from now we have a Hall of Fame that doesn’t include the undeniably best players of their time, you have a pretty useless and irrelevant Hall of Fame."

Other issues, besides there not being enough inductees each year:
1. "Era". One of the guys elected this year had his peak in about 1980, others under consideration were still building their cases well into the 1990s. The eligibility was based on age, not years after retirement since you can always keep playing, but we are mixing together players from a lot of eras. I know the peer groups might be trying to address this, but it seems to be inconsistent with how it's applied.
2. Women. Only one was put forth on the Slate of Eight this year. The women who were recently elected played significantly later than the guys who have appeared on the ballot or were elected. Again, I don't know what the right answer is, but there is an inconsistency.
3. Public discussion. The UPA did put out a call soliciting comments on the Slate of Eight, and those comments were reviewed by the final voters before making their decision. But there ought to be a public discussion group somewhere, not that it would be required reading for the voters, but so that things can be discussed logically and coolly (as least as much as this is possible on the Internet). Some baseball website created a Hall of Merit akin to the Hall of Fame, and they have discussions on all prospective candidates.

Discuss.

my neck

2009-12-08T10:41:00.001-08:00

Doctor today recommended a laminoplasty on multiple vertebrae. Still gathering opinions.

The Year in Jim: Epilogue

2009-11-06T14:33:00.000-08:00

"If I wasn't done before, I'm done now."

In the finals of the Grand Masters tournament in July, Alex caught a swing pass near the sideline. I was about 10 yards in front of him, being fronted, so I faked a step in and bolted long as he hucked the backhand. Because of the thin air or his poor touch, I had to keep chasing after it and laid out for it. I caught it a split-second after it hit the ground and put it down*. But as I got to my feet, I noticed that both of my arms were tingling.

* - I knew it was down and never considered calling it up, but I somehow had time to turn around and notice my defender pointing down before I did anything with the disc. Maybe I was paying attention to my hands. I later asked the observer whether he would have called it up, just to see what he said. He said it was down, but maybe he was just covering for himself.

At Regionals, down 6-4, we had turned it and I noticed DJ of GLUM was looking to throw it into the endzone, so I dropped off my guy. He threw it, and I had to take an awkward angle to the disc to try to block it. I missed and ended up hitting the ground. Once again, my arms were tingling, and I headed to the sideline for a break.

Around the same time, a similar feeling happened when I landed funny playing basketball. In all these cases, there was a sharp hit and an immediate sensation which began dissipating immediately and within about a minute I was back to normal.

Then at Nationals, it happened at least three times, but this time I didn't have the sharp hit. Once, I simply reached out suddenly to try to block a throw, and twice, I was simply running hard. The last time, my last point, I was sprinting to make a jumping bid at a block, but as I swing my arm down to jump up, my arm isn't responding right, and I am unable to jump. By this time even _I_ have become a little suspicious of what's going on (unless it's debilitating, I generally don't seek medical advice; even for nagging injuries, I don't do a whole lot except for occasional ice and ibuprofen and maybe rest; I considered it a major step this year when I bought several pairs of new shoes to combat nascent plantar fasciitis). I mention this to a few people over the next few hours, and tentatively make plans to see a doctor when I get back, when I get around to it.

That night, I end up at the beach after the bars close, and I'm standing next to Alex, no doubt spewing about something. Two of our friends see us and decide it'd be funny to tackle us (and I have to agree with that), so they rocham to see who gets whom and charge us. I see tje charge at the last second but can't prevent it and end up flat on my back. However, my legs immediately feel very heavy, and I realize that I can't get up. As soon as I am aware of it, I try to wiggle my toes and find that I can, and then I begin the struggle to get up. I can finally move my arms and legs after maybe a minute but it's like pins and needles, times 100. I can sit up a little bit, and can sorta flop my arm over. It takes me probably five minutes before I am able to stand under my own power. Never in this time range did I have any change in mental faculties, no shortness of breath or seeing stars (well, I guess I could see stars since we were outside and it was a clear night). Eventually I'm ok, and fortunately someone finds a doctor in the group and he interviews me and determines that I'm not in any imminent danger of paralysis or death, but that I really need to see someone as soon as I get back.

Over the next day and a half, I'm sore, though not appreciably sorer than I would be any other year, and my arms and legs feel a little weak. Additionally, my arms feel a little weird. I have a little trouble sleeping so take some ibuprofen.

I go to my PCP on Monday afternoon and describe my symptoms, she calls a specialist to discuss, and they set me up with X-Rays and an MRI. Within an hour of the MRI, I get a call at my house suggesting that I should probably go to the ER this evening instead of waiting until the morning, since the doctor would "hate to see a young guy like me paralyzed." (He quickly added that he'd hate to see any age person paralyzed.) We arrange for the boy to have a sleepover, and get to the ER at about 8. Now, I didn't really think there was any imminent danger, and they didn't whisk me to the front of the line, but they put me in an uncomfortable neck brace and make me lie down, where I stay for the next 8 hours or so. I tell them I had an MRI at another hospital, but when they finally see me four or five hours later, they ask me if I have the MRI. My wife has to then drive to the other hospital to get a CD of it (they don't share information electronically) so they can look at it. The resident on call is somewhat apologetic but otherwise the staff isn't all that attentive or sensitive to the fears of this patient. I eventually see a neurologist at about 2 or 3 in the morning (or was it 1?), and he's half-asleep. (The reason I was directed to this hospital was that the other one didn't have a neuro staff working.) After looking at the MRI, he tells me I can go home but they'll give me some steroids or other anti-inflammatory to reduce the swelling in my spinal cord. He goes off to ask his "spine guy", and comes back and says in a monotone, "Our spine guy got kinda excited when I said I was sending you home." "Is that excited happy or excited agitated?" I reply. "Yeah, he wants you to stay here tonight. How are you with that?" What do you think, bucko? Oh, after he leaves, the nurse comes back and says, "So, you'll be having surgery in a day or two, is that right?" Huh, how about that.

In another hour or two, I get some more X-rays and then get ushered upstairs to a room, where they finally remove that cursed neck brace and I can get to sleep for a bunch of hours. I get woken up at about 9:30 and am told that they are scheduling a CT scan as soon as they can. Around 2 they come in and tell me that it will be at 4. At 4 I am picked up and taken to the CT area, where I am propped up without a word for about 40 minutes. Finally I get taken in, the tech apologizes and says an emergency had to get screened, I jokingly say "but I was here first", and we get the CT scan done. Unfortunately, the "team" doesn't have time to look at it before their shift is over, and I have to hang out until "first thing in the morning" to get the results.

At about 10, I'm told by a nurse practitioner who is trying to make me think she's a doctor that they'll be letting me out that afternoon but that I'll need surgery and that the attending neuro will talk to me after he's out of surgery at 1 or so. At around 3, after hearing nothing, I'm a little upset at the lack of attention. In 36 hours of an expensive hospital stay, I've had 10 minutes of diagnostics, 5 minutes of an NP, a bunch of vital signs readings (I made a control chart of my pulse rate), and a whole lot of waiting. Luckily I have my laptop and there is wi-fi, so I am able to keep in touch with the team and let them know what is going on, and my wife has spent a lot of time at the hospital with me, though she was also trying to do work. It's just annoying that they tell me so little and leave me waiting for long periods of time past when they said they would do something. I called the patients advocate line to pre-complain about my bill and the lack of attention, and I almost never bring my complaints to the authorities, generally just keeping them to those within earshot.

Finally, sometime after 4, the team (attending, sleepy doc, and NP) comes in, and I learn that I have two of my neck vertebrae compressed against each other and there are spurs and there is some impingment on my narrow spinal column. The fluid that I thought I heard the MRI guy say was there is not there, but there is swelling, which will have to subside over the next few weeks prior to doing anything. I'm lucky that I'm not paralyzed, I'm told. I ask whether that's "lucky like there was a chance that I could have been paralyzed, or lucky like 'I'm surprised you're NOT paralyzed'", but the attending doesn't seem to understand my question, as he apparently has not been briefed on how to handle levity. (The nurses who frequently came in were personable.) There is no fracture, I'm stable, I'm in no immediate danger, but I'll need a laminectomy. I'm confused about a lot of it but he is staring so sullenly I don't know what to ask. They write nothing down and discharge me with instructions to wear a (more comfortable but still not fun) neck brace and take the OTC medicine of my choice for pain and schedule a surgery consult for the next week or two, which apparently gets scheduled for December 8 without telling us.

There is a wide enough range of outcomes per teh Interwebs that I can't tell what to expect from post-surgery without more detailed knowledge of my specifics. I have the MRI and CT Scan and have sent out copies to a neuroradiologist friend who will share it with his colleagues, and I'm going to get a second opinion. I think there's a good chance I've played my last competitive ultimate game, and I can live with that, but I'll be really disappointed if I can't golf or play softball (not to mention what would happen if I get another traumatic hit prior to surgery and end up paralyzed).

Ooh, I get shivers just typing that sentence.

The Year in Jim: Masters

2009-11-03T15:18:00.000-08:00

So, back to DoG and Masters. I had already missed two tournaments. I quietly put my name on the roster, and eventually word got around. I got sincere "Sorry, it would have been cool, but we're glad to have you back." Both were true. The idea of a 44 year old playing a cutter role on a Nationals contender would have been cool, but it was also nice being back in my comfort zone, both as a player and as a teammate. I was actually relishing the idea of being a bit player who could focus on going all out every point, but I also enjoy the challenges of being The Man.

I had been doing some training already. Besides the Ironside practices, I did the weekly team workout, and was doing a lot of microexercises. I did a set of 50 no-weight squats every day, would do various reps of other exercises when I had a minute to spare, would hold up my computer bag while walking to build up arm strength, little stuff like that. Those all stopped. Later, I would return to doing some workouts, but not right away.
I played in the championship of the Ultimate Showcase a couple weeks later. It was really odd being on the same field with some of the Ironside guys. Only one of them said anything at all to me at all related to my having been with them just before, but hey, what do you say to Jim Parinella after you just cut him? I played poorly, or at least caught poorly, though it was windy. I must have had three drops, maybe even four, in the first half-dozen points, plus a throwaway, a block, a goal thrown and a goal caught. I think I was turnover-free the rest of the way, adding two blocks and some goals, but didn't do anything of real note.
My first tournament back was Boston Invite. We lost a couple winnable games on Saturday and had to win a game to stay in the 9-16 bracket. I was a little down and played uninspired that day, happy and sad to be back. On Sunday I felt good, though, and helped beat Open Nationals qualifier Pike in our B quarters. That was definitely fun, and I felt like if I had played like that in tryouts maybe things would have been different. We then had Pony next, and started off in a similar vein with me getting open at will against the best defenders on a team that thought it could be at Nationals, but then age 44 kicked in and Pony played better and took control of the game. But it was a fun morning, with the team's best game in some time.
Next up was Grand Masters in Denver, which was like Masters, but without even that level of defensive pressure. It was hot and at altitude. We had two games in a row on Saturday where I felt every day of my age and then some, but otherwise I had another very good two days of running. I did get lazy at times with setting up cuts because I knew either that they were going to screw up the coverage or I could just outrun them if they didn't. This actually might be a key point in assessing my real ability to play at a Nationals Open level. It is often said how smart of a cutter I am. It has become more often the case that I punish defensive mistakes rather than just being able to shred regardless, so if a defender plays solid positioning on me and continues to adjust based on the changing flow, I might never make a real cut. But let him suddenly find himself on the wrong side of me because he didn't adjust, and I'll make a devastating cut and catch the goal flat-footed. So if you're young and fast AND you know what you're doing, I might have some real difficulties. That wasn't the case at GM. There were times I found myself thinking, "ok, I need to set this guy up, drive him out a little, act like I'm coming in and make him bite, and then go deep....nah, I'll just sprint deep." After all, those were old guys I was playing against. Some of them were even 44 years old!

So our O had a great time out there, not just me but Coop, Simon and Will all played well. It was basically our starting O line from the regular Masters team.

Next up were two coed tournaments, Hingham and Summer League. Most of Hingham was against bad teams. One team (hardly fair to call it a team, just some counselors from some camp) threw more Callahans than goals and gave up more points than points played (there was a two-point cross-gender huck rule). We had a decent game in the semis, and a good game in the finals against a mid-Regionals-level coed team. I felt very mobile again this game. I mused later that perhaps I am beginning cold-blooded in my old age, in that as long as the sun is out and it's warm, I am lively, but if it's only 60 or less, I am pretty lethargic. (The first day of Nationals disproved that, though.)

Summer League was pretty good, as far as I can remember now. We played in the semis against the Andover High recent grads. Jackie had coached the girls' team there last year and I met some of the parents (who are probably my age). One of them said to me, "It must feel good to be able to keep up with these young kids." Never one to take a compliment well, I responded, "Keep up with? I'm blowing by them." She looked at me strangely, as she should have, nodded, and walked away. But that's how I felt. None of those kids knew enough about how to play, even if they are serious players, so even though sometimes when I had to cover them I was often just trailing them, offense was still pretty easy.

These were all great training experiences for me, much better than an Open tournament with Ironside or 2000s DoG. The sheer number of points played and the increased role in each dwarfed any increased level of opposition. That's partly why I've recommended that aspiring players slum around some. (Probably the bigger reason is to get time playing a bigger role and expand their repertoire and to get more experience in points where they have to play well or the team will lose. I feel this outweighs the possible bad habits they might pick up.)

At Sectionals, the hard fields contributed to my lackluster performance. I had really wanted to play well against Ironside but it was the fourth game of the day and I just didn't have it. I beat one of them deep but I couldn't catch the crappy trailing throw. Breaking the tradition of bad Saturday/good Sunday, I didn't feel better on Sunday, and thus the team didn't do any better.

Clambake did manage to have a couple games in it. This was a harder to classify performance. Typically, I either have it or don't have it on a given day, but there were moments of both here. We had some real struggles moving the disc when I was out there trying hard but just not getting any separation, and times when things went well.

At Regionals, Saturday was one of those days again, another day when I was glad I wasn't out there embarrassing myself in Open. Sunday started off well. I burned one of their players early deep and threw a deep pass in the first few points and I felt good. But the team just fell apart. In the game to go, by the time I actually got to play, the game was essentially over, so it didn't matter.

Nationals, once again. I didn't get good sleep in the couple days prior to Nationals,and when I got up on Thursday, I felt run down. It didn't help that the temperature was going to exceed 90, but despite a good, early warmup, I just never had it in my legs all day. I'm not saying that I'm worth 4 points a game (Bill James once found that the value of a (baseball) superstar is far less than anyone thinks, and I would definitely be psyched if ultimate could one day have enough data to put a number on this), but I feel that if I had been moving well, we'd have beaten GLUM instead of losing to them.

Day 2 was much better. The quarters were the highlight of the tournament for us. Our O had only 2 turnovers and 1 break and we won 15-13. I didn't feel quite as good as at some of the other events this year but with strong performances all around, we did well.

The semis were pretty good but a half-step down for me. I had one full-field sprint for a goal but otherwise have nothing specific I can add about my play. It was certainly a game we could have won, something that no one would have thought possible after Thursday's play. We got broken twice to start the game, then there wasn't a break either way again until 13-11. Surly then scored on their only upwind point of the game, and then we got broken on our second upwind point of the game, and it was over. The 3/4 game was a throwaway, notable only for it being the only time we ever played the Condors and joked with them throughout the game.

Coop played great for us all weekend and deserves the team MVP. After being afraid of what he would be able to contribute, he did it all for us and was unstoppable throughout the tournament. Props also to Marshall Goff for solid and sometimes spectactular play handling. I'd go on, but after all, this is "The Year in Jim."

The team was one point away from not even making the quarters. After beating Ball and Chain Friday morning, we thought that guaranteed us a spot. Only during the last round did we realize that if we lost and Boneyard beat GLUM by exactly two, the three-way tie would go to the second tiebreaker, total point differential, and all we could think of was that we had suffered a blowout loss to Surly, and how lucky we were that we had gotten a break at the end to beat Boneyard by two (rather than trading out on serve to win by one). So we're watching that game while we're losing big to Troubled Past. In the TP game, we started out on serve, got a break, Al threw a hammer OB, we get the break back, Al throws another hammer OB to the other side, and they take half. After another break, things spiral and we start looking ahead to the quarters. Except that it's close on the next field. But GLUM is winning or at least has the wind advantage, until I look over at 13-13 to see Boneyard cheering in the upwind endzone celebrating their go-ahead goal. I next look over to see Boneyard cheering the ensuing turnover, and see them catch the goal that gives them the dreaded two point win. Meanwhile, we're down 13-8 and then 14-9, and we watch dreading that every turnover is going to be the one that keeps us out of the quarters by a point. But we manage to get 3 straight to make it 14-12 prior to losing 15-12, and then we hurry over to tournament central to figure out what's going on. Several teams are gathered around to see what's going on. I quickly add together our scores and get -2. A GLUM guys tells me that his team is also -2, and thus our team would finish behind theirs in a two-way tie, so if Boneyard was at -1 or better, we were out. But a quick add shows that Boneyard is -9, and I add GLUM's total to confirm that they are -2, and so I let everyone know what I found, and for about 15 minutes, this is the official word (GLUM, us, Boneyard, respectively, for 3-5), and we play Beyondors in the quarters for the live stream. I confirm with Will Deaver that overall point differential is indeed the second tiebreaker, so we start to mentally prepare for the big game. Eventually, though, when they do the official adding together, they announce that GLUM is really -6 and thus we are 3rd place and play OLDSAG in the quarters. I am torn at this point. I wanted to play the Condors, but I also wanted to improve my chances at making semis (and thus avoiding the consolation games), so do I tell them they added it wrong? Eventually, I decide not to, but go over to see the scores one more time. I then discover that when I got to the final game, I had GLUM at -4, then went and added 2 for the Boneyard game to get -2 instead of subtracting for -6. Geez, now THAT should embarrass me more than any slowness or codgerdom I show on the field. I try to track down Will to apologize for thinking him stupid but he is ignoring me while talking logistics to some other guy and I continue on.

I'm glad that we were on the live stream for the quarters, allowing my wife and my parents to watch it, up to the point that the feed went out at 13-12. Two interesting anecdotes from that game. After maybe the second O point, I hear my defender Paul Bonfanti asking someone in the next tent over how I had broken him that point. He is told that the throw went over his foot, so I shout over that I will throw the next pass at where his foot is supposed to be, knowing that he will be lifting his foot to the new place. Sure enough, I have the disc on the line and throw underneath him on the break side, and he gets a solid foot on the disc. Luckily for me, it pops up into the air behind me, I turn around and catch it, and continue playing. I let him know after the point that I am so used to getting footblocked that I instinctively know where it will go, while others get so flustered after it happening that they bury their heads and have no bid at the second chance.
Late in the game, at 13-12 I think, Alex has the disc about 10 yards out and on the backhand sideline, I am a couple yards outside the endzone, so we make eye contact, and I cut away for the blade for the goal. As he throws it, the two of us and at least one teammate on the sideline flash back to a hammer in the 2000 semis against Condors that some may remember from the second Above and Beyond video. This one, however, was not so high that it melted from being too close to the sun and not so far that I had to keep running after it and not in the air for so long that I had to think about it, and I caught it. (To this day, I'm still not sure the right way to catch that pass in 2000. It's possible that reaching out with one hand is the best way, though I can't imagine having the balls to do that at a late point in the semis.) My defender shakes his head in disgust and says, "Who throws that?" Here, I thought it was obvious.

Next in the Year in Jim: Epilogue. I promise that there is a cliffhanger.

The Year in Jim: The Ironside Experience

2009-10-26T16:43:00.000-07:00

The most lasting impression I have is that the tryout season is a lot different as a tryout than as someone on the team. When deciding between players at the end of the roster, the team should consider factors beyond who is "better" (not that there is a single answer to that). Other things being equal, you might prefer a 22 year old who will probably be better the next year than a 44 year old. On the other hand, experience should count for something, too.

So I left Nationals last year not knowing what to do. I was disappointed for the Ironside guys, some of whom I had played with on DoG and others I knew from goaltimate and Boston's Ultimate Showcase Series. I also felt happy for my Worlds teammates who won with Jam. I also missed the excitement of being in games like that. In Masters, win or lose, you're still going to drink beer after, and while you might feel disappointment or excitement, it's on a much lower scale than in Open. I had some misgivings about abandoning the Masters team, and it would have just felt weird to play on a team without Alex. But I felt I owed it to myself more to give it a shot.

So I started preparing myself for the idea of a comeback without officially committing to it. My son was taking swim classes, so I would do a Tabata at the gym during the class, and I played my weekly basketball game as if it were a training session. I committed to attending Kaimana with the intention of playing intense on a big, talented squad. We had a few guys who were invited to the World Games tryouts plus other big names from the Open scene, so I figured this would be a good test for me. I was pretty happy with the results, though it also came with a realization that while I could still hang, I wouldn't be able to do it on every point.

But this fit in with the role I had envisioned for myself, something equivalent to a sixth man in basketball, a starter's role with a substitute's playing time. On a team hoping to win Nationals, I couldn't be THE primary option, but with the opponent's third or fourth best cutter defender covering me (especially if that player was athletic but inexperienced), I thought I could do some damage. I also figured that I could handle a limited amount of playing time and still go all-out, maybe something like 6 O points a game on average. The last couple years, I got used to playing every O point and being in a primary role, but it was against either Masters players or against Open teams that didn't have a prayer at making Nationals, so I could usually afford to get a little lazy with setting up cuts. And if zone offense was required, I am extremely effective at popping.

My next stop was Paganello (hey!). It was a similar experience to Kaimana on the field, playing with a bunch of guys who made semis last year and fitting in just fine, at times standing out, though once again fatigue became a factor from occasional overuse.

Meanwhile, back in Massachusetts, I had alerted some of the powers that be on Ironside that I was interested in trying out, and stated what I thought I could contribute. They invited me to come out, though warning me that several starter-level players were moving to the area and were expected to play. I went to the practices (missed at least one, though), even having to skip out on DoG at the White Mountain Open, and played at one tournament.

It was such a different experience at the practices solely due to my station. I wasn't ever sure how much it was appropriate for me to speak. First off, I wasn't sure what had changed since I was left there, and found that I had answered at least one question incorrectly on what the team wanted to do in certain situations. Second, I didn't want to step on anyone's toes. I figured there would be time later to talk if asked about zone O or setting up cuts in vertical or whatever.

It was also a lot of work. I don't know if practices were any harder than they were a few years ago, but without having the luxury of being in charge of my fate, I had to play harder. At my first practice, I put so much effort into every single part of the active warmup that I was already fatigued by the end of it. In one of the early practices, an unfortunately hot day (it hit 90), I was cramping about halfway through, but others appeared to be in worse shape, so I had to keep on playing. Injury felt much closer than it ever had before. In years past, I could monitor my schedule and play time so I could be ready for Nationals. No such luck this time, but even given that, I felt further along in May than I had been in several years (and in fact commented that if I were already on the team, I would be very pleased with where I was in terms of conditioning and in game readiness), especially considering that at best I hoped to be used a point at a time, a few points a game. (There was still some question in my mind how much I would actually enjoy that role, or whether I could physically handle standing around for 20 minutes and then going in for a point. In later years, I found it harder on my body to stand on the sidelines than to play.)

My sole tournament was at Cazenovia, which we won pretty easily. We had about 22 for the tournament, so split into three lines. I was on the O line, had one turnover and one or two D's. I'm a big advocate of purposeful walking, but discovered that in order to try to fit in with the offense, I was doing a lot of purposeless running. I don't think I ever ran as much per second of field time in my life as I did that weekend. Some of this was due to unfamiliarity with what other people wanted to do or could throw, but I found myself having to think instead of reacting to what I saw on the field. I was able to occasionally display my ability to get open without running. One of my strengths is being able to set myself up so that I am open on my first step, provided that the thrower is ready to throw it, and I caught a few goals that way.

So, I was cautiously optimistic about the next few weeks of practices leading up to Boston Invite. I knew that there were a lot of quality players out there and it would be tough, but thought that the team could use an experienced versatile player more than another eager young guy. Even if the team was building for the future, you're never sure if a player will be around the next year. Plus, it was barely June, with almost five months of training and playing to go until Nationals. So that's why it was so shocking and heartbreaking to hear just a couple days after the tournament that my services wouldn't be needed any more. I knew that it was a longshot going in, and knew I hadn't played my way onto the team, but also didn't feel like I had played my way off it, and that a few more weeks of integrating might open the door. Sigh.

It took about a week before I let people know (other than those who knew already). It was a relief in some ways, knowing that I wouldn't have that time and effort commitment and that I wouldn't have to do 400s and that my body wouldn't be falling apart from abuse. But it was mostly a downer. Pretending I was a high school girl, I was wondering what I did wrong, why they liked HIM instead of me, not even caring whether the team was the right fit for me. I'd gotten laid off before, one time out of the blue and in a completely unprofessional way*, but hadn't been cut from a team since JV baseball, and had never had a painful breakup with a woman, and it hurts. In some ways, it's a fair payback for the wholly unprofessional way I had handled the initial cuts on DoG back in 1994, so I could see the irony, and like I said, I never really expected to make it (or at least didn't think it was the likely thing to happen). But it sucked.
* - there had been rumors, and there was a two-week shutdown planned at this 30 person company. One day, I see a co-worker printing off resumes in the library and thought it bold, only to see others come in and tell him how sorry they were he got laid off. I was sorry, too, but glad that I hadn't been told the night before by our boss that I was gone. But then again, I hadn't heard from my boss either, and he was out of town that day. No one says boo to me all day, until finally the CFO just happens to wander past my office and says, "Oh, uh, hi Jim, umm, did Peter talk to you last night?" "No, why do you ask?" "Uhhhh, no reason. Gotta go." Still no bossman, so eventually I corner one of the partners and ask him what's up. He looks at his shoes, the ceiling, out the window, and stammers, "umm, we had a meeting last night and decided we had to let some people go, and you're one of them." Silence. "Gee, Dave, I'm sorry you had to be the one to let me know." "Oh, hey, no problem, t's ok." Finally, about two hours later, I hear a page over the intercom, "Jim, line one, it's Peter." I say to another of the laid-off employees, "Gee, I hope it's not bad news." I pick up the phone and say, "Peter, what's new?!" "Oh, I guess you heard. Sorry." Ah, what laffs.)
So, back to DoG.

The Year in Jim: My Sixth (and Final?) Final Season. Prologue

2009-10-25T09:13:00.000-07:00

2004 was my first “final season.” I was 39, my kid was 1, and it was time to retire. I went through that season thinking that it was my final season, that this was my final 400, that was my final agility workout, this was my final Saturday practice prior to Nationals. The tournament itself was a bit disappointing. We nearly lost to bottom seed Goat in our first game, and had to play a pre-quarters game for the first time. We nearly redeemed ourselves with a near-epic game against Furious in the quarters, as we didn’t have a turnover until 7-5, but we weren’t good enough and lost. My final pass was our final turnover, a mid-range forehand to Kelvin. I played in the consolation game a little (good old Bravo always insists on playing those) but my muscles had locked up and I could barely run, and I didn’t throw a pass. The next day, leaving the fields, I choked up a bit, remembering all the good times and “knowing” I would never cast my eyes upon this scene again.
But then you get away from the season a little bit, and then like with anything, it doesn't seem so bad, and you remember the thrill of the chase and the good things, so I decided to come back. (Some say it was just to try to sell more books.) In my second final year, we made a somewhat unexpected semifinals appearance, and had the advantage up until Nord’s amazing layout D at 7-7. We started off slowly at Nationals that year and built up, taking down Bravo in the quarters. I don’t think I was really close to retirement that year, after the previous year’s trauma of going through all the emotional baggage about being ready to give it up. The year ended well and optimistically.
2006 was my actual final year in Open. Hard to believe but only seven players from that team are on Ironside this year. (Note to UPA: although it’s good that the link for each team on the championship site goes to the current Score Reporter page for that team, it also means that you can no longer see the roster of previous teams.) The team again had an uninspired performance, dropping down to the pre-quarters and then bowing out in the quarters. The season itself hadn’t gone all that well, either. I had disagreements with management about personnel and commitments and how to play the game, and looking back, I guess I didn’t have faith in the team. After the season, I realized that though I thought I could still get it done, it just wasn’t worth it to me to put in the effort. I also wanted to get the band back together before everyone got too old. So I sent the lamest retirement email ever and started sending out emails to the old DoG guys about putting together a Masters team.
At first I just wanted it to be a reunion team with the goal of making it to and not embarrassing ourselves at Nationals. Eventually wiser heads prevailed and we did some recruiting of non-DoGs. The regular season was fun again. We went to about the same number of tournaments as ever, but pool play games were challenging. Once again there was no doubt whether we’d win any of these, but this time we knew we wouldn’t. Winning is great, but competition is better. And having to play a larger role (both in number of points and in what I had to do on those points) meant that tournaments were that much more taxing. As a result, despite having few practices and doing only occasional high-intensity workouts, I felt like I was in as good shape as the previous year. We had sporadic attendance through the year, but managed to get almost all of the historical DoGs who weren’t injured to play at Nationals, and it was just like old times, winning the tight games and taking home the trophy. Granted, it was just Masters, so who really cares, and it’s not like we worked hard all year as a team (though some of us did, kinda), but it was fun. As I said at the team dinner that night, I didn’t really have any expectations for the team, but we exceeded them nonetheless, and I was surprised at how fun it was.
Having won it all, of course we had to do it again the following year. We got the monster roster commitment for Worlds, and picked up three Condors. We once again won the tight games and took home the trophy. However, there were troubling signs. Several players decided they couldn’t commit to both Worlds and Nationals, and our performance leading up to Nationals was decidedly worse than the previous year. We still won the Region, but I was uneasy going in, and predicted that I would have to be carried from the fields the first day, either from exhaustion from cutting non-stop every point or from being overserved at the beer tent after going 0-3. Instead, the other teams were even worse, and we won our first day’s games 15-4, 15-4, 15-8. It was then that I decided I wanted to do something else the next year. Open? Mixed? Retirement? The second day wasn’t any more competitive, though we gave up a few more goals. Even after getting smoked in the semis, I was convinced that Masters wasn’t worth it and still felt the desire for something more. It’s never enough.
Next: my Ironside experience.

Sectionals 2009

2009-09-23T19:19:00.000-07:00

We played once again in the Open Sectionals and finished 3rd out of 11 (or 28, if you include Division II). The tournament was once again held at the Citizens Bank Fields at Progin Park in Lancaster, MA, on some turf fields. Last year these fields saved our tournament, as it was raining a bunch and we couldn't have played on grass fields, but this year I am not that thrilled to have played there. I had a general body soreness afterwards and had an achier than usual left knee and right heel, both of which are bothering me a bit this year. The fields are hard, with some pretty solid base at some small distance beneath the turf. The footing was good enough, though there was an occasional slip, but I couldn't even wear one of my pairs of cleats because it would have hurt too much to stop quickly and turn (if indeed I can still do that). I have more sympathy now for baseball players who used to complain about playing on Astroturf.

We once again had our pivotal pool play game early on Saturday against Red Tide, to see who would play up into the semis and who would play down. Last year we came out really flat and got spanked. This year's game was the first round, which was originally 8:30, then 8, then a late email on Friday night moved it to 9 (unbeknownst to a few of our guys who showed up at 7:30 or so). I believe we again went down a couple breaks after having a good chance to go up 2-0, but somewhere along the way we went ahead and won by two. This became the theme of the weekend, as our next game was also a two point victory over some local kids.

Bye, another win, then the premiere matchup against Ironside. We scored on O to go up 1-0, then had a chance for a break, but didn't get it and it was downhill from there. They turned it over several times but we never got a break, then let them get the last four of the game to win 13-5. They were able to throw it really far. I used to hate Sectionals when I was in their shoes, and couldn't imagine getting up to play some old guys, but they played fairly seriously, though they were goofing off when not playing.

This got us a semifinal matchup against Sons of Liberty. I had us as about a 2 1/2 point underdog. The details of the game escape me other than not making two blocks (both were nice plays by the receivers, though one of them required a mistake by me to give him a chance to catch it). We again had our chances, and though there was no pivotal moment that had it gone differently might have given us the win, it again felt winnable, much like a few of our 3-5 point losses at Boston Invite this spring. I guess if we match up against a team of athletic 24 year olds at Masters, we could be in trouble. 15-10.

Final game was for 3rd place against Tufts. We switched our D and O lines that game, giving all of us plenty of opportunities to mock the other line. We got a break on one D point and I just walked off the field as usual, and it wasn't until the point started and I was getting mocked for sitting out did I realize that you stay on the field when you score if you are playing on the D line.

Overall, I felt like we underperformed by about one break for both O and D each game over what we should have done. We won the games we were favored in and lost the ones we were underdogs in. Maybe the only game we covered the spread was against Ironside, though it would have been close (maybe Red Tide, too, which somehow ended up with a higher RRI for the weekend than we did).

Personally, I was disappointed in my play, never really feeling like I had it going, definitely much less than at previous tournaments this year. I don't really evaluate my play based on how many turnovers I have, but on how many turnovers other people have when I'm on the field, and there were too many of those. If I can cut well, then the disc gets moving, other people will be freed up, and we'll score quickly.

Mixing it up on offense

2009-08-24T18:04:00.001-07:00

There are several ways to mix it up on offense so as to keep the defense honest. You can run different stacks, you can vary the emphasis on the long game, you can run set plays and counters, you can try motion offense or you can be deliberate, and other variations. How much do higher level teams do this and what form does this take?

In our heyday, DoG really didn't do a lot of this other than shifting the names in the four-person play. Then again, the offense was built around giving the cutter options and taking what was given, so any mistakes or adjustments the defense made automatically gave a new look to the offense. What made it work (beyond talented players) was that we could operate successfully in a couple different modes, the jam-it-up-the-line mode as well as cut-deep-and-put-it-out-there mode.

Now, we will shift from vertical to horizontal stack if it feels right, but we won't flip back and forth. Our long cuts are a little more deliberate, too, as it's kinda tiring to run deep if you're not going to get it.

But all this is a long way to get to the point of this post, how to rotate the usage of players for maximum effectiveness. Braess's Paradox says that in certain circumstances, closing a major road will actually lead to improved travel times. With the road open, it's in each person's best interest to take the main road, but it will lead to an increased average travel time. If instead a certain percentage took other routes, the lesser travel on the main road would prevent clogging and those who took it would be much better off, more than enough to make up for the extra time the others take.

This guy decided to apply these principles of networking to basketball, though the target could just as easily be ultimate. For a single possession, it makes sense to go to your best option, but if you go to it all the time, it will get clogged. I discussed this a little bit a few years ago, taking the idea of usage vs efficiency from the seminal work on basktetball analytics, "Basketball on Paper" by Dean Oliver (who also chimes in on a discussion of the linked article at APBRmetrics. The idea is that a player's efficiency decreases with increased usage (defined as % of a team's touches he gets when he's on the floor) as he has to shoot more on less than perfect looks and there is more defensive pressure applied.

So how do offenses deal with this, especially in the case where there is a clear "best play" (I'm less interested in what you do when every option is a very strong one)? Do ho stacks place their lane cutters in the same lanes as always but run the play to different people? (I'm presuming that teams call some sort of four-person play or a set play on every point; does anyone ever run complete free flow?) Do teams instead run counters, plays that appear to be the same as always but in fact the first cut from the main cutter is just a decoy? (In this case, you lose a bit of the benefit as the main cutter still gets fatigued.) What is the right amount of going to your lesser options in order to keep things honest?

Platitudes

2009-07-21T00:30:00.000-07:00

"This is an important point!"
"Let's try harder out there!"
"Don't screw up!"
"C'mon!"
"@#$*&!"

Platitudes: an idea (a) that is admitted to be true by everyone, and (b) that is not true. - H.L. Mencken

I've never been much for huddle talks, in part because so often they are useless. Really, what action are you going to take based on knowing it's an important point? "Gee, I'll make sure I don't drop the pull then." And why the hell should we listen to that guy right now?

And yet, there is somehow the need for people to hear someone else speak in huddles or on the line. (Admittedly, this is better than the need for them to hear themselves speak.) Thus did I find myself a few weeks ago calling the line and then trying to bark out something inane yet reassuring. I felt like I did as a parent when I first screamed "I don't want to have to stop this car!" at my kid. I have a sense of the absurd, though, and I chuckled and simply said, "Platitude #3, boys. #3." and nodded my head sagely.

I've made some improvements since then. I try to say something fundamental, technical, and simple. Give the people one of our key concepts to focus on, one that might tend to trip us up otherwise. It may be a reminder not to huck too mindlessly, or to huck if it's available, or to move up the stack if there are a couple of dumps in a row, or to get on the mark if we turn it over. The tip is that it should be something concrete, albeit small, that they can do, something more than simply "play hard."

I'm tempted to credit this for our Grand Masters championship, just to provide a segue. We outlasted Denver's "B" team Yomo Fog Oho in the finals, 14-13. Semis and quarters also count as outlasting. Our 12-9 win over Ozark Hillbillies in the quarters was noteworthy because every single point featured the O team going downwind. The only breaks (and only turnovers we forced on D) came on the last point of each half, so with an upwind/downwind game like that, only counted as half-breaks since we didn't get the ensuing downwinders. Our O gave them plenty of chances (8? 10?) that game, but they couldn't get the upwinder.

I don't think we were broken in the semi, either. Overall, the O had a pretty good weekend. Factors:

The defense wasn't all that good. To be expected for a bunch of 40+ year olds, but it's also expected from 33+ year olds, and this seemed noticeably worse. Maybe the altitude had something to do with it.
Altitude. Overall it made it easier to complete passes. There were exceptions, of course. We had some long overthrows that just kept going, and we had at least three passes to space on the first day that didn't curve or float enough and fell incomplete. But there were other throws that would have been
It was pretty close to our regular starting O.
We kept the rotation small so everyone was familiar with each other. Unfortunately, this also meant that the D was a hodgepodge. Also hurting the D was the fact that we never had a chalk talk about what to do.

One of the passes I threw that would not have been complete at sea level is worthy of its own paragraph. At about 2-2 in the final, I had the disc on the line about 20 yards out on the backhand side. William cut under and started to clear inside, and then Simon filled up the line, but William's man poached off. I looked to throw something to William (scoober was an option) but he cleared out and continued to go downfield. I then turned to the dump, but nothing was open there, so I returned my gaze downfield, found William headed to the endzone on the other side, and threw a hammer. It made it there, but it surely would have been held up enough for a block attempt if there were more air resistance.

Saturday was just a day we could have lost the tournament, not one we could have won it on. Our pool had a first round bye, then our team had an additional bye since there were an odd number of teams in each pool, so we didn't play until noon (2 pm ET). I spoke for 3 minutes and 30 seconds on offense, including 17 seconds on ho stack, which we ended up playing on every O point on Sunday. (I also wasted about 15 seconds on zone offense, which we played no more than 2 or 3 points all weekend.) We knew this first game was dangerous, as our opponents were the underseeded Denver team (our finals opponent). They were local, and they already had a game in them. Luckily we had received some warning from Randy Ricks that this team was better than seeded, and we also got a hint from their dismantling of the Philly team in their first game. It was pretty chippy on both sides the first ten points, with rules misinterpretations and some arguments. I told my team to stop being douchebags regardless of how the other team acted, not that anyone listens to me about that stuff. We pulled away, though, and the game got less chippy. We were going to give them a 2 in spirit rating, expecting a similar score from them, but then the scorekeeper came up to me and wanted to discuss the spirit score. This seemed a breach of protocol, but I listened, and upped their score to a 3.

The next two games were foregone conclusions against the two bottom teams in our pool. I was already starting to fatigue from the first tough game and the altitude and being out in the sun and standing around, and took it pretty easy these games.

This left us with another tough game against Philly, which came in thinking they could win the tournament. Due to their big loss in the first game, they had to beat us by 6 in order to advance, and the wind had picked up by this time, making it mostly upwind/downwind. Brendan was playing his heart out that game for them, but it wasn't enough, and we clinched a playoff spot, first place, and then the game.

Prior to that game, there was a 15 minute lightning delay, which of course we spent hanging out on the field. The weather there was interesting in its own right. In New England, as Marshall pointed out, if you see lightning, it's an immediate stoppage and you take cover, since it's close. But at the fields in Denver, we could see lightning 20, 30 miles in the distance making its way in our general direction, and only knew to halt play because the man and his radar system told us it was too close. On Sunday, the wind completely shifted direction from the morning to the afternoon as a storm approached (but did not hit us).

It was a lot easier to play against 40 year olds instead of 23 year olds, although this also meant I got a lot lazier at times on my cuts. otoh, it's a lot sweeter to go downtown on a 23 year old, twice in the same game on the first pass off a walkup.

losers whine and winners get the prom queen

2009-07-20T11:32:00.000-07:00

I've never had a post whose purpose was to link to another blog, but today, Joe Posnanski totally nails it. I discussed something similar a while back with Players make plays, but Pos' is pretty good.

Rerun: Rules for cutting

2009-05-26T09:59:00.000-07:00

Rules for cutting was originally posted on July 7, 2005. This was a more concrete set of rules than the famous rules of "take what they give you, fake them into giving you what you want, fake until they give you something".

Anyway, the post:

1. Cut sharp.
2. Cut hard.
3. Cut decisively
4. Think, but only before or after the cut.
5. Know when to just run.

Cut sharp. Don’t round your cuts. Plant on one foot, push off hard, and go. The longer it takes you to change direction, the less separation you will get from your defender.
Cut hard. Don’t jog out there when you are actively cutting. One place where this is especially important is at the start of a deep cut. For your first 3-6 steps, go all out without looking up or back, until you’re near top speed and have some separation and can check back to see whether the throw is up and where it’s going. Further, cut hard when you’re the decoy in a called play, or else an astute defender will know that it’s a fake.
Cut decisively. As Idris said, “Oh, you had ‘em.” You really only have time for one or two efforts before you become a clog. Commit to something, if that doesn’t work, quickly try something else, and if you don’t think you’re open in the first three steps, get the hell out of the way.
Think, but only before or after the cut. During the setup phase of the cut, you might have a chance to think about what you’re going to do, and can try to manipulate the defender into giving you a straight path to the disc. But once you are in motion, you can only react. You need to internalize all the small details (defender body position, field space, playing conditions)
that let you know whether you’re open or not without having to think about it. After the cut, you can think about what it was that made it work or not so that you build up your experience, until eventually it will become more of an instinct.
Know when to just run. You need to learn when you can just sprint in a straight line and be open. Fortunat calls these “opportunity cuts.” These arise when you know that the disc has changed positions but the defender does not, because you have kept him busy enough that he can’t check in. But this also arises in the middle of a faking sequence, when you can recognize the exact moment that the defender has committed himself to another direction and you can cut behind him.

ADDENDUM:
I was thinking that I should have added a rule about clearing, and I noted that the book (page 52) has a fourth rule of "actively get out of the way when someone else has a better cut". These anti-cuts are basically just moving in the opposite direction from where you would cut. When the flow goes right, the anti-cut goes left. Simple English communication can help to achieve this, as players talk to each other to establish priority.

Rerun: Mechanical cutting

2009-05-18T19:13:00.000-07:00

Mackey occasionally cites an old article of mine, so I thought I would get in the rerun business. I will begin to repost old articles, with addenda as necessary.

I noticed that it took me 50 or 60 posts to write something technical. Was I afraid of cannibalizing sales? Did it just not occur to me? Should "decision-making" count? Anyway, on June 14, 2005, three months into the blog (when I was making posts almost daily), I wrote Mechanical Cutting, reprinted below.
----
Mechanical cutting
I noticed that some of the tryouts this weekend cut very mechanically. They might fake, but then their actions do not depend at all on what their defender does. They don't even appear to be watching the defender at all.

Idris talked about this in his Oh you had 'em blog entry. Players just don't seem to realize when they're open. I commented there, "Bad players either plan too many fakes or else they get so caught up in trying to read the defender that they misread him. Instead, do a simple fake, expect that it's going to work, but be ready to do something else after 2 or 3 steps if you see that it hasn't worked."

Maybe the way to drill this is to have them watch real cutters and defenders and attempt to identify the exact moment at which the cutter simply needs to move in a straight line to get open. Anything a cutter does after that is at best inefficient and at worst the first part of a miscommunication turnover.

We sometimes say that a cutter has several seconds and several options before he has to clear, but that includes the setup time, which should occur before the disc is live.
1. The setup. As the disc is in the air to the new thrower, the cutter moves into position and might do a little bit of juking, but is basically trying to force the defender into a repositioning error.
2. The cut. Make a final sell and then go hard in one direction, making a commitment. THEN you evaluate whether you'll be open. When you get good, you'll know as you're making that hard move whether or not you're successful. If not,
3. The 2nd cut. Turn 90 or 180 degrees and go hard that way. If that's not open, clear. The only exception is when you're in an iso situation with a lot of field and the defender overcommits to the 2nd cut, and you are 100% guaranteed to be open in a good place if you return to your original direction.

I guess basketball players work on their fakes by themselves, repeating until they've internalized the sequences, but they will still need the feedback of whether their defenders are going to buy the fakes.
END

Addendum: in the ho stack, as was pointed out to me the other day, the thrower might want to give the lane cutter an extra cut before turning away, since there is still room for a 20+ yarder after a deep cut without poaching or clogging. I guess that is just the "exception" mentioned in point #3.

Also, what about when a defender really studies and learns an offensive player's moves? As mentioned in the post that spurred this idea, this can happen after only one or two instances, but what if a defender really learns the tendencies and internalizes them? (I mean, beyond just a simple bait.)

Man I love Paga (hey!)

2009-04-21T15:33:00.000-07:00

I went to Paganello for the second time in my life. I'm not trying to hit any list, just taking the opportunity to have fun. And boy, was that fun.

It wasn't even on my radar a few months ago. I enjoyed myself when I went previously but apparently didn't capture the full Paga experience (for example, I went to The Barge only once and wasn't even aware that it was The Barge), so hadn't really had any supreme desire to return. I wasn't against the idea, mind you, but it wasn't a top priority.

But then Alex was going, and I had a good team to play on, and airfares got cheap ($400), so what the hell, I asked my wife if I could go, she said, "Sure", so I booked my ticket quickly.

I'll leave most of the details to Alex, since our itinerary was the same and we were on the same team and he likes going into excruciating detail. The summary:
On the field: Solid team. Apparently a few guys couldn't make it because they had World Games practice or had other commitments, so we were stuck with a team of 2008 Open semifinalists and me and Alex. Without putting a lot of effort into laying out strategy, we were nonetheless on the same page and played efficiently throughout the weekend, even when some players were hungover or still drunk (several players blew over the limit in the morning or early afternoon from the night before) (but of course, this didn't bode well for our hard man-to-man D).
Off the field: Solid team. We were very well represented every night at the parties and at the bar, averaging something like 3 or 4 am bedtime each night after starting out with room cocktails after the games (well, after a carbomb at the Barge).
The tournament was built for socializing, with 2-3 hours between games, nightly parties, a stadium field, and a late start time (no more than one game before noon).
I held up pretty well, although I did get a muscle tweak (groin, maybe) on my last point of the finals. In the end, we were just a little worn out to play well in the second half, and watched them score the final five to win. We probably could have used another solid player or two so as to allow for a little more rest in the finals. There was only a brief period for me in between "ah, finally wore off the effects of last night" and "gee, my legs are awfully tired".
blockstack.tv did a 20 minute podcast each night. The final one covered part of our final. Our game was supposed to start at 4, but between the under-14 exhibition game and the gladiator exhibition (a bunch of guys in gladiator costumes had a pretent battle), it was pushed back 20 minutes. The UTI guys had already been out there for 45 minutes getting ready, while we were much more laidback, shall we say, and took the extra 15 minutes and pretty much just sat on the line and waited. (I do have to confess to taking a 10 minute jog at 3:15 in order to get a sweat going, and also did about a quarter of the full active warmup.) Unless not warming up doesn't manifest itself until the second half, I don't think this cost us. We just made some mistakes in the end. Despite not having invested a lot in this tournament or in trying to win it, I was surprisingly disappointed in losing, probably somewhere around #15-20 of my all time losses. Right now, I'm pretty much over it, but it was strong at the moment, even a couple hours later on the medal podium. One of the good organizational things that make this such a popular tournament is that they call each team up on stage one at a time, culminating in the medalists for each division. Standing up there looking out as the penultimate group, well, it felt good but it also hurt a bit.
Asher Roth's "I Love College" white boy rap somehow became the song of the tournament, at least for me. I don't know, it just struck a chord.
Had some good food, too, though didn't do a four hour team dinner like I had the previous time.
And absolutely no sight-seeing. After having spent 11 days in Hawaii, and with some other things planned for the year, it was stretching it even making it to Paga. But boy, am I glad I did.

spirit, workouts, frisbee

2009-03-31T18:30:00.001-07:00

The other night at indoor soccer, the ref was terrible. He seemed to get a majority of the contested out of bounds calls (i.e., which team did it go off) wrong, may have given us a goal on a ball that hit either the top post or the top of the net, and rarely moved from his standing position at center field. Now, this is just a coed B league (and only B because there was no C), so I'm not expecting him to be any better than we were, but I would appreciate a small amount of effort. But that is just the origin of the problem. The problem was how the other team reacted.

At first they just whined. We actually gave up a call that was obviously wrong in our favor, then watched them complain a few minutes later on a less obvious call. Shortly after that, they started to try to steal the calls by acting as if the ball was theirs. This led to me retaliating, twice. The first time, I deliberately kinda fouled a player from behind, leading to an OB ball in our favor and a resulting goal from the corner kick. The second time, it was a horribly blatant OB on them and their player ran to put it into play. I complained to him about his terrible manners, and he said, "Lighten up" and proceeded to crowd the ball on the kick in. So I kicked it as hard as I could right into him, and would have done so again on the rekick had he not backed up.

The way I see it, when they realized the ref sucked, they could have either accepted that each call would be a coin flip as to which team got it, or they could play as if there was no ref by dropping off when they knew it was our ball. It was not ok for them to whine and to try to steal the balls. (In case you didn't notice, this was a B league coed soccer game, albeit the semis of the playoffs.) I was very close to speaking to their team about it, both at half and after the game. I am again mad as I type this.

I've worked out more this winter than I have for many years. Been doing about one Tabata or pseudo-Tabata a week, often during my kid's swim class. I've varied the exercise, trying out the rowing machine, spinning bike, exercise bike, elliptical machine, swimming, and burpees. I'm not sure the rowing machine and exercise bike provide enough resistance. I maxxed out at about 400W on the rower, and while I got to 600W on one of the bikes, the resistance it provided was inconsistent and slow to adjust so I had difficulties with it. I don't have my own heart monitor so have used the machine monitors or counted heart beats and multiplied (but only at the end of workouts) and found my heart rate to generally be only about 165. (I hit 170 once after running on the treadmill.) I also ran two timed miles to see where I was. The latter was at a 6 minute pace but with a 15 second break with about a lap to go (due to a weak will more than a physical breakdown), followed by two quarters at 75s pace (after 5 and 3 minute breaks). (According to treadmill conversion charts, running on a treadmill at a 1.5 degree incline translates to a very slightly faster road time. And a 6:00 treadmill pace at 8 degrees is a 5:00 road pace (what I used for my quarters).

Also playing basketball most weeks, working hard there. Played some goaltimate over the winter, too, and finally got a chance on Saturday to play on something besides snow. That game couldn't have worked out much better. I show up to see Alex's team lose game 1 while he's muttering that they will have to mix up the teams soon. I join the other team and we win two more. At that point they agree to mix the teams, so I say that I have a big enough ego to think that I can make the other team win. Sure enough, I switch (along with another guy) and we win the next two. Someone then suggested that the two guys who switched to the new losing team ought to split up so at least one of them can get I win. I wonder aloud whether conversely, there was anyone who won all his games. (Someone quickly pointed out there was another guy who had done so.) Then we played a few more games but I can't remember how they turned out, other than I had a nice sweep catch called not a goal at 4-4.

I'm surprised at the variety of ways I will throw the disc at goaltimate. On the one hand, this is a bad habit, since I can get away with using just my arm on those short throws but in ultimate throwing without shifting my weight might be a bad idea. But otoh, it helps with creativity and in fast decision-making. Seve Ballesteros became an escape artist on the golf course because he grew up playing with only one club (a 3-iron, at that) and had to learn how to do everything with that club. (I'm not sure that's the right analogy, but I'm sticking with it.)

I was looking at my recent commentary on end zone offense and was wondering whether a typical elite ultimate team could benefit by using Frank's motion offense there without having to adopt the philosophy everywhere. Give and goes often work great as long as the space ahead is clear. If you keep the disc off the line you have enough space to keep multiple players behind the disc. You only need a few yards, and your goal-scoring cut has the additional benefit of not having to leave the receiver in position to make another throw.

Off to Paganello next week with Los Ox, one of only two US teams this year (the same number that Russia is sending and less than France). I was there in 2000 or so so I won't be doing any bucket list editing, not that I have a bucket list.

Kaimana Klassik and the 23 person paradox

2009-02-25T19:44:00.000-08:00

I got back the other day from my second Kaimana tournament, the first being in 1998. Both teams had "Southern" in their name and were basically the same team, except only one other guy from the first team was here again.

The tournament was a blast. There was no need to leave the area for the whole tournament. Breakfast, dinner, and beer were at the site, camping across the street. Pseudo-Nationals format with 4 pools then power pools then elimination play. We stumbled undefeated through Day 1, winning but not covering the spread appropriate for the #2 overall seed. We had one last pool play game at 8:30 on Day 2, but were missing several players from too much partying the night before. This is the 23 person paradox for a casual tournament. If you have small numbers, say, 12, then the only valid excuse for missing a game or practice is if there is something legendary happening. When you have a few more, then the realm of excuses expands a bit, but it still has to be for a good reason. But when you get to 23, then pretty much anything goes, and you can even convince yourself that the team is better off if you took off that game (or day, Luke) because it's more PT for everyone else and you'll be fresher when the games REALLY matter.

So this presented an opportunity for me to test myself. I came into the tournament wanting to play hard, not efficient, and expected that with our pool of talent (the email list of talent was even greater, as the Kid didn't seem to remove anyone from it), we'd win 15-6 and I'd try to play 6-8 points a game. Instead, we'd win 13-11 (and have those 24 points be more like 35 with all the turnovers) and 23 felt more like 16 with a few part-timers. And we had to win this game (or lose it by one or two) in order to avoid getting sent to the B pool. So I laced them up, did what passed for an active warmup, and went out to play. I can't actually say that I remember much other than I played a lot and we staged a late rally to avoid relegation (and also won).

But then I was cooked. I played a couple points early and could hardly move, and then took off the next ten points while I chatted with Dugan, who had a bye but was at our field for some reason. I started to get my legs back and was rarin' to go when they turned it over at 7-7, half at 8, cap approaching. One of our players had the disc about 10 yards outside the goal and I saw him flip the disc over to a thumber grip. I said to him sternly, "No, Karl." He swung it to me on the open side, I got no cuts from anyone, so I went to swing it back to him, but got point blocked (it was probably going into the ground anyway). Score, 8-7, halftime, cap comes on, they score again to win. After a bye, we head over to the other fields (10 minute walk away, second time we had to head over there) and go down 5-1 to Voltron. Our offensive flow stands out as being terrible by this time, as a disproportionate amount of the time, whoever has the disc is looking at the endzone. Sure, with players coming from all over, there wasn't much familiarity prior to the tournament, but it never really meshed, as we never really discussed an offensive philosophy. (Perhaps there were too many potential cooks and all were afraid to tout their own recipe.) We stage a late rally but it is impossible to score quickly enough to overcome the hard cap. (Hard cap in effect for all games, including the elimination rounds, although apparently the women played with a +1 soft cap in their games, but whether due to different rules or different knowledge of the rules, I don't know). We're still in the quarters, though (one of the teams fell down to the pre-quarters, lost, and had to play a fifth game of the day in the B bracket quarters).

Quarters were against Philthy, who were looking much the worse for wear after a hard partying night. And with only somewhere between 10 and 13 functioning players, they needed everyone. Nevertheless, their offense at times featured an unbelievable amount of running. We were no longer a favorite to win or even contend for the tournament by this time, but we still had enough good players and experience that a run of wins wouldn't be out of line. But it didn't happen, and despite yet another late rally, we couldn't overcome a big deficit and lost at the cap, 14-12.

I was particularly irritated late in this game when we played a zone defense and no one on the sideline ventured more than 2 yards from where they started the point. Earlier in the weekend, I noticed players doing the same (and pointed out that the guy 30 yards away probably could not hear what was being said). I myself am generally not all that active on the sideline, unless not enough people are helping out already. There is much to be gained from having one sideline person talking to exactly one player on the field (and only that sideline person is talking to him, excepting perhaps if it's a deep and there is one guy on each sideline). Instead, it's "Tom, look at 34, now Fred, a guy is coming up behind you, ok, ok, force middle, 34 again, Tom, ooh, is that a travel, up, up" while Tom and Fred have to listen (or not, more likely) to several voices and figure out which words are for them. This isn't to pick on the Southern Dandies, as it is the exception that teams talk efficiently. But it's big.

Overall, I had a great time at the tournament. Lots of time to hang out, good opportunity to play. I was happy with my ability to move around, less happy with my throwing skill at times (although in fairness, I've only thrown goaltimate passes since October). Good group of guys who were genuinely happy to be there (one fellow even flew out there with wife and infant, rented a pop-up trailer, and left late on Day 2 to head back) and that rubs off. So thanks, guys.

Trip to the Big Island after the tournament was a lot of fun, too, but I won't bore you with too many of the details. One day exploring the wet Hilo side, including a trip to Waipio Valley, one day at the volcano (lava flow was outside the park, could only get a mile from the flow but watched it from there), 4 days on the Kona side. One 2-tank dive, several great snorkels, and a manta ray night snorkel adventure.

Hawai'i, and Hard vs Efficient

2009-01-02T16:13:00.000-08:00

We bought our tickets for Kaimana, after some headaches along the way. We'll be spending a week on the Big Island after the tournament (3 days on the Hilo side, including the volcano, and 4 days on the Kona side at a TBD discounted luxury resort (yeah, recession)). From the time I started looking at flights, the price cycled between $600 and $900-1100 four times, and each time I missed the buying opportunity, I got sick to my stomach. The third time was especially painful, as I saw the fares and did a few other searches and got FF numbers and rejiggered and played whatifs, and by the time I hit "select flight", all the low fares had disappeared. We had almost resolved to paying an extra $900 for the three of us but waited it out, and at 9 pm on New Year's Eve, prices dropped again so I snatched them up. Fares are still at that price if you're willing to leave at 6 am.

I decided I'm going to play hard, not efficient, at the tournament. I'm playing with John Hammond's team, and it looks to have a lot of good players, he says, so I should have the liberty of burning my energy in short bursts without feeling like I have to be ready all the time for the team. My normal mode is to play efficiently. I spend a good part of my time doing purposeful walking on offense, and generally try to minimize damage on defense.

The two modes are not mutually exclusive, of course, but there are different mindsets. The downside of "play hard" is that you can play stupid, biting on fakes in order to make the big D, or being overaggressive on marginal throws. The downside of "play efficient" is that you can be too passive and thus let others make the turnover (and it can mask laziness).

Efficient play can work really well on offense if the team is smart and has the ability to reset at will. The team then flows as one, creates lots of open space, and punishes the poach (if there are fewer people moving around, it's easier to spot the poach and find the poachee who has moved to the open space). Hard play is more stereotypically frothy defense, but I prefer to think of it as good positioning like in basketball. I play hard at my pickup basketball game, especially on defense, constantly moving my feet and getting my body into position, not flailing with my arms. In indoor soccer, I usually play goalie, and I play hard there, too (though that doesn't involve running so much). I move around, run hard to get loose balls, diving even, and am willing to take a shot to the body to stop it. When I'm in the field, I tend to be more efficient, though I'm not as sure how to be efficient playing soccer since I don't have great control of the ball.

No love for the Coop cut

2008-12-02T17:01:00.000-08:00

This week's Huddle discussed endzone offense. I liked Wiggins' talk about using easy breaks or non-break breaks.

Ostensibly, DoG's endzone offense has always been the swing/strike regenerative offense with the 45 degree "gut cut" thrown in as an option. However, we've always had an alternate that has never really been codified. This year at Worlds, we really started going to this option a lot, and finally named it after Michael Cooper, who perfected the shoulder shimmy Coop cut.

So what is this cut? It's just a quick step to seal off the defender, and cut directly in front of the thrower, no more than 3 yards away. Break or no break, it's very easy to throw a soft pass over the marker's arm. The only way the defender could block it would be to lay out before the throw is made. The cut is ideally made from about a foot inside the endzone.

Alex and I have always preferred the cut from the front of the endzone instead of the back. As the various Huddle contributors pointed out directly or indirectly, the cut from the back is a race to the cone and good solid defense (front, keep the buffer but not too much, don't get turned) can usually stop this while tiring out the cutter. The cuts from the front rely on soft break passes or the threat of the soft break. The horizontal cut straight across the field is tough to hit only if the pass is fast.

The key to the cut is that the thrower needs to be ready to throw. If the thrower sees the cut and reacts to it, it might be too late. He doesn't have to be sitting on the throw, although he can, but his weight needs to be set so that he can immediately move to it. For this reason, I don't think I would recommend this as a default endzone offense for any team other than ours (although Frank might like it because a power move can lead to a goal).

I hate "home" and "away"

2008-11-27T16:51:00.001-08:00

When I'm playing, I'm on the field. I know which way an opponent's forehand is, even if he's lefty. I do not know on which side of the field my bag is sitting on. And we are supposed to have people on both sidelines anyway, so both sides are home.

While I'm here, I can't stand that back of the endzone cut. Especially the endzone drill that promotes it.

Hate it when the team wants people there 60 or 75 or 90 minutes before the game and at least 30 of those minutes are spent chit-chatting or lazy stretching or standing and throwing unrealistic passes. You can do a full warmup (including adequate throwing) in about 30 minutes if you are efficient. If you have some specific team thing or a special throw you want to add in, too, add 10 minutes. What's the big deal about getting there 20-45 minutes extra early? It's time wasted, energy wasted, and focus wasted. Those things ain't free.

My kid's soccer team had a drill using one ball where each kid was standing around 95% of the time before having about 5 seconds of "skill work". Hated it enough that I got up and left to go work out.

And now for things I like.

Jim’s Nationals report

2008-11-07T14:51:00.000-08:00

Once again, this year’s Nationals is not like any other Nationals.

I wrote just prior to the event, exaggerating only a little, that 0-3 was a distinct possibility for our first day. I did believe that it was going to be a fight to get into quarters in a decent position (good seed or not exhausted). Our team was thin in numbers (18 players on Saturday, swelling to 20 for the rest of the tournament, minus injuries) and in talent (missing a lot of big names from Worlds and last year’s Nationals), and our performance earlier in the year (Worlds notwithstanding) was decidedly poorer than the previous year. In 2007, at Boston Invite we had a play-in to make top 8, then lost a one-pointer in the 9th place semis bracket; in 2008, we lost a play-in to make the second 8, and ambled to a 17th place finish. In 2007, at Sectionals, we lost a one-pointer to make the finals; in 2008, we finished 6th. In short, no matter how you looked at it, we were significantly worse than we were in 2007, when we battled to win it all.

But when the games started, this was not at all the case. We started off against Madison’s Old Style (#2 from the Central), which had beaten Surly in pool play at Regionals. We broke with tradition and insisted everyone get there early, to run a huck drill at 9:05 (game at 9:30) and then some endzone scrimmaging prior to the game. On offense, I made it a point to treat this game as an elimination game, and our offense came out and scored the first several times we got the disc. Before we knew it, we were cruising in for a 15-4 victory. “Huh,” I thought.

Next up was Miami’s Anejo (#2 from the South), with some of the old Refugees and some younger guys who apparently inherited their marking habits. This was a key game, we all thought, as a win would put us in good shape to be able to lose to one or both of the regional winners and still be in good position to run the table at the end. But they kept dropping the disc, and before we knew it, it was 8-0 at the half. They finally scored and mock celebrated, but the 15-4 final score was a good indication of the game. “Wow,” I thought, “these teams really suck.” To be fair to my team, we were playing solidly. Our O hadn’t been broken in 10 attempts (with only a couple turnovers even), and our D was converting their opportunities fairly efficiently. DoG’s best performances historically came when the O and D did their basic responsibilities (score and get turnovers, respectively) well but not historically so, but the D managed to convert their turnovers at a high rate.

With some room under our belts, we knew we could lose our next game to Troubled Past (#1 from the NW) without forcing us into any must-win games. They appeared to have about the same team as last year, when we beat them by 1 in pool play and 2 in the semi. But once again, they made mistakes and we didn’t, and it was soon 5-1 in our favor. I think at this point they backed off and conceded the game. (There was one point in here that one of our new guys came up to me and apologized for that last point. I had no idea what he was talking about, so he said he was getting into it with one of their players. “Which one, #3 or #77?” I asked him. “Don’t bother with them, that’s what they do.” But in fact #3 (my old friend Aaron) was not playing that game at all this year.) We continued to roll, although the O finally got broken at game point and then survived a multi-turnover point to avoid getting broken a second time (I was rooting for either team to score at some point as I just wanted to get off the field and not wear myself out). 15-8.

We had clinched a spot in the quarters and were already calculating necessary point differentials and tie-breakers. Our first opponent on Friday was Philly’s OLDSAG (One Last Ditch Shot At Glory, for about the fifth year in a row), who had surprisingly lost to Denver’s Double Black (SW #2) on Thursday at double game point. It was a little windier this day. OLDSAG didn’t play that well, and we rolled them 15-8. Somewhere late in the first half, I developed a big knot in my calf and removed myself. I went off wandering around looking for treatment, stopping at the Ironside tent first (Russ couldn’t take me), then to the Frisbee central (no massage until 1, just a tape guy, who told me to stretch it), then back to the field eventually. Coop’s wife Amy, who is a massage therapist also, worked me over after the game a little, and spread out the pain from a single spot to a much wider area.

Our final opponent had rendered this contest meaningless for us by getting smoked by Anejo in the morning game. They needed to beat us to qualify, but we had clinched first place. I thus planned to take the game off, but with our small numbers, when we began struggling, I got into the game, first as a fill, then more actively as the game continued to be close. We just don’t think it’s a good idea to blow games before the elimination rounds start. I think it was during this round that Mooney hucked a backhand upwind to me right over my head. I couldn’t pick it up at first, and when I finally tracked it, it started to fade away quickly and I just watched it hit. Hall of Famer Danny Weiss thought this a good chance to heckle me, so he did. Some Miami guys were also walking by and joined in, and all reminded me later when they saw me again. (In the second half of the Miami game the day before, as we lined up, I saw my wife in the far endzone walking away from the field. I yelled down to her right past our opponents, “HEY JACKIE! I’M CUTTING DEEP THIS POINT! GET A PICTURE!” They came down in some odd form of junk and left me uncovered, so I ran deep. The throw was perfect for a picture, and as I was chasing it down I saw Jackie 15 yards in front of me with her camera, but it was just too far to even make a bid, knowing that if I knew it was gratuitous I would hurt myself. So the Miami guys heckled me, “if you were 33, you would have caught it.” I replied that 41 would have been enough. I also threw into a poach which I saw but didn’t bother to care about. Those two plays seemed to make their day.) So I played a few more points, and we had our closest game of the tournament, 15-11.

After a brief break came quarters against Seattle’s Throwback (#2 from the NW) , which had backed into the quarters through a) beating Mileage which was resting their players and b) Old and In The Way losing a DGP game to Chesapeaked when they had the disc downwind at least twice to win. The win had picked up a bit so it looked like it might be an upwind/downwind game. We had the choice of sides, but Alex wanted to start going upwind for some reason. I felt this was a dumb idea, giving away the advantage like that, but he insisted, so I continued to humor him and let him choose side. Both teams scored downwind the first two points, and I started to worry. But then we broke them upwind, and downwind, and maybe upwind again. Before too long, the game was safely in hand. During the game, one of their players came up to me and said, “I’m from Alaska, and we were talking about Sarah Palin last night, and your name came up. Is it true that you’re a Republican?” I laughed, and said, “No, although I vote that way every election. I used to vote libertarian, but they’re wacko and soft on terror. I just dislike the Democrats more than I dislike the Republicans. Maybe that’s just because everyone in Frisbee and Massachusetts is a Democrat.”

Thus we found ourselves in the semis once again. This year, the pools went about to seed, and the higher seeds all won their quarterfinals, none of them all that close. We drew Mileage (S #1), who had been rolled by Throwback 15-7 in their final pool play game. We knew they had two big receivers and one guy who wanted to throw deep. We had lost Dennis to a hamstring pull in the final pool play game (he said it was the first time all weekend he had run hard for more than 3 steps), Simon was available only for limited use, and my calf was sore enough to limit me a little. Alex insisted again on letting them start with the disc going downwind, and they got two easy hucks for goals. We also moved the disc down fairly easily, although they were running a poachy defense. I may have outsmarted myself here, as I decided to try to counter this before it was effective, and went to an alternative play (catch-hitch-back to catch) on the next point. But then the pull was short and it messed up the timing anyway, and we had to scramble. I hucked a low pass, and Coop tried to intercept it before a defender had a chance at it, and it bounced off his hand, break for them. We tried the catch-hitch-catch again the next point, I think, but this time the pull was too long and it again broke the timing. Our stack didn’t adjust and we found ourselves too far downfield, and a forced pass later, they had the disc and quickly punched it again. After yet another misthrow and break, we finally got back on the board with our first upwinder. We really needed a downwinder here from the D, but they couldn’t muster a turnover on that point or the next and so we traded out to an 8-4 halftime deficit. We had one chance to seize the momentum shift in the second half, after our D finally got a break and again had the disc going downwind, but an errant huck spoiled it. We may have gotten broken again on the ensuing upwinder, and that was pretty much it, barring a miracle comeback. No turnovers for Mileage in the first half, and not a lot in the second half, either. They made the plays, created the breaks when they needed them, and we did neither. Not that we invested a ton of effort into the season, and we had awfully low expectations coming into the tournament, but it is still disappointing to go out like that. Especially when the team that beat us rolled over in the finals.

After drinking beer for a few hours at the field, I headed back to Siesta Key to get ready for the Hall of Fame banquet. I had done some work in coordinating the Open Peer Review group in prior years and so wanted a chance to meet up with some of them (some such as Mooney and Sholom Simon I have known for years, others I’ve really only dealt with through email). The banquet was a good blend of milling and listening. The presentation lasted about 90 minutes out of 4 hours allocated for the event. First Mooney presented a slide slow of ultimate then and now. There were some other generic speeches, then came the honoring of the inductees. Rob “Nob” Rauch, the other emcee, announced that individuals would not get a chance to speak but rather each class (there were five years of inductees to get through) would come up as a group after each inductee was feted. I was disappointed in this at first, but in retrospect that was the right decision as it would have just taken too long and taken away from the time spent conversing and celebrating. Besides the inductees, several had family and friends present (Jim Herrick’s 92 year old father was there, for instance). The stars of the show in this respect were the Glassboro State crew, which must have numbered at least a dozen to celebrate the induction of two of their players, Timba D’Urso and Frank Bono. Matty J was there to support Danny Weiss, several Godiva women supported Teens (Glo could not attend).
There were probably 80-100 people total, a nice showing.

I made it to the fields to catch the first goal of the Open finals. Although I played on DoG with 11 of Ironside and have played goaltimate and in the Boston Ultimate Showcase Series with about a dozen more, I didn’t want to be one of those hangers-on who inserts himself onto the sideline as if he were an injured member of the team. So I meandered and tried to catch up with some people I hadn’t seen much of. It’s amazing how easy it is to miss people or to see them for only a fleeting moment on Thursday and not again for the rest of the weekend. (Maybe not that amazing, since there are 1500+ people and players are occupied for most of the day.) I was definitely disappointed for the guys, although happy for my Worlds teammates Husak and Namkung, old DoG teammate Justin Safdie, and fellow blogger and long-time finals sufferer Idris. Congrats, guys.

One eyed kings

2008-10-28T06:30:00.000-07:00

We joined a Grand Masters league this fall in Boston. 40+ for men, 35+ for women. I was surprised to find that there was enough interest to form 6 teams playing every Friday night for 7 or 8 weeks.

The level of play was higher than I had expected. I guess I was anticipating something barely above wheelchair ultimate, but most of the teams were reasonably skilled (somewhat expected) and occasionally athletic (not expected).

Our team had several of my DoGmates, and we rolled through the year undefeated, culminating in a too-close championship game 15-12 victory (tournament victory #115, if it counts), after we had jumped to an 8-3 lead. Our teammates generally started out unaware of our lineage. In our second game, one of our draftees pointed to an opponent and said, "He's the best thrower I've ever seen" and warned us that the other team was really good. We took those under consideration. But to their credit, they treated us like normal people, and played like it was another day at the office. And it was a fun group, as we all migrated to the local bar after the games.

Hmm, got another tournament this week, playing against just old guys, instead of against really old guys. We are going to be doing things a little differently this time, though I don't want to say what they are because we're going to need every last break. And it's quite possible that we'll deliberately go 0-3 on Day 1 to set up the greatest comeback ever. You heard it here first.

PS. None of us know nothin'. We all live in our own world and see things through our own eyes, and hear what we want to hear. The blogosphere gives others a chance to step into our worlds for a few minutes, but they still only see what we have seen, and not the world as it really is.

Worlds 2008: the play

2008-08-26T19:45:00.000-07:00

It was fun. After discussing that we shouldn't play every O point in important games for several reasons, Alex and I did just that (except for him subbing himself out due to turnovers in the finals and me sitting out a stretch in the semis due to an injury). And I think I was called first in the play about 80% of the time.

One factor that allowed for this (for me, at least) was that our tough games were spread out (other than having semis and finals on the same day!; Open played Q's, semis and finals over three days). Monday against Canada, Tues afternoon against Japan, Wed morn against Aussie, and the semis/finals on Friday. The Tues aft/Wed morn combo actually did take a toll on me as I was less effective in the Australia game. The 0 goals/0 assists of course understates my contribution that game, but I was definitely feeling it (14 O points against Japan, 15 against Oz).

Canada really played us to make in-cuts, so I began cutting deep right away more often after our Tuesday game against them. We also switched to ho stack a lot more, in fact playing the entire finals in a ho stack. It wasn't "the" ho stack, since we still didn't employ the Huck N Hope*, but it was "a" ho stack. Still primarily a cutback offense, but the spacing was different. I'm not sure what we will do in the fall.

* - I did throw one not-quite HnH pass in the finals, caught the disc as the first lane cutter, then saw Husak cutting deep and I just chucked it. I meant to put it out to the side and let him run it down, but it hung and he boxed out and made the grab. It was kinda fun, actually, but don't let anyone know.

I'm really a bit at a loss to explain how I was able to keep being effective while others got tired. After being pressed by Dugan a little bit about what I did to keep in shape, I finally confessed that I probably did less training overall than the typical elite Open player does on his off-days. Genetics certainly helps, but it's really got to be in the efficiency. I paid attention occasionally in the Open finals, and the Sockeye cutters were running all the time, fairly hard, too. And it didn't seem to be totally mindless, either, which was the impression I got watching teams like Jam at 2001 ECC (where I commented that every other offense runs a lot more than we did).

Somehow, the "offense of the future" might feature coordinated mayhem. Pro football plays are designed to provide similar looks and starts and then mix it up. Individually, cutters today may give themselves two options and make a hot read, but it's not that hard to pick up from the sideline who the first and second downfield cutters are going to be from the way they set themselves up (or the way the others take themselves out of the way). When not in the play, I often try to mix it up by acting as if I am the primary cutter, but definitely not every time. So perhaps future offenses (at least on set plays) will do this extensively. (We've had endzone plays designed to be similar, and counters on set plays, but those were always the exceptions and were obviously set plays, not anything close to free form.)

Fantasy totals (goals scored and thrown only) for all 11 games: Alex 29, Jim 28, Husak 26, Ewald 24, Coop 22, Dugan 19, Stoddard 19, others.
Fantasy totals for 5 tough games: Husak 22, Jim 20, Ewald 15, Alex 14, Dugan 11, Coop 10, others.
Fantasy totals for 6 non-tough games: Alex 15, Montgomery 12, Coop 12, Stoddard 10, Zaz 10, others.

I threw or caught 8 of 12 O goals against Japan, 6 of 8 against Canada in pool play, 0 of 10 against Oz, 3 of 11 against NZ in semis, and 3 of 10 in finals against Canada. My cell phone rang 30 minutes after the Australia game. It was my wife wondering I was injured and had been taken to the hospital and nobody told her. I knew immediately what she meant, and fessed up to not scoring.

Our endzone O became a parody of hot box O. Our median goal pass length in some games was probably 5 yards. Coop was amazing with those cuts, though, just a head fake and a shoulder shimmy and he was open for that pass all the time, so much that I called out "Coop cut" once (with just a little pause in between words, so it was both "Coop, cut!" and "do the Coop cut") and everyone knew what it meant and would later use the phrase.

Both the O and D performed better in the first halves. For the 5 tough games, the O scored 22/29 (points, not possessions) (76%) in the first half, 29/42 (69%) in the second. D got scored on 22/40 (55%)in 1st half, 25/38 (66%) in 2nd (with the first Canada game being an exception for both teams; O was 18/21 (86%) in 1st half in other four tough games, and D was 22/28 (79%) in 2nd in other games) (although neither is close to significant at the 95% level; even if I exclude the first Canada game as an outlier, only the D ratio is close to significant (p=0.06 using Test of Proportions). I think the "normal" should be between 3/4 and 2/3.

I got hurt early in the 2nd half of the Oz game. I was jumping to make a block, and the receiver ran harder at it and ran into my rib cage, probably with his shoulder. At first I thought I just had the wind knocked out of me, but an hour or two later, it was sorta painful. I was watching the disc immediately prior to the block, but I didn't think the receiver had a real chance at catching it, so I was surprised to get hit. But he eitehr got there more quickly than I thought or he made a reckless bid. I sat out the next game against Germany (17-4; I was thinking about resting that game anyway), then played a limited amount the next day. I did manage to take another shot in the ribs that day, anyway, on an innocuous collision while playing zone D. In our last pool play game (17-10 victory), Dugan (who had injured his ribs earlier in the week, worse than I) laid out and reinjured himself ("if the ribs weren't cracked before, they are now"). He didn't play at all in the semis the next day, and was surprised to find that he could play in the finals after taking drugs and warming up for a long time. On Friday, the day of the semis and finals, it hurt me to jog (it wasn't a cracked rib at all, but the muscle or the cartilage between ribs or some such thing), and sudden, low-gravity turns and accelerations hurt more than just running (there was a little soreness due to bounciness, but mostly it has been confined to muscle exertions). I played, and then on the final point of the first half, I cut to the cone but didn't think there was room for the throw, so I pulled back, but the throw went off anyway, and I had to leave my feet for it. Here is a picture. Of course, I landed solidly on my chest, right where I was injured. I told Alex I planned to sit out the second half unless we needed me, as we were up 9-5 at that point. But then we gave back one break, and then another, so I warmed up again and went back in. We traded the rest of the way until the final point, where the D got their first break since their streak of 5 in a row in the first half and ended the game. But those extra four points I played were hard and not something I wanted to do before the final. The D did a great job early in the game, getting 5 breaks in a row, but then let in 8 in a row prior to that final point.

In the final, they didn't hurt, but they definitely affected my wind, as deep breathing was a little painful and hard to achieve.

Since then, coughing is painful, and sneezing is very painful for about 30 seconds, although in recent days it seems to have improved. I played the summer league tournament the week following Worlds. I didn't have to exert myself too much on Saturday, but it was good to go on Sunday, although I was a bit more hesitant than usual on a few potential layouts. I played softball on Wednesday. Swinging the bat only hurt once out of five swings. Fielding was actually more difficult, as there were at least two that requires sudden reaching with my injured side, and I didn't make the plays as a result.

Definitely nothing like the high of previous championships. But then again, our first practice this year was on Sunday after our first game (along with three tournaments and two scrimmages). The overall level of play in the Masters division wasn't as high as at Nationals. I was a little worried that Cruickshank and Al-Bob were going to show up on Friday to play (Al was there and we drank some beers together, but he was spectating). I had written, "We expect Japan and Australia to be real threats, as well as Canada. UK and Germany are also potentially tough. More importantly, we are potentially bad, as witnessed by occasional lackluster performances this year." Japan and Australia both played us tough, but neither even medaled (both got knocked out by a surprising New Zealand team). Germany finished next to last, beating only the Venezuelans. GB finished with a losing record. I don't think any of the teams had a player who (even without our 'young' recruits) we would have been afraid to match up against. Compared to the Masters div at Nationals, at Worlds it was younger but less skilled.

We probably put out an O line at least once that averaged 43 or 44 years of age. Mooney 50, Greff 46, me 43, Coop 41, Alex 41, Bim 44, Simon 43 is the oldest that might have all been out there at once, but even our younger O players were 39 or so. So we were probably giving away 6 years of age per player against the Canadian D line.

I was pretty annoyed at the announcer in our first game against Canada (we played in the "spirit enclosure", a field set off from the others where they had a beer garden, seats, and four hot tubs). He started in right away with insults at both our ability and our spirit, almost before having had a chance to see either. Someone must have said something, because in the finals it wasn't the same. I wasn't bothered as much as some by the pro-Canada slant, as it was in Canada. (This is in contrast to the announcer at Worlds in 2002, who said when we were a point up, "Who wants to see a tie!" No home team there, either.) It's funny the things you hear when you're playing. I can pick out a "let's go, Jimmy P" or any instruction given to me by the sideline but not much else (including the line call).

The fall awaits now.

Worlds 2008: the experience

2008-08-14T19:30:00.000-07:00

I’m back, we won. I called home on Saturday, and my five year old son said, “Daddy, you lost.” “No, we won, we won!” “No, Alex had http://www.wugc2008.com/team/409 one more goal than you did.” But then he continued with “At least you outpointed him significantly in the close games while he padded his stats in the blowouts,” so I forgave him and decided to give him his little Team USA #88 shirt after all.

It was a full week. Alex and Marshall covered the games some. We played 11 games in six days, including semis and finals on one day. (Meanwhile, the Open teams played quarters, semis, and finals over three days.) Although two games a day might not seem like much to Americans who are used to four games back-to-back on each day (or three hard games a day at Nationals), it is surprisingly tiring. With at least one full round off between games, there are two full cycles of warmup/play/warmdown, coupled with a few hours of meandering, chatting, and watching. Plus, there is a week of dormitory food, dormitory housing, and beer.

It was a big disappointment that the tournament unexpectedly lost 10 of the fields to construction earlier this year. On the first and last days of pool play, we were at satellite fields. Thursday’s location (Jericho Beach) was incredibly scenic, but far away from the rest of the tournament. (The schedule-makers did a crack job at rotating the off-site appearances, other than scheduling Japan-US Open pool play at one of them.) As I mentioned prior to the tournament, it really adds something to the atmosphere to have all games and lodging co-located.

It was a strange campus. Other than a Starbucks and another coffer shop, there were no food or beverage options on campus other than the official dining hall, which did not sell individual meals, only a meal plan. Not even a single bar that I could tell. The University Village (with a couple walk-in restaurants) was a 10 minute walk from the fields and about 20 from the dorms, and the only food at the tournament (other than fruit/bagels) was a single pita cart staffed by two unmotivated younguns provided by the university.

There was an Athletes’ Village which was good in concept but underutilized in practice. They had 12’x12’ (or 15’x15’) tents for each country in one area, but there was almost no flow past this area, and you couldn’t see any of the fields from this area. Given the constraints of the space, there was no place they could have put the tents to make this possible, however.

Nice amenities: gallon container of sunblock for each team, two or more volunteers per game (they used cell phones to instantaneously update the score online), water bottle in player pack, water at fields. There were an amazing number of volunteers (I seem to remember hearing there were 400). Probably a lot of the $500K collected in player and team fees went to housing and feeding the volunteers. The online information provided to the fans at home was unprecedented for a Worlds (UPA does a pretty good job at Nationals).

The port-o-fields never seemed to be an issue, although it was rare that someone would need to run across them. I vaguely recall one player getting his feet tangled, but since most of us don’t pivot near the line, it didn’t get in the way. The endzone lines (which were lined, not part of the port-o-field) were pretty worn out toward the end of the week.

Other amenities that seemed a waste for me: bands at the field every day, four hot tubs at the main field. I would have rather had my team’s share of them to go for a keg or two of beer for us in the beer garden.

Like Alex said, the lack of opportunities to hang out with others and drink was a disappointment, although in retrospect probably not that different from previous Worlds. With some bad luck with the timing (it’s a big holiday! Your liquor stores should be open early, not closed all day!), our room was dry until Tuesday.

I missed the opening ceremony, but it was a lot of fun to receive our trophy and medals during halftime of the Mixed final. I also can’t recommend highly enough the energy that comes from the final being in a stadium instead of at just another field, even one with sidelines or bleachers set up.

I can’t stand how the fans indiscriminately boo pretty much every close call (and some not so close calls). I can understand the boos when there is an egregious foul, but every travel call and every foul call where there was no blood involved were met with boos. There is just no way that people in the stands have anything close to best perspective. I myself was convinced that Gehret’s second foul call was a bad one when I saw it live (from 80 yards away, drinking a beer), but two pictures from different angles showed his hand clearly in front of Savage’s, so maybe it wasn’t (and I’m not even talking about the body contact). But what I do know is that there is no way in hell any of those “spirited” folks booing could tell.

But overall, people were amazingly friendly, certainly to me and my team. I think I mentioned once before, I enjoy my nanocelebrity status. I got a lot of "Good game, Jim" in the line after the game, people introduced themselves, and I even got VIP access at the finals (worse seats, but free beer). Even guys who I may have thought or even spoken badly of for overaggressive play were friendly. So thanks, everyone.

Off to Worlds tomorrow

2008-08-01T12:37:00.001-07:00

I have to admit, this whole thing has kinda snuck up on me this year. We haven't been practicing nonstop, throwing in track workouts and agilities and a gazillion other training methods, we haven't been doing a lot of tournaments or trips, and I haven't been waking up at night sweating.

But then again, I am excited. There have been a few inspirational emails from old DoGs who can't go and from new guys. We are being outfitted free of charge by Five Ultimate, and we got Team USA discs from Discraft. We are DoG, and we are Team USA, and many people who have heard of us somewhere, sometime, will be seeing us for the first time and making impressions that they will take back home with them (as well as a few signed copies of the book, hopefully!).

Worlds is a tournament like no other. Club Worlds is special, too, but with the strong American presence at those, it feels a lot like other elite tournaments, with the non-UPA teams adding color but not a lot else (at least historically). But Worlds (WUGC, real Worlds, whatever you want to call it) has a more patriotic and international feel to it. Even if you're DoG, you ARE the US team, this year more than ever.

1996: Jonkoping, Sweden. (I'm surprised to find that I haven't blogged about these before). NY had a late comeback against Sweden in the 1994 Worlds, but otherwise, there had not been a challenge to US supremacy. The women had won 1994 Worlds by a large margin (might have been 17-1 in the finals) and also expected to cruise. Our jerseys were striped like referees, and we carried red and yellow cards in our pocket, as a symbol or something of the player's responsibility. We lost a one-pointed to Sweden in pool play, had to sweat out the possibility of a silly three-way tiebreaker (power pools went directly to the finals, no semis), and got our rematch against Sweden. One of my favorite memories is a morning throwaround on the day of the finals, with the Clash's "Death or Glory" blaring out repeatedly on a boom box brought specifically for that purpose. We won going away. The dorms were a short walk from the fields, meals in the dorms, pretty nice.

1998: Blaine, Minnesota. Being on US soil actually took away some of the lustre. Maybe it was just being in the middle of America. The turf was great but slow. We had a big team of 25, featuring many of the young guys who would not join us for real until after we had won Club Worlds in St. Andrews the following summer. My car (we were staying pretty far from the event) had Lenny in it, and he was already injured by Day 2. It took us an extra 20 minutes one morning just to get him packed up and to the fields, and as a result we showed up 28 minutes prior to gametime, but Mooney had decreed that anyone not there by 30 minutes before the game against Canada wouldn't play the first half. We went down several early, he relented and our car got to play, and we more or less traded out to a 3 or 4 point loss. This was our first real exposure to Furious, although apparently we played against several of their key players (while researching the other day, I saw Cruickshank's and Lugsdin's names in a writeup) in 1996. We beat the other teams and Sweden beat Canada in pool play. The tiebreaker gave 1st place to Sweden (who then got taken out in the semis by Japan) while we had to battle Canada again. Again we went down by a bunch, but this time I felt certain that we were going to win, all the way up to the final goal in a 20-15 defeat. We did fight back and take the bronze over Sweden, though. That fall, we lost two more games to Furious at Tuneup, but took it to them 17-9 at Nationals. Again, stayed at the dorms with other teams, and it was fun to hang around and see other countries' teams.
2000: Heilbronn, Germany. This time we booked late and got stuck about 20 minutes away at the end of the bus line. The fields, too, were spread out at the site, with no more than two adjacent. The Sweden fields were pretty tightly packed, and Blaine were pretty close but somewhat inconvenient because of these drainage ditches. Club Worlds in Hawaii were tight. Toronto 1991, Madison 1993, Street 1995, they were pretty close. St. Andrews, they were spread out a bit, though not as much as Germany. It's a real bonus to have all the fields close to each other, especially with only two games a day. At Nationals in Sarasota, the lack of byes removes some of the benefit of having all the fields next to each other. ANyway, back to Heilbronn. They had a beer garden next to the stadium fields, which was a nice treat. I don't remember beer gardens at other WFDF tournaments. We lost to Japan in pool play, once again with a poor performance after a long bye. They were all fast and jumped well, so I guess this was the first inkling that they had caught up. Won our other games, cruised over host Germany in the semis. Struggled at first in the finals against Sweden, switched to the side stack and ran off 13 straight without a turnover, but once again struggled at the end of the game. We finally prevailed 19-18, but there was a close call at double game point, and their captain (who had played with us a couple years earlier) played to the crowd, which is already predisposed to boo any close call for some reason, and really sucked the wind out of the victory.

And that's it.

2008, Vancouver, BC: Who knows. There are only 10 teams in our division, and they are Masters teams. I don't recognize many names from other teams (the rosters are online: ours is here; you can also see our results there). We expect Japan and Australia to be real threats, as well as Canada. UK and Germany are also potentially tough. More importantly, we are potentially bad, as witnessed by occasional lackluster performances this year. We are bolstered by having added three of our old nemeses from the Condors (Steve Dugan, Greg Husak, and Mike Namkung) for the tournament. Maybe that will catch some opponents by surprise. We just need to treat every game like an elimination game as far as preparation goes, and figure out how to keep 29 players involved.

USA
USA
USA
USA

Ultimate Techniques and Tactics available at Worlds

2008-07-23T05:25:00.000-07:00

A limited number of copies of our book "Ultimate Techniques and Tactics" will be available for $20 CDN at the Gaia tent at the World Ultimate and Guts Championship in Vancouver beginning August 2. If possible, we (my co-author Eric Zaslow (Zaz) and I) will set up one or two autograph sessions at the tent for anyone who is interested. You can also track us down playing with USA Masters, as long as we're not in the middle of a game.

See you there.

training request

2008-07-17T05:24:00.000-07:00

Someone on my team wanted to make a request. Suppose a player had a major tournament, we'll call it Worlds, in 3 weeks and wasn't in as good shape as he wanted to be. His remaining training time is limited and often comes a few minutes at a time. What would you recommend for him? What kind of exercises?

Nothing to see here, move along

2008-07-01T19:36:00.000-07:00

I’d like to apologize to the Masters Division for destroying whatever credibility we may have had. We won the “Easterns Div II” at the Boston Invite this weekend, which means we were 17th of 32. We came in seeded 11th or 12th and expected to finish about there, with a little luck in the top 8, with some bad luck something like 13th. But then again, when your average age is 40, you don’t practice, and you don’t do much training, it doesn’t really matter how good you used to be.

Well, that’s not really true. If we didn’t used to be really good, we would have finished more like 27th than 17th.

It all started out innocently enough. We were in the second tier of 8, seeded 2nd in our pool of 4, with top two crossing over against the bottom two from the top tier. We won our first game against Tombstone 14-12. We were up 2-3 the whole game. I got off a lefty backhand for the gamewinner (lifetime lefty backhand: something like 6/6, 3 GT). In some ways, this was a preview for Worlds, as they will be representing Canada, but they didn’t have a complete squad (one guy filming, one guy sitting, another guy playing with another team most of the time except for a few illegal points which we certainly would have called them on had it made a difference in our advancement), and I don’t know if they were showing us everything. (We withheld our new O and D formations, the bi-angled stack and the ho-stack clam.)

Then, disaster. 2 hour bye, plus we noticed our next opponents lost to Bodhi, 15-5. No problem, that locked up a top two finish for us, no need to get ready for the next game. And at one time (199x), that was true, we would have gone up 2-0 and traded out for a 15-13 victory. We came out flat, and got flatter, and flattened. There was a timeout late in the first half, followed by another break to lose half 8-5, and further degradation in the second half put us at 15-8. While this did lead to some enjoyment at figuring out all the possible tiebreaking scenarios (Bodhi has to lose by less than 14 to guarantee top two, we have to win by 7 unless Tombstone wins in which case we just have to win but if we lose then we want Tombstone to lose, etc.), it wasn’t enough to make up for the poor performance.

Next game started well with a break, but then more blah, going down 8-2. Near the end of the half, a short hospital pass went up to me, I jumped, my defender got his fingers on it a split-second before I did. I started to rip it out, but then let go while everyone anticipated the strip call and stopped. I waved "no call", and he threw the disc to a teammate for a goal while most players looked on. I stuck with my non-call but then asked for a check, mistakenly thinking that I had made a call before retracting it, thus meriting a check, but I gave that up too without realizing that this was what the rules said, too. Most thought it was a strip, one guy told me he thought it wasn't. The second half was a moral victory as we managed to get 9. This sent us down into a crossover game against some Brown alumni plus Chain guys, drastically underseeded at 23rd coming in (they finished 9th, ahead of two 2007 Nationals qualifiers, giving up no more than 10 in any game). We were tired and old, and we lost a few guys in having to relocate fields, and we got beaten deep repeatedly. The closest we came to being in a position to win was having a pass dropped in the upwind end zone that would have made it 9-6.

A scrawny scrub who hardly played wanted me to blog about how bad it was that they were seeded so low. It was a good question. Clearly, going in they were one of the top 16 teams. Zip, AJ, Joel Wootten were the biggest names, plus several other players who played at Nationals last year. But they were a pickup team without any history, and all of the other teams who were in the top half were real club teams (albeit two of us were Masters teams). Should one of them have been bumped to make way for a group of guys who were better but had no way to prove it beforehand? (They proved it afterward, but they were limited to no better than 9th.) A few years ago, another pickup team (Thermonuke) won this tournament, but they had a little more history and a wider cast of characters. On the other hand, these other teams may have worked hard and earned a spot.

btw, I’m a strong proponent of stratification in tournaments. The Women and Mixed divisions at Boston Invite both had an 8 team round robin with no crossover (but also disappointingly no final game). For Open, there wasn’t as clear of a line, certainly not at the #8 spot, and except for Great Britain and Machine, none of the Elite teams had plane flights. With a full set of Nationals teams, a completely split-off Elite div is probably the best, but with less of a field, this way makes sense.

So we lost and got rewarded with an 8:30 game on Sunday. Not surprisingly, at 8:20 we didn’t have a full squad, and I’m sure our opponents were wondering if they were going to get a forfeit. Got a break early, gave it back, traded until we broke to take half 8-6. Gave it back and proceeded to trade to 11-11, scored, then broke three more times to win.

This set up the semis against Colt .45. Our previous matchup against them at White Mountain Open in 2007 helped to launch a blogging career, but there was to be no repeat of that loss. There was again not a lot of ebb and flow to the game; perhaps we got a three goal run once, but otherwise, just single breaks here and there. (Runs always add to the dramatic tension in a game. The only exception is if there is a long streak of no breaks at all, especially if there are some points with multiple turnovers, and you start to wonder who is going to blink first. As an O player, I always felt more pressure in this situation, as your hopes get up when your D gets a turn, only to have them sink away again on the cluster of an offense they run. Repeat.) One of their guys called travel twice on Arnold on non-egregious violations, probably in line with what others were doing, then after the second one, tapped the disc in a little too enthusiastically and knocked it out of his hands. At some point, Arnold told him he didn’t know how to play the game, so for the rest of the game, whenever this kid did something good, he would repeat the line. And I would repeat the line to my team whenever one of his pulls sailed out of bounds halfway up the field. Eh, no hard feelings, it’s just amusing to me now.

After the game, we tried to find an open field to move up our “final” (there was a bye scheduled) but couldn’t, and our opponents (Tombstone again) weren’t all that interested in waiting around to play us again. Their captain came looking for us and said, “We have 12 guys playing still and 3 of them are going to get hurt if they have to play another game.” So I raised my arms in triumph, and he didn’t argue with my proclamation of our victory, so we are claiming that as a forfeit win. We’ll see them again in a few weeks at Worlds.

I stayed around (my wife was still playing) and watched the end of the Open semis (both one-pointers) and most of the Open finals. GOAT-Pony was a multiple-turnover final point. The final turnover came on a long pass than hit the ground before a diving BVH could catch it, and he lay there after for a few seconds, clutching the disc. His opponent came up and tried to rip it out of his hands, but BVH wouldn’t let go, and the opponent started yelling at him, unaware (I hope) that BVH was mildly injured. But even after understanding this, he was still somewhat belligerent, so I screamed at him, “Why don’t you just piss on him?” as that would seem in character.

The finals were exciting. GOAT is my new role model for Huck n Hope. Boston was also unafraid to put it up occasionally on a whim, but not nearly as often. Kids today.

Ultimate Showcase Series

2008-06-23T17:21:00.000-07:00

The Ultimate Showcase just completed its third year in the Boston area. It's a series of games featuring the club players in the Boston area against each other, competing in Open and Mixed.

There were three preliminary games at area schools (Concord, Bedford, BB&N in Cambridge, Charlestown) prior to the finals at a nice new soccer stadium in Somerville.

My team (Cambridge) won the Open final (hurray!) but gave up the final four points to lose the Mixed final by 1 (doh!). Even though I didn't care too much, I still hated losing that final in that way. I thought we had clinched the game after I caught a long pass in the crowd (flat-footed; I lead the league in flat-footed contested catches) and dished off a lefty backhand for the goal to put us up 14-11 with about 6 minutes left in a running clock (we had the field only until 3 pm). But boom, boom, and it's 14-13, pull with less than a minute. With about 20 seconds left, we decide to throw it deep, turn, and then they launch their own deep pass with about 8 seconds left for the goal. (It wasn't really clear, though, what the cap rule was, whether the game would have ended right there or if the point would have been finished.) The soccer guys who had the field next and were watching were nice and allowed us to play another point. But long throw, non-catch, and they moved it upwind 70 yards for the game.

Our Open team barely made it to the finals. We lost our first game 15-11, and because of point differential needed to win our next game by at least 4. We took half 8-6, then stretched it out to 14-9, but once again, we faltered. Gave up one again, then another, then another turn, got it back, another turn, got it back, and then punched it in to make it on the margin (our opponent had already clinched their spot by scoring at least 9).

It was good playing with the Boston Ultimate guys, but I wish more of them had participated. I don't think that any of the ones who played in the finals were teammates of mine ever (other than Alex) (ok, there were two, on further review). Hmm, interesting also, I just looked at their 2007 roster and only counted 11 guys who I had played with just the year before.

Kudos and thanks to the crew who ran these events, Erik Sebesta primarily. It would be good to get more fans for these events. We seemed to be plagued by bad weather this year. The finals had looked like storms, but instead just brought high winds, at least until about 30 minutes after the game, when lightning and heavy rains did hit.

Blogging the Huddle- #4

2008-06-18T07:46:00.000-07:00

It's a great time to be a young player. There is so much information available on strategies, teams travel much more than they used to, the knowledge about training is miles ahead of what it was.

The most recent addition to this list is The Huddle. This is unique in that it has many different opinions on a common topic.

This bi-week's issue is "The 'Up!' Call" on what to do when you're beat deep and it's thrown.

Responses on what to do immediately were split between "find the disc" and "sprint all-out and react to the receiver finding the disc". (Of course, there was a lot of "It depends..." in there.)

But the purpose of this blog entry is to provide a forum for comments. The editors decided not to allow comments for good reason, but I figure the quality of commentary here is often quite high (better than the posts in some instances!), so have at it. What did you think?

PS. They have 100 000 hits already! It took me a year and a half and 150 posts to get that. Congrats, and well done!

Masters Easterns

2008-06-09T18:44:00.001-07:00

For a day, it looked like this tournament was destined to join an elite group that included Turkey Swamp 1997, Tuneup 1998, ECC 2001, and Nationals 2004 as contenders for Worst DoG Tournament Ever. Nothing went well, and there wasn't even a glimmer of hope that things were going to go well. Since it was the first time that some had played since Nationals, and none of us had a whole lot of PT since then, it wasn't quite desperate, but neither was it looking like just a little blip on the road to success.

But then we did well on Sunday, so we can return to our slumber.

To save you all from having to read Alex's recap, I'll mention our scores: 15-6, 9-15, 15-12, 8-15; 15-8, 15-8. We had about 14 on Saturday, about 11 on Sunday. The turnaround was largely due to improved play on our part but also worse play by our opponents, who seemed to have some fundamental problems with catching on Sunday.

My own play mirrored that of the team's (or perhaps the team's mirrored mine; my ego is large enough to believe that the complete difference between Saturday and Sunday was me). I was on travel for work and so ate too much and slept not enough and was feeling a little worse for wear by Saturday. I never was able to feel like I could get to top speed. I couldn't chase down a huck from John Bar in the Philly game, a point that started our downfall (it had been 4-4 without a turnover prior to that). I got winded a little too easily, even accounting for the 90+ degree temperature, and I was just jogging a little too much on D.

But Sunday was a lot better. Again, there are still areas for improvement, but everything seemed to go easier and provide fewer reasons for anguish.

The low numbers for our team was disappointing. It's a local tournament for us, we have a roster of somewhere between 25 and 35 (depending on how you count all the guys who have standing invites but didn't play at Nationals and the out-of-towners), and we have a smaller team than a squad from Nova Scotia. Worlds is coming up in less than 2 months, and although people are married with families, etc., it's still not good that we have so few. Philly is hosting a six-team Masters tournament in July that would be a perfect tuneup for us, but if we have such bad turnouts so close to home, I can't imagine we'd have more than four show up in another Region. But I'm sure everyone will be there for Worlds.

Not a whole lot else to report. I called two fouls and a strip, don't think I had anything called on me. The strip was worth retelling. It was the 2nd half of Saturday's game against Philly, we just got a turnover, and Alex threw me a short pass, which I pancaked. Paul Bonfatti came diving by and swatted it away at about the same time that I grasped it. I'm quite certain that no one else but us two had a good enough perspective to know for sure. The flight of the disc afterwards was probably more typical of a clean block, but I'm also reasonably confident that I had both hands firmly against the disc before he touched it. I called it, Paul protested, I thought about it a little, remembered back to 1994 in the semis of Easterns against Philly when I called a similar strip, and decided that there was probably about 1.0-1.2 total strips between the two plays and so therefore the fair thing to do would be to take back the call. They put it into play right away and scored while some of us were still standing around wondering what happened, so I insisted that there be a check, and then some of them were upset that we were making up rules (as Alex mentioned, the game was a bit chippy, as was our game against them in the quarters of Nationals last year), so I briefly considered and threatened to stick with the original call, which I still felt would have been defensible, but we all settled on a check, their disc. And they scored in two passes.

Both fouls were on the same stall count. Oddly, the fact that they completely prevented me from releasing a throw made them less bad in my mind, since that indicates those were probably legitimate attempts to block a throw rather than deliberate or semi-deliberate muggings to prevent a break. That is, the contacts were hand-to-hand (or nearly so) rather than involving the arm, shoulders, or body.

While I'm here, the recent Huddle article asked about how to stop a handler who suddenly is going deep. My immediate thought was that someone would suggest "mug him" (or the other guys who are throwing to him), but I was surprised that none of the guys and only one of the women came up with that idea (and she attributed the idea to other teams, not hers). I guess none of us have ever played WITH someone like that, only AGAINST. It's like Lake Wobegon, we're all cleaner and more honest than average. I guess I plead guilty to that, too.

WMO 2008

2008-05-25T17:24:00.000-07:00

Short story: see last year. Replace "Colt .45" with "Dartmouth Alum" (or Die Nasty, I think they were called), throw in a couple more 1-pointers, and you'll be all set.

The most remarkable thing of the weekend was that there was one point in the first or second game where all seven players were wearing the same shirt. I can't ever recall that at a spring tournament, and there were probably whole years where it didn't happen except at Nationals.

Saturday, we had 13 players (one bailed last minute with a "tweaked back"). Not too hot, sometimes cloudy, occasional wind (in one of the games, there was a string of 4-5 points in a row where the wind picked up when we were receiving and died down when we were pulling). We debuted the horizontal stack, and ended up using it fairly often over the weekend. It worked best for us when the downfield cutters got off quick passes in succession. The only long pass the handler stack completed to a cutter was a quail forehand I threw that bounced off the chest of the defender. But it was kinda fun running back and forth a few yards at a time until something opened up.

We had the desired first round bye, which let most people drive up Saturday morning. I was shocked when I got there 10 minutes before game time that we actually had more than enough to play.

We lost our second game to Phoenix, 14-13 or 15-14. We had so many opportunities to score in that game but turned too many of them. We received at double game point, Alex hucked to me, it hung a little and my defender made a good but not great play to knock it over (I should have boxed him out better). They hucked it back, caught it, and then we didn't get enough people back to play defense and they scored it. Overall we did poorly that game on huck defense. Phoenix went on to win all their games until losing in the semis to Bodhi, a new Amherst/Boston team that started off in the B bracket.

Next game was to avoid the 9 am pre-quarter round. We sat around in between games and skipped the hot box warmup, so I asked prior to the opening pull whether we would go down 3, 4, or 5 before waking up. Strangely, though, it was us that started off well, leading 2-0 (at which point I quipped, "time to trade out until the cap"). But then they woke up and went up two breaks and received to start the second half. I vaguely remember some zone or junk D as we made our own run to start the second half with several breaks, and we traded out to win 13-10. This guaranteed us at least 2nd place and thus a first-round bye, provided we could beat Colt 45. They came in seeded 2nd in the pool (us first), but were missing Match and some others and had gone winless. It was a pretty low-key game, and though it appeared losable somewhere along the line, we held on for a 13-10 win.

For Sunday's play, we were down to 10, as three had other things to do (including, get this, a "Soberfest"). Two who were supposed to come for Sunday only bailed. Then two were late, and one stupid idiot pulled up lame because he drank too much beer (not that there's anything wrong with that) and not enough water. We went up a break and had chances for another, but pissed it away and once more went down two breaks, pulling, at half. This time our run didn't start until 12-10, but we tied it up just in time for the hard cap, double game point. We got a block just outside our end zone, and immediately called time out, which we had agreed among ourselves that we had. No, no, no, says the other team. "I'm a captain, and I agreed with one of your guys that there were no time outs this point." "Well, I'm a captain and I did not agree to any such thing, so you can't use that argument." They tried to invoke the Captain's Clause, but again I insisted that none of our captains had agreed to that, so barring any such agreement, we should play by the UPA rules (which I was beginning to doubt that I knew correctly; I sure hope I am correct, or else I truly made an ass out of myself after the game, instead of just sorta). Eventually, they generously let us keep the disc with a stall count of 3. After a few seconds, I cut for the dump, but kinda cut away since there was a lot of space there, and the thrower threw it straight back, and my defender laid out for the game-ending Callahan. I was still mad enough about the time out that I got my rulebook out, then walked over to the frisbee central to make sure there weren't any tournament-specific rules about timeouts in the cap, then came back and handed the rulebook to the other captain and said, "Here, read this."

We then had a consolation game against Red Tide. This one yet again went to double-game point, us receiving. We turned it twice, but so did they, and we finally scored on a DGP possession (our first goal in five chances). I did a little fist-pump after throwing the game-winner, just as a little reminder that we could still win a close game (I guess we did okay on this score at Nationals last year, but against Open teams, we have had a lot of one-pointers with mostly bad results).

Although there were lulls for sure, I felt pretty good, easily my best "first tournament of the year" in at least five years. My D on handlers was pretty good, not so good on zone D, okay on receivers. No real terrible decisions on throws (not to say perfect execution, but some good long throws), always something that can be troubling after a layoff.

We were discussing how strange it was that we were able to do well with our advanced age. Only 4 of 13 were under 40. I figured even with only 10 people there Sunday, we still had the most years of life of any team there. And we were even missing 20 of our teammates.

Japan Friendship Tour 1994, part 1

2008-02-27T18:39:00.000-08:00

My wife was out of town at a Frisbee tournament last weekend, so I took the boy to go sledding with the de Frondevilles over at a hill in Arlington. This was his first real sledding hill, although we had gone a few times in the backyard. He can actually get some speed going in the backyard if the snow is right, and there is a tree a bit off to the side to make it interesting, but it’s small. At the Arlington hill, I rode with him a few times at first, but then decided to let him go by himself (after glancing around to make sure the missus hadn’t flown in suddenly to say it was a bad idea). He made it just fine, although with the crowded hill there were a few close calls. I think he may have even been knocked over one time at the bottom, but it was barely hard enough to merit a foul.

The memory of careering down a hill, however, brought back memories of 1994. Twelve of us were flown to Japan (all expenses paid) to be instructors for a week at a frisbee camp. This was about the fifth time that Masa Honda and Hiro had worked with Mike O’Dowd (a teammate of Masa’s on Windy City in the ‘80s) to bring some Americans over to help them develop the game. Considering how good they’ve become, maybe this wasn’t a good idea (I told Masa at Nationals last fall (he played with O’Dowd’s Troubled Past) that maybe they will have to come over here now to give us clinics). Here is an article from an American ex-pat who was in Japan and played in their Nationals that year, a few months after this clinic.

The crew:

from San Francisco: Mike O’Dowd, Brian “Biscuit” Morris, Scott Lipscomb, Caryn Lucido, Molly Goodwin
Portland: Kathy Porter, Jon King, Aaron Switzer
Colorado: Buzzy Ellsworth
Boston: me, Christine “Teens” Dunlap
St. Louis: Mark Houska

This was the first time that women were flown over. There were a few women’s teams attending, possibly for the first time, but mostly it was the men’s teams. Teams attended for a day or two, had some instruction, and also got to play one game against the Americans.

To cut to the story, one night, we had a few Sapporo beers and decided to explore the grounds. (I should stop now and say we were pretty inconsiderate, disrespectful, and stupid about the whole adventure.) We were at the Dai Shin En in Takahagi, about three hours north by train from Tokyo, where we had stayed the first night. This place was a cross between a hotel, a camp, and a dorm. There were plenty of sports training facilities, including a disc golf course and a golf pitching course. But we were more concerned that night with the alpine slide and the artificial ski hill.

It was raining steadily that night, so sliding down a hill seemed like a good idea. We first tried the alpine slide, using trays taken from the cafeteria, but that didn’t work too well, so we headed across the facility to the ski slope. The slope was a hard plastic fake grass, with small densely-packed needles which got pretty slick when it rained. I think we may have been using the trays to slide down and were having fun, when someone (probably the same guy (cough Switzer cough)) found two big park benches. Thus, the Jamaican bobsled team decided to come out.

We were a bit drunk, of course, and hit the hill hard. I was on the first bobsled, and it became evident very quickly that this thing was fast. We did everything we could to slow ourselves but still sped down the hill. We managed to stop ourselves, though, and immediately started running up the hill to tell the other bobsled not to go. We yelled, waved our arms, and jumped up and down, but maybe it was the rain, or maybe it was the beer, or maybe it was the obliviousness of the girls and Switzer, and they took off at full speed, giggling all the way. Near the bottom of the hill, Switzer bailed out and suffered some brushburns, but the girls continued on, past the bottom, up the ramp, through a pavilion (narrowly missing a cement pole), caught some air, and got themselves stuck under a plasticky chain-link fence. We all immediately decided that this was the last run of the night.

Other non-frisbee memories:
Two water-closet stories: At the Dai Shin En, there was a row of stalls in the bathroom. The first one didn’t have a toilet, just a hole in the floor, as did the second one, so I stopped looking, figuring they’d all be that way, and I used this one all week, squatting to do my business. At the end of the week, I decided to venture all the way to the end, and saw an “American-style toilet”.
In the restroom at the Tokyo airport, there was an American-style toilet along with the normal ones. Apparently, they had had some trouble with natives not understanding how to use it, so there was a sign indicating that you are supposed to sit on the seat and not squat on top of it.
Waking up at 5 am a few times because of the jet lag and walking around town and playing the golf course. (It wasn’t really a course. The holes were each about 20 yard doglegs, about 6 feet wide, and you have to keep the ball within the ropes before chipping it into a bowl suspended above the ground.
Doing lots of guns.
Hanging out at the beach one evening and doing a group photo gun (that was a favorite photo of mine for some time; I wonder whether I still have it). The wall at the edge of the beach was really far from the water, I want to say 50-100 yards, and we were sitting there chatting when all of a sudden a wave ran all the way up to the wall. We then found out that there had been some recent drownings (strong swimmers, too; it seems that sometimes strong swimmers are more at danger because they think they can handle greater challenges when it really doesn’t matter how good of a swimmer you are. Snorkelers who dive very deep (more than 30 feet) can black out when they hit the surface, but that wouldn’t ever happen to an average swimmer who would go no more than 10 feet deep) where people got washed out to sea by a rogue wave.
Hanging out in the sento at the inn. Buzzy and Aaron were jawing good-naturedly. Aaron made a crude comment. Buzzy told him if he said it again he’d pop him. Aaron said if he popped him he’d give him a forearm shiver back. Buzzy repeated his threat. Aaron said it, and the rest occurred as promised, and we continued with our evening.
Mystery meat in the cafeteria. And the corn chowder.
Ro-cham-squirrel. We had a party one night, and Biscuit and I did a series of roshams to see who had to drink the warm beers lying around (loser drank). You weren’t allowed to look in the cup first to see how much, you had to guess. Luckily, there were no smokers, so there was never a risk of having to down a cigarette.

Next: the frisbee

rules

2008-02-09T06:33:00.000-08:00

From Section I Etiquette in the Rules.

The Spirit of the Game
[This sport] is played, for the most part, without the supervision of a referee or umpire. The game relies on the integrity of the indivudal to show consideration for other players and to abide by the Rules. All players should conduct themselves in a disciplined manner, demonstrating courtesy and sportsmanship at all times, irrespective of how competitive they may be. This is the spirit of the game of [this sport].

[This sport], of course, is golf. I just got my copy of the updated Rules of Golf today and noted that they made some (what I would call) common-sense improvements. For instance, simply carrying a non-conforming club will not get you DQ'ed, only penalized, and standing on your line of putt is now legal if done to avoid standing on someone else's line.

The other proximate cause for this post is the recent rsd discussion on the intentional self-mac or airbrush. My understanding is that the rule was put in because ultimate players also used to do other disc sports such as freestyling and controlled macking and finger-delaying was a part of their arsenal of disc skills. So, the intent is that since the disc is advanced by passing, it would be an unfair advantage to advance by delaying. But the rest of the rule, I'm not sure what was intended. Was it really intended that you should be allowed to mac it to someone else? If it's so easy to mack it to yourself, it can't be that much more difficult to mack it to a teammate. And in a related rule, is it really intended that you can mack your own pass but you can't catch it or greatest it?

I know that writing specifications can be difficult. I remember once on the Board that we put in some specific language one year to cover some contingency, and the next year the statement was reinterpreted to mean something else. And this was for something that we had thought about. There are many examples where you don't actually consider a case and then the case comes up and the users are left to interpret what is written.

A problem can arise when there is mindless devotion to what is written as the be all, end all. In golf, maybe this is ok, since the individuals have pretty much no input into what the rules should be. Perhaps the rules committee does respond to public complaints, as this year's changes seem to indicate, but traditionally it doesn't seem that way. Ultimate players, however, have a more direct relationship with the rules committee, and can even take part in rules experiments through local tournaments or leagues.

So we can change stupid rules or ambiguous ones. I think one of the main purposes of the 11th Edition was to tackle this, to remove exceptions ("the rules don't prohibit it, so it's allowed") and to clarify.

Anyway, as always, I remain ambivalent to rules interpretations. I know them pretty well, follow them pretty well, but am very lax at calling them, most of the time. (An exception is when I feel that the following conditions are met: the player gains an advantage, does it on purpose, knows the rule, and does it repeatedly. I called something like this at goaltimate last week and pissed off the violator. I'm perfectly willing to let laziness or ignorance or an occasional minor semi-deliberate offense slide, though.) I too often let myself get involved in rules arguments started by other people, and I usually take the petty pro-rules side.

And just for completeness, I'm anti-ref, pro-observer, don't mind certain calls being actively done by observers.

Testosterone man speaks (well, grunts)

2008-01-17T19:19:00.000-08:00

So, as you guys have figured out, that was an old rant of mine. I wanted to shock people a little, at least those who didn't recognize it right away. In 1993, Boston developed an attitude and tried to be like NYNY. We had a strong team, and had beaten NY by 7 at Regionals to take the top seed at Nationals. But then we met them in the semis and lost. That game had a "bench-clearing brawl" and a headbutt, and lots of jawing and posturing and all that. I remember the feeling very well still, although the specifics of the game are almost completely gone now.

I wrote it after reading complaints from a bunch of people who weren't there and who had no idea what it was like to be in our shoes. It drew quite a response. I can still quote some of the replies. "Mr. Parinella's horrible posting pisses me off." "@%&$ you and the horse you rode in on." "There is no place in the game for people like Jim Parinella." But there were also replies from people who knew me that defended, somewhat, me or my point of view.

So, this was my response.

Wow. I guess this means I'm not invited to play with Rec.Sport.Disc at Fools
next year.

I'd like to explain a little about why I wrote. I fully expected to get flamed
terribly. Tross (law...@brandeis.something) posted an opposing viewpoint that
was very mild, and got nailed for it, so I knew it was coming. I can take it,
I'm pretty thick-skinned. I'm enjoying this whole discussion, even though
anyone that dares to say anything along my lines provokes outcries of "Savage"
and "Kill that aggressive guy". I would like to thank the people that wrote in
with support. They really made my day.

I'd like to clarify some things that people may have gotten out of my post:

1. I am not an asshole. The sig was a reference to a previous post equating
wanting to win with being a "testosterone filled asshole". How many of you
know me? I think that I have (at least until this week) a pretty good reputation
(as a person) among this crowd. I think most people consider me a quiet, mild-
mannered guy who plays hard but fair. I'm sure many of those people are now
saying, "I never knew he was suck a jerk", but I was also hoping other people
would read the post and think, "Hmm, Jim's always been pretty reasonable. Maybe
he's got a point." I put my name at incredible risk because I read statements
that I considered to be just plain wrong, and I could not sit and let it go by
any longer. I've been on teams that didn't make it out of Sectionals, I still
captain a summer league team, I still play in pickup tournaments. I like the
game. But it's a sport, and sports have winners and losers.

2. I do not think that fights in the game are a good thing. But nor do I think
they're the end of the world. If there were an ejection rule, that would help.

3. Man is an aggressive animal. Screaming for joy is an act of aggression.
Wanting to win is a form of aggression. "(W)hen the disc is crisp, when the flow
is kind, I get this pulsating ball of energy brewing at the base of my skull."
Do you get this same feeling when you're on defense and the flow is kind? Isn't
this the same as saying, "I enjoy it when I humilate my defender"? It's not the
same as hitting someone, but isn't that aggression all the same?

4. It really is a different game at the top. This was really the main point of
my post, and it's the point that people seemed most unwilling to accept. Do
any of your teammates puke regularly after track workouts? Do you study game
films of your opponents to know their tendencies better? Do you have half a
dozen different defenses to throw at an opponent? Does everyone on your team
break the mark? I was on Earth Atomizer when we made it to the semifinals at
Worlds in 1991, but I think that this team is really at another level. I've
learned so much more in the last two years with BB than I did in my first nine
of playing.

5. Along those lines, individuals play for different reasons. If you're
playing because you like sports but don't like all the yelling, that's fine.
I don't want you to stop playing. Just accept that not everyone feels the
same way.

I will admit that I focused too much on aggression in my first post, hence the
overwhelming response. For what it's worth, I was calm when I wrote it, and
even revised it to remove the personal attacks (unlike others--you know who
you are). It just irritated me that seemingly most posts had no basis in fact
and relied purely on emotions and feelings (but isn't that always the case).

Flame away.

Jim Parinella
Big Brother
"If you can't open your mind, are you sure you still have one?'

Testosterone Man

2008-01-14T19:16:00.000-08:00

Ban whole teams for a year? Put a man in the penalty box for spiking? What a
bunch of thin-skinned self-righteous whiners!

I play for Big Brother, and it irritates me to know that I am now considered
evil. Where the hell do you people get off saying this? I thought Tross'
"Six levels of Ultimate" posting was an excellent behind-the-scenes look from
an "elite" team's perspective, and I had hoped people would realize and accept
that it's a different game at that level. Unfortunately, a lot of people
refuse to accept that socialism will never work.

I don't play the game because of SOTG. I don't bust my ass doing wind sprints
in the cold and rain because I want to be accepted in a friendly community.
I don't spend several thousand dollars a year and all my vacation time so that
some computer geek has a high opinion of me. Ultimate, beyond everything
else, is a sport, and sports are about competition. That's why I'm out there.
I want the game to become more competitive. I want Cuervo to sponsor us. I
want the game to be accepted in mainsteam America. I want it to evolve into
something more watchable.

You want to spike the disc? Spike it!! (Incidentally, George "Win one for
the Gipper" Gipp is often credited with the first "spike" in football). Most
spikes I've seen aren't personal--they're either celebratory ("Yes, we scored,
we're still in this game") or mildly retaliatory ("You fouled me all over the
field and I still scored! Ha ha!"). In fact, we even spike it during
practice. It's about intensity, emotion, competition, winning, and losing.
In the NFL, you know that if you get scored on, a spike is coming, and you
better accept it. I've never seen a football player return the spike, by the
way, like many good-spirited ultimate players do. Retaliation equates with
being a poor loser. It also takes your concentration away.

Retaliation led to the near-"fights" in the NY-Big Brother semifinal.
Unfortunate, but as Tross stated, it's surprising it hasn't happened sooner.
If you consider the typical ultimate player, though, it isn't surprising.
Most historically have never played another sport at a level higher than gym
class, and have no idea what it's like to do so. He thinks we should respect
each other because we are all equal, all of us just creatures of this world,
and he can't stand to see other people get ahead if they don't play by his
rules. Your typical non-ultimate athlete, on the other hand, believes that
the best man wins. The best way to stop someone from spiking at you is to
work harder and play better so he never has the opportunity. You say that we
have no respect for other players. I say we have a higher level of respect,
the respect of warriors, the respect that says you give everything you have on
the field of honor, and it's all decided on the field. Afterwards, it's over.
That's what sports is about.

I don't think most levels of the game have to be this intense. If you're just
playing for fun in a friendly, less-competitive atmosphere, then aggressive
behavior isn't good. Many NY/Big Brother players coach high school teams,
captain summer league teams, and play in pickup games and tournaments (many
"good-spirited" players mentioned in a recent posting about the Fairfield,
Ct., Turkey Bowl are NY/BB guys), and wouldn't dream of spiking it on some
rookie or screaming after a goal. But it's a different game at the top, as
different as your pickup touch football game is from the Super Bowl.

Learn to deal with it. If you can't, I suggest you take some mildly
hallucinogenic drugs and stick to summer league.

Jim Parinella
Big Brother
"Testoterone-filled asshole and proud of it"

Live commentary on Masters final

2007-12-11T20:22:00.001-08:00

There is a 20 minute highlight up on ultitv.com. I thought I would provide commentary while watching. For the most part, I typed as I watched, but paused it three or four times.

Here we go:
Preview. First game all tournament we’re wearing the white shirts. I tried to get cute during the flip negotiations and I ended up losing. Can’t remember if we won the disc flip or not, but we ended up choosing to pull a bunch. Interesting camera shot, far away. Wind is coming toward the camera and from the right maybe 30 degrees.

0-0, receiving. Swing, swing. Nice catch by me, funny high release, followed by another high release by Mooney, foul on the catch. Good effort by Coop just to get fouled. Could easily have been blocked cleanly. Hammer for the goal, Alex to Alec.
1-0, somehow that point got skipped, only one of the game. Amazing how in a 20 minute highlight, virtually every pass is shown.
1-1 We’re on O again, Alex sails the i/o over Alec’s head. Maybe I have a chance to get it but I’m not ready for it, turnover. Ahh, block by Alec, slow walkup. I cut off Mooney for the first pass, quick high release. Another foul somewhere. High release, another foul on Coop’s guy. Lots of short stuff. Alex looking hammer, swing, oh, throw that Mooney. Jeez, look that off, and throw THAT? Well, it’s a goal, ok.
2-1, us, pulling upwind They moved it up the line, huck it, too far (out the back). Ah, a long throw from us. Jeez, the airbounce under the defender’s arm for the goal. Must talk to thrower later.
3-1, downwind. Junk? No, just man, no wait, maybe junk. Ok, junk, as no one is covering the thrower. Trapped on the line, pivot dude. Ooh, nice catch on the crossfield hammer. Nice catch for the goal.
3-2, receiving upwind. Hey, we’re on the line. No offsides today. Paul, fake swing, back the other way. Greff again to me. Standing, standing, ooh, yuk, nice catch by Coop. Jim to Coop for the goal, my only (plus) fantasy point of the game.
4-2, pulling. Two passes, in the middle. Nothing to comment on, diving block or maybe a drop. Ooh, good long cut, but not thrown, then why throw that next one? Ok, it’s caught, that’s good. I was standing behind this one saying “NOOOO”..
5-2, pull. I can’t see them, they’re so small. Zone, thrown into the ground. Quick pickup and score. That’s gotta hurt.
6-2, pull. Another junk or zone. Probably zone, as the marker is chasing the Frisbee. Ok, transition, anvert up the field, another, (is that really your choice?). And another for the goal. Don’t really like that pass.
6-3, receiving. Look at us hold that line. Greff, swing to Moon, throw me the damn disc, I’m open. Swing back, hammer to Marshall. He looks like Lyn. I had a tough time figuring out who that was at first. A huck, ah, a change in camera view, finally, so you can actually recognize people. Ooh, toasted on the other end, fine catch for the break.
6-4, receiving. I break across the stack, must have been a pick in there. Durn. Interesting play to watch, I was focusing on Coop on the in-and-out cut, and Boardman poaches from 10-15 yards away. I spot him, follow his path back to where he was and then see Bickford all the way across the field and try to hit him. As he catches the disc OB, there is no one within 15 yards of him. I hadn’t even considered that I might throw it out there. The throw was carried a little by the wind. Smart play on the transition (how did he get over there after being the poacher? Where was everyone else?) ooh, should have been a veteran travel call on the huck, his foot was at least an inch from the line.
6-5, receiving. Mostly same line in still. Alex wants to huck but can’t. Simon swing to Mooney to Marshall. I have almost no trouble recognizing anyone even with the small screen. Mannerisms are pretty distinct. Another foul. Another jam it in the corner for the goal.
7-5, important one for them. Another camera switch. Huck up the line. Goal.
7-6, important now for us. After being in control, we need to take it to half. Good pull, play up the line. Cut of death, which was open all weekend. Crossfield swill hammer, nice catch by Mooney. Nice throw for the goal, Alex to Alec. That’s halftime.
8-6, pulling. Zone. Transition. Drop? No, point block by Stewart. Medium length huck from Seeger, Cameros runs it down for the goal.
9-6, pulling. Another transition point, I think. Fast break for them. Probably is a goal, yup, lots of open space.
9-7, receiving. Oh, c’mon, throw that. One of you guys huck it to me, even if I’m not that open. Great, up the line, the old “39” offense (as in “don’t bother using the other 39 yards of the field”).
10-7, pulling. Huck, little guy on defense, Turtle doesn’t see Fassina coming up behind. A “man on” call from his teammates would have helped. That’s about the only thing I want to hear from the sideline (or “nobody”, just as important). That’s worth a point a tournament. Jeez, Damon, we yelled at/questioned him all weekend on that backhand flip to the forehand side, he maintained it’s the right throw. Hmm, questionable choice on the goal throw, but a foul, and then a nice catch for the bookend by Fassina. Starting to pull away.
11-7, pulling. Man. Yup, could see that huck coming, no one near, goal.
11-8, receive. Can’t see, too small. Pass, camera switch. Funny, I can recognize myself just from the stomach catch. Another great “39” offense. Five straight passes up the line, cut of death for another goal by Alex, tying a career high.
12-8, looks junky. Downfield quick, goal.
12-9. receive. Just keep it going, guys. Alex fakes the huck. Swing, swing. Huck from Mooney, Simon wide open for the goal. He’s 10 yards in, but the defender has him check his feet, it looks like.
13-9, zone. Seeger and John Bar on the point. Oh, Lenny with the block. He was our best middle middle way back. Gary, pivot or do something that lets us know you’re not afraid. Ok, goal, stupid looking spike. Why now?
14-9, another huck to Turtle, blocked again by Fassina. Turn it over, D, the O wants to win this game. Sigh. Ok, not great movement, but everything is being caught. Ok, good movement there, about 15 passes later, goal!!!!!! Hugs,. Replay, the old chainsaw, even if none of the guys involved know what that call means.
Ooh, nice touch, putting the elimination chart on the screen.
Looks like we had only 3 turnovers in the game, unless there were some at 1-0 that the camera missed. Like I said, virtually every pass was shown, too. That would mean the O was 8/11 (two breaks), and the D 7/7. Their O would then have been 7/14, and their D 2/3. Vaguely reminiscent of the 1995 final, I guess, with the O playing well but not historically so, the D getting no more than an average number of turnovers, but the D not turning it over once they got it. I mentioned this somewhere, probably talking to the UPA reporter, that when we did well, it was because the D scored when they had it. It was always mentally difficult watching the D get it 2, 3 times in a point and give it back each time, not to mention that you actually get the break when they do score.

Q&A

2007-12-11T19:06:00.000-08:00

In case anyone is still reading, let's do a Q&A. Phone lines are open. Questions with 1-2 paragraph length answers preferred.

Mixed vs Masters

2007-11-16T08:46:00.000-08:00

Someone suggested jokingly that we should have played off against the Mixed champs to see who the real B Division champ was.

I'm fairly certain we would beat a mixed team. But we can ask what the strategies would be for such a game for both teams. And it doesn't even have to be mixed versus men, it just has to have three distinct classes of players. 4 studs on team A, 7 good but far worse players on team B, and 3 decent but far worse than good players on Team A. (This level of disparity can also happen in more recreational play, but one possible solution there would be to completely ignore the worst group of players.) This is what the case would be if you took an all-star team of players from Open and Women's Nationals and played off against an all-star team from Masters Nationals. To generalize, let's just say that the top Mixed and Masters players could play in Open and Women's but wouldn't be anywhere close to as dominant, and the benchwarmers at O/W Nats would be starters in mixed. I think that's a fair assessment of the talent level, although I'm not sure it's completely relevant.

Strategically, it seems fairly obvious. The "mixed" team would want to iso the big 4 as much as possible, just as any team wants to iso its best players, but has the added burden that there will be deep help. They'd probably need to run some kind of spread offense but would need to split its men. For defense against this, perhaps a version of the Clam, or maybe the old Tea Cup we used back in summer league 15 years ago. In that, we'd cover the other team's top 5 players and let the other two roam, nominally playing the equivalent of middle middle and deep deep. For this, maybe you'd cover just 4 and have one of the other three play something like 3 in the Clam or covering whichever of the women was closest to the disc.

When the "masters" team has the disc, I'd be tempted to run a homey with whoever is being covered by the women. Defensively, if this tactic wasn't being used, perhaps a clam with one woman as 4 (weakside downfield) and the others up front (or maybe move one of them to 5). Or maybe a zone. You would probably want to encourage the other team to huck it because you'd win most 50/50 shots. But the old team should be smart and really take a look at where all the defense is before hucking it.

All would mark extra aggressively against the less skilled players and sag off a little on the better ones.

I don't know whether you'd have any additional strategies for upwind/downwind or if you have large variations within each group. (Maybe you'd put your fastest woman up front in the clam.) Or whether you'd prefer to have women handlers or deeps, other things being equal.

Lastly, this will never happen because neither team could stand the embarrassment of losing to the other. Perhaps if someone were to make this the semi-pro league, they'd do it.

where da blogs

2007-11-13T18:36:00.000-08:00

Where is everyone? I was hoping to see recaps from AJ, Idris, Hh, and have had to make do instead with summaries from the lesser divisions (Timmy, the 15/16 game). C'mon, men, sack up and let us know what happened. Are there other blogs out there from people who were at Nationals, even as spectators? Feel free to post links in the comments.

And where is that Masters video on ultitv? The other divisions had the misfortune of having their finals on a windier day and so didn't appear as aesthetically pleasing as they could have. Even allowing for that, though, the games didn't seem that crisp on video (I had a morning flight and so didn't go to the fields on Sunday). Lots of athletic plays from the men.

Teams today seem to rely more on the athleticism of the receiver as a catcher, while we used to rely on their athleticism as cutters. Sure, use it as a cushion, but it shouldn't be the deciding factor.

For spending all that time at the fields at Nationals, there seems precious little time to see folks. There are always several people I see only in passing one day and never again, even people in my division. Thank heavens for the beer tent or I might not see anyone.

The immediate post-season is always difficult, even in a year like this one where we won and we didn't have the all-consuming schedule. It takes several days for my body to get back to normal, and there are still some lingering sore spots.

I would really have liked to have played one more game with our team against one of the Open teams at Nationals, just to see. Maybe we'll be able to get a full squad out next spring in preparation for Worlds. We had pretty spotty attendance this year other than at Regionals and Nationals.

That's about it.

1 of N, N >= 3

2007-10-31T15:57:00.000-07:00

Vancouver, baby! Worlds, here we come.

I have to admit, this turned out to be really fun and exciting and even emotional. Back last year when I knew I would be “getting the band back together”, I really didn’t even care about the results too much beyond simply wanting to make sure we didn’t embarrass ourselves. I regretted a bit that it was so many years after our peak and that we had probably missed our chance to win the division owing to our advanced age (average 40, only 6 of 31 under 37). But somewhere along the way, the magic returned, people remembered how to play, and it was just like old times.

My first venture into Masters still felt like Nationals, although with four of six teams making quarters, pool play didn’t have the same urgency to it. The most notable difference had nothing to do with the division, but was the weather. Only for a brief time on Friday was it hot and sunny, and for the first time since 1996 in Plano, we got rain. I guess the relative coolness prevented us from losing people to cramps and injuries, as we managed to finish the tournament with all of our players available (although with 31, playing time was tight for some). Equally impressive is that almost all of the vintage DoGs (average age 42) who were not presently hurt (at least five of them who may have been there if not) played.

I don’t think I changed my view of the division that much. Although 8 games in 3 days is a lot, more than the others play, I think the final is just fine happening on Saturday so the “real” divisions can have their finals on Sunday. I wouldn’t have minded moving up the final 30 or 60 minutes even though that would have meant there’d be less of a showcase due to the overlap with the Open semis (oh, and the other divs, too). The field wasn’t populated with 250 pound old men, nor was it just a contest between 33 year olds. The play wasn’t perfect, but then again, neither was it so in the other divs. Pool play was much more civil, for sure. There was almost no ho stack, and not an excess of hucking (or hoping). And once the games got going, and got close, it was just like it always was.

I was very happy with how I played. In contrast to every other tournament, I felt good from the get-go (partly due to taking a Wednesday jog with a Fartlek component to get my legs loose), and except for the start of our last two pool play games, never felt anything but. I did tire by the final, but that was the eighth game of playing virtually every O point in the tournament, 80% of those as The Man. I even got my most D time at Nationals since 2002 (1/6th of a point). I felt like I was as fast as last year, maybe even faster, although it would be hard to come up with a valid reason that would be so, what with my relaxed training and practice schedule. (I will provide one, though: I played in just as many tournaments this year, and about 50% more points. This was my old style of training, playing a lot of ultimate and demanding a lot from myself at those tournaments. Nothing trains you for ultimate quite like tournaments.) I caught about half a dozen hucks, most of them from Alex on opportunity cuts off of flow. These are my favorite, because it’s all about timing and recognition and I feel smarter than everyone else. Sometimes these will come when my defender flashes off ever so briefly to poach on an in-cut, but usually I will just be playing, with my defender fronting me from the middle of the stack, and the play will just develop such that I find myself with no help defender behind me and my man still fronting me, unaware of the change. I take a step in, then go as hard as I can deep for half a dozen steps before glancing up to see if the disc is up. Another reason I like this cut better than bolting deep in the four person play is that I am more confident that the disc will be thrown because I have already assessed the mark. In the finals, I found myself making what I thought was good long cuts several times off the called play only to find the marker preventing the toss.

As in each of the previous 17 Nationals we attended, Alex was convinced that we had the much tougher pool. This time, he turned out to be correct, as all four of the teams from Pool A won their quarterfinals games. These four teams had been awfully close in pool play, with only a meaningless last round game between us and Surly being decided by more than two points. In the other pool, Old and In The Way cruised through Day 1 outscoring their opponents 45-22 (including 2nd seed and 2006 runner-up BIGS), setting themselves up as the early favorite in the tournament.

We started off with Ironwood from Arizona, a nice break-in for us. We had “only” 27 at that point, which was still our largest roster of the year, and it gave us a chance to get everyone acclimated to the tournament. About a third to half of the team had, shall we say, significantly less experience at Nationals than Mooney, who made his record-extending 23rd appearance at the Show. Two had last played in the UPA Series in about 1996, and one fellow had played at College Nationals twice in the ‘80s. And at least half didn’t play in the series at all last year (and only four made it to Nationals, three in Open). So it was good to get our legs going, try out some D’s, and made some mistakes without it costing us. DoG, 15-6. The 3 and 4 seeds, meanwhile, had a 17-16 battle right next to us.

Next up was Mileage from Texas. We knew they had a couple tall receivers who could threaten us but otherwise we felt pretty confident, if for no other reason than we didn’t recognize most of them. I guess five of the teams had cores that were players we recognized from Open (us, Double Happiness, Rage, Boulder, and Sub Zero) plus Above and Beyond, which had a smattering of post-NYNY New Yorkers abetted by more than a few “young” guys. I had told Jeff Brown, our fretful defensive stopper, that if one of them was killing us I wanted a shot if I was feeling well. He said to remind him if it came up. I did end up covering one of them after a turnover and despite being outpositioned, felt confident that I was going to sky him on a floater. I didn’t. As for the game, I already have forgotten the ebb and flow, but I think that we established a pattern of taking a 3 goal lead then letting them back into it before pulling it out at the end.

Next up, our old friends from the Bay Area, Troubled Past. A lot of people thought of this as a finals preview. It was great to see a lot of old friends. I was in Japan with four of them (O’Dowd, Masa, Switzer, and Lippy) back in 1994 as part of a series of clinics that the Japanese federation sponsored to improve the game there. I told Masa that with their successes at Worlds last year, perhaps they will be coming over here now to give clinics. (I should probably write about that trip sometime.) The team also featured Billy and the Worm, two fellow Short Fat Guys who we tried to recruit for our team before they lied to us and blew us off, and a handful of other vets. Following the pattern of the previous game, we got up 3 before giving it back. Ten yards away from the win, I had a Forch moment at 14-13, dropping a short swing pass when I got stuck between pancaking and rim-catching. Instead of ending it and getting an extra half-hour for heckling and the beer garden, we had to play another five points. Double game point featured an exciting play, with receiving stud Alec Ewald misplaying a huck in the end zone, then burying his head in his hands (I had to laugh at that one even with what it meant), before Bickford got the block and we converted for the win. The game was remarkably low-key and friendly despite the history and the significance (I suppose that is a difference from Open Nationals).

This pretty much clinched the pool for us, requiring only that we win one of the games on Friday, and also provided a good setting for the World Series game that night. We had 11 rooms at one of the condos on the Bayside, right next to the Palm Bay Club, where we ventured over for some hot-tubbing. We got a little bit lucky finding that place as we didn’t make the reservation until the Thursday after Regionals, but the rate was good and we had all of us together, plus we didn’t have to worry about drunken yahoos on the beach.

Friday’s first game was against Boneyard from Raleigh, who would have to beat us and 2-1 Mileage to make quarters. Finally during this game the sun came out, and I applied sunblock for the only time of the weekend. We wanted to open up the rotation again after two consecutive tight games. Alex wanted to get his calf massaged by the Boston Ultimate trainer (a friend of ours who has played summer league with us) and figured he could only do it during a game, so he ran over there partway through the first half and delegated the offensive subbing to me. For the next 20 minutes, I had lines ready, switching players in and out depending on whether they were in on the D point, but the D kept scoring. I finally managed to call a line moments before Alex got back, and we scored. With nothing left to prove, I returned the reins, and we cruised to victory and locked up first place.

This set up a trap game for us against Surly, who was also locked into their position.(there could have been a three-way tie for 3rd, but Surly would have taken the second spot on head-to-head). Even though it shouldn’t matter, a loss in that game can have a carryover effect to the next round. So we started off this one treating it normally, and only after they pulled their top players and we opened up a good lead did we relax a bit. The 15-8 final score was meaningless for prediction (but good for the RRI!).

After an extra half hour break, we played our quarterfinal against Philly’s OLDSAG. No matter how big your roster is, if another team’s is bigger, you can make fun of them, and Philly’s 37 man outfit provided us some chuckles as well as 1000 post-game handshakes. There were intermittent sprinkles in the first half to go with a steady quartering wind (I wonder if they can rotate the fields 45 degrees next year so the games will be a straight cross-wind instead). The game was chippier than any of our pool play games, probably because something was finally at stake. Several calls that had opponents groaning, although I’m hard-pressed to remember any of them now except for some point blocks. We broke early to take the lead, but we were broken at 5-5 to give it back, despite an actual layout block by me. They scored upwind against our O to take half 8-6. (Technical note: if it’s an upwind/downwind game more than an offense/defense game, then the upwind break to take half only counts as half a break since there is no ensuing downwinder. Normally, if you lose the half, you have to outbreak the other team in order to win. This game, at the time, was fairly close to the crossover point between O/D and upwind/downwind, so I knew that if the D could score upwind just once, we’d be in good position, though not completely “on serve” at that point. We’d still need a downwind D break, either immediately after the upwinder or after an upwind O score.) The rain continued in the second half, and lightning soon flashed in the distance. I waited for the horn suspending play, but it did not come for several minutes, during which we managed to get our upwinder and downwinder to take the outright lead. I was happy to avoid the horn, since I figured our chances of breaking were greater in bad weather.

So, the first lightning delay at Club Nationals since I have been around. 30 minutes, plus another 17 minutes to warm up, 16 minutes more to soft cap, then an unfortunate 24 minutes to hard cap if necessary. We began trading after play resumed, and it began to look like we might trade out to the cap (we hoped, rather than gakking at double game point). But at 14-13, fate smiled on us. We got a block about 20 yards out, with two defenders bashing into each other hard enough to require injury subs. “Mooney, Greff, you’re in!” shouted Jeff Brown. But then we learned there was a foul called on the throw. “Mooney, Greff, you’re out!” Two defensive-minded replacements went in. Play continued but was sloppy, and we struggled to keep the disc moving. After a turnover near our goal line, one of our guys pulled up lame with an aching hamstring. I found myself called in, only to hear, “Jim, we need a D handler.” So I turned around, a little confused, and starting walking off, only to learn that I was supposed to fill that bill. “Eh, how hard can it be?” I reasoned. “Sure, I’ll stay near the disc.” I was surprised to see that our opponents turned down the opportunity to put in a fresh defender when the point had already lasted 5-10 minutes. I happily dodged and weaved the disc up the field. At one point, I had the disc about 20 yards out from the goal and saw a poach in the end zone but knew it would take a hell of a throw to get it there. By the time I figured out how I had to throw it, my senses had come back and I looked instead for another 10 yard pass, and a few passes later, we had the goal and the win. The game and that point in particular are as fun a one as I can remember being part of in some time, probably since the 2002 semi.

This set up a rematch against Troubled Past at 10:30 on Saturday. If we hadn’t known them before, we knew them from the 33 point outing two days prior. We had a little advantage since we had picked up Mooney, Seeger, and Lenny. The flow of the game was almost identical to the first, but the tone was quite different. Two of them in particular seemed intent on changing the game through their voices when the disc was not in play (one through incessant celebration, the other through complaining). As I said afterwards, it made it a lot less fun to play the game, but a lot more fun to win it (I said this to one of the perps and several of his teammates as I apologized for getting a little obnoxious myself, responding in kind (though to a lesser extent) whenever one of these guys got involved; they replied that they hadn’t noticed; I also chatted about it with celebration guy later over a beer at Mr. Big’s without any animosity). So, we took half by three, and it started to look like we might even pull away, but they solved us for a while and got three breaks in a row to take the lead. We got back on serve and again got into a position where it looked like we might trade out downwinders to the cap. Then DoG blinked. At 15-15, I was having a point reminiscent of the game-winner against Philly, catching every second or third pass and immediately getting off the continuation. I caught another swing, turned and threw it right to Worm. In retrospect, I think I actually intended to throw it to him, since it was the cut I was expecting, and I also saw a flash of Patagonia red moving in that direction. Luckily for me, we got it back, maybe after another set of turnovers, and punched it in. A miscommunication throwaway gave us the disc on their half of the field, and the D guys ran it in for the emotional win and a spot in the finals, back where we belong.

We had almost three hours before the final. We called Jordan, who couldn’t make it down, so our heart and soul could take part in our excitement. We celebrated a little, reminisced a little, and then began getting ready for the big game. Although DoG hadn’t been in the finals since our last win in 1999, I do think that experience helped us prepare. I wouldn’t say that I was hyperfocused and running on adrenaline, but I really paid no attention to the outside agencies at all. I heard Doug heckling Paul one point, and I vaguely remember some other Bostonians calling to me, but otherwise have absolutely no memories of the crowd or the announcers or of doing anything other than playing ultimate. The game itself was easily our most complete game. Traditionally, our best games occurred when the D was able to score most of the time they got the disc. Looking back to the famous 1995 final where we had three turnovers and won 21-10, our D actually had just an average game defensively (9 goals allowed in 20 possessions), and our O had a good but not noteworthy game itself (10 of 13), but the difference was in converting after a turn (11 of 11). And so it was in this game, although not to the same extent (don’t have the stats yet). Our O had some kinks in it at the beginning, but we were able to avoid getting broken thanks to some nice plays by Coop. Through the game, lots of people were making plays and not many were making mistakes. From the writeup, it looks like we might have only had 5 or 6 turnovers the whole game.

The O scores to make it 14, then it strikes me that I might be deprived yet again of a championship-winning goal. At game point in our first win in 1994, I tried a difficult catch on a fouled throw and biffed it. The disc returned to the thrower, swung quickly to the other side of the field, and we (not me) scored. Since then, over 9 titles, I never caught or threw the final goal. So when I realized this, seeing how we were up by 5, I was kinda hoping to get another chance. But then we got a damn D and worked it the length of the field for the title. Well, at least it was one of my teammates who scored it, I suppose.

Surly was nice enough to share beer with us after the game. We got the trophy, donated this year by Throwback, and quickly scanned it to see the record for most consecutive titles (2, by Keg Workers 2000-2001). Pictures, drinking from the cup, hanging out, etc. By the time I was ready to go to the beer tent, it was closed. Alex and I headed to Mr. Big's for some Guinness and a car bomb and to see some friends, then off to the team dinner. I remarked that for coming into this not really caring that much, it felt awfully good and I was proud of how the team came together. Everyone was in pretty good spirits. Kudos to Jeff Brown and Alex for running subs, a difficult task with that many players who hadn't played together all that much.

Now, who to pick up for Worlds next year....

To DQ or not to DQ

2007-10-23T19:39:00.000-07:00

That is the question.
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them?

I dunno. It's easy to predict the UPA's decision.

It definitely sucks for the two players who won't be playing. Originally I felt worse for the captain who got dragged down, but it was probably more her fault than the omitted player, who really would never have any reason to suspect that her name wasn't on the roster.

On the other hand, the other 59 teams at Nationals presumably got it right. I spent countless hours checking and double-checking, herding the cats to see who was actually in or not and nagging them to sign up and send in their waiver and enter their birthdate and everything else. Not that I would have done anything with that time, but I'd like to have it back.

I definitely see that the UPA can't let this go with just a shrug. When they first started getting serious about requiring everyone to be a member before playing in the series, membership (and membership dues) increased by more than 10% that year after several years of close to zero growth. They have probably already spent many hours they don't have right now to deal with this when they should be preparing a tournament for the 1500 other players.

But then why does it have to be disqualification? Again, I see the UPA's view, and I can't imagine that any other sports organization would even be having this discussion. If you're not on the roster, you don't play, period. Use someone who is not on the roster, you're DQ'ed and face possible extra sanctions. Simple, right?

But still, it seems harsh, especially because this may be those two's only visit to Nationals. (Then again, players sometimes get hurt the week before or the first game of Nationals and don't play.) They could still be severely punished so that no one would want to be in that situation but still be allowed to play. For instance, have to do 40 hours of community service before being allowed to play in another UPA event. Pay "court costs", a fine to cover the UPA's time on this. Pick up trash every day. Massage Will Deaver's feet at the end of each day after fetching him a couple beers (well, maybe they would prefer to remain DQ'ed to this).

Then again, the UPA doesn't want to nor should have to listen to every sob story (and there would be a lot more if they backtracked), and soon it might become impossible to DQ those who really deserve it. "No tolerance" might be the greater good, all things considered.

So, not much new here. Not a plea to the UPA to reconsider, at least not today. I wrote a couple things to rsd this week that might be construed I think that the whole team deserves to be kicked out; I don't, I just didn't expect anything different from the UPA. This is not your father's UPA, for better and for worse.

Good luck to everyone.

Masters preview

2007-10-17T19:40:00.001-07:00

Since no one else is doing it, and there is a vast demand for it, here you go.

I got no clue, either. O'Dowd did a preview for the Newsletter. In his original version, he mentioned me and Alex, but what it got past the editor, they took us out and put in Mooney, who had been on loan to Above and Beyond the last couple years. O'Dowd will get his.

Masters was really hard to seed, since there was almost no Masters play this year outside of the series, and there was a lot of turnover from last year. Four of the Regionals winners did not play at Nationals last year (hmm, two Open winners did not, either, which has to be the most in some time). In figuring out what I would send in, I looked at how teams did in Open play this year, but that task was made more difficult by the Score Reporter not reporting what these teams RRI was in Open play. I ended up trying to find equivalents for those teams, opponents against whom they may have had close games, and tried to guess from there, but that too was error-prone. Masters teams are even less likely than Open to have full or near-full rosters at any event, sometimes even Regionals.

We played four Open tournaments this year. Clambake didn't make it to the Score Reporter. For the other three, we were listed as Big Ego Ultimate. At Sectionals, we lost by 1 point to the team that finished 4th at Open Regionals and split with the two teams that finished 5/6 (but won the pool by point differential). The most we had was 20 or so at Sectionals. We had about 15 at Clambake, about 12-13 at Boston Invite, and 8-11 at White Mountain Open. That's another thing about Masters; players tend to be available for only part of the weekend. We had at least four guys who showed up only for Saturday. Another guy showed up for our first game, disappeared for a few hours to go to his daughter's soccer game, then reappeared for part of our game before a bye (this same fellow showed up on Saturday of Clambake moments before the last point of our last game of the day). I think we have 31 at Nationals, three of whom are missing the first day (plus another 3-4 will presumably get hurt on the first day and miss the rest).

Even looking at the rosters won't necessarily help determine how strong a team is (several of you wienies are already jumping up and down saying that should have nothing to do with seeding). "Oh, this guy is great. Well, he was great. 10 years ago, when he played. Hmm, I wonder if he can still walk." At the other extreme, some teams might have a bunch of 33 year olds who either never happened to live in an ultimate mecca or perhaps were never that much as Open players but have hardly aged compared to their peers (and elders). The Senior Golf tour has had several of their top players come from the lower echelons of the regular tour or even from outside the ranks of the pro tour (Allen Doyle didn't even turn pro until 46, played on the mini-tours for a few years before turning 50, and has won more than $11M since).

So, in the end, seeds are based on previous Nationals. Our #3 seed, for instance, probably has a lot of basis in the 1994-1999 Nationals. OLDSAG didn't play last year, choosing to go to Worlds instead, and is seeded 4th. Troubled Past just formed and is #1, based mostly on winning the NW but also probably a little on Double Happiness' success in the 1990s (which is why I argued for the #1 seed based on head-to-head).

Of the 31 on our team attending Nationals, we have 15 guys who played on the championship teams of the '90s, anywhere from 10 to 13 in a given year. 6 of the 8 who played for all six champs will be there, as will 4 of the 6 who played for five of them. Last year, I told a bunch of people, "We're getting the band back together," and I wasn't sure exactly how much of a competitive team it would be, and how much of a reunion tour it would be. I held off on inviting some good players because I wanted to see whether it would be a total reunion tour (maybe not the best move).

But then partway through the year, it wasn't looking at all like a reunion tour. I think only three of old DoG attended White Mountain Open, and maybe only five for Boston Invite. We had good participation at Masters Easterns, but still not overwhelming. I built up the team with other recruits, though, and even without the vintage players, it was looking like we would be at least nominally competitive. It wasn't until the (nearly) full army showed up at Regionals that things really started to come together. Even with our random sampling of 12-20 at previous tournaments, we were holding our own against those young guns, even the ones who ran.

So, I like our chances. And they just got better, because Dick Brown is already frothing and sending out inspirational emails to the team.

Yeah, baby, it starts in a week!

Regionals

2007-10-09T19:27:00.000-07:00

Well, I guess we need to buy shirts, shorts, and numbers.

First, the streaks. 12 Regional titles in a row (and 15 of 16), covering about 50 games (can't be bothered to look it up right now). 16 Nationals appearances in a row (and 18 of 19). 14th in a row with a team called "DoG". 24th straight Regionals appearance, 25th straight UPA series appearance.

The tournament went better than expected. As I mentioned on rsd, no one had bought his ticket to Sarasota prior to the tournament. There were three teams of roughly equal caliber (plus two teams that weren't as competitive) and two spots to Nationals. the format was full round robin on Saturday and modified clipped elimination on Sunday (1 plays 2 for 1st, 3 plays 4 to be eliminated, loser and winner play for 2nd spot to Nationals). It's version 5.1.2.A.chi, I think, in the handbook.

First round is at 8:30. We have 38 names on our mailing list, about 35 on the roster, and somewhere between 25 and 30 who are actually playing. We hadn't had anything close to a full team in our prior five tournaments, and as is typical of a Masters team, introductions were done at the beginning of Regionals. People are still strolling in at 8:30, or 9 for that matter (one player was at the Sox game the night before which didn't end until 1), but we still have plenty. We roll over Mt. Crushmore 15-4.

Next up is Tombstone, the #2 seed. They could easily have been the #1 seed, or the #3 seed. They are purported to be a merger of Tombstone, which won Canadian Nationals a couple months ago, and GLUM, which finished 2nd at CanNats and won the NE Region last year, finishing 5th at Nationals, but word is that they are bringing a small squad because of Canadian Thanksgiving. I develop an immediate dislike on the first point for one of their players who mauls me a couple times (not violently, just hackingly) while playing poor defense, then tapping the disc back in quickly and silently. The game is close through the first half, but we pull away. Mooney convinces Alex to withdraw a foul call, thus leading to a discussion after the game of the many, many, many times that Steve has handed the disc to the other team. (Most notable was in pool play at 1996 Worlds, where a pick call on double game point just prior to a huck was somehow overruled by Moons, and we lost right then and there. I know one player who is still livid about that. But this led directly to another story of a double game point call. At pool play at Nationals in 1998, a Condor caught a scoober very close to the line in the end zone. (Two videotapes from cameras right next to each other provided conclusive but contradictory evidence on whether he was in.) Discussion ensued, I saw Mooney saunter over to hand the game away, and I say to him, "Steve, don't say another word." He backs away, the disc eventually goes back, same pass is thrown and is OB, we move it upwind for the win. With the wind as strong as it was and the disc where it was after it was sent back, I'd have to guess that the Condors would still expect to win in excess of 95% of the time.) We stretch it out to a 5 goal win, which gives us a lot of breathing room in the event of a 3 way tie.

Next up is Above and Beyond, the other team that could have been seeded anywhere from 1-3 (their biggest claim is that they made semis at Nats last year and are the only of the three teams who played in the series last year as the same team). It's our second tough game in a row, but at least one of the three had to play back-to-back (given that none of the tough games were in the first round), and even though we were the top seed and thus in line for the favorable schedule, it wasn't really an earned first seed so we sucked it up. Similar pattern to the first game, close for the first half, then we pulled away, this time winning 15-11. A&B may have realized that point differential wasn't going to come into play if they lost, and even if they won, they would still need to win or keep it close against Tombstone in order to finish top two, so perhaps they conceded at some point. I noticed that Arnold and I were rarely on the field at the same time, which was a surprise since he so often covers me. I've come to really enjoy playing against him because it's always a battle, and though it was easier with others on me, I was disappointed.

We then had a bye, followed by a final game against Not Dead Yet, a team which plays in the local club league. I played one point only and was on the field for only about 15 seconds, which was enough for me to make the Man cut and huck the goal.

I had only two turnovers on the day, a drop on a stupid hammer and a breakmark flick to the middle of the field. (The hammer should have been the fourth straight O point goal for us that came off a hammer or blade to me, only two of them from Alex.) I went up well twice. I was embarrassingly bad at jump balls last year and possibly the year before. In my defense, it always seemed that I had to wait an excruciatingly long time for those and thus had to jump flat-footed against a young defender coming in at full speed. I once again found myself playing almost exclusively O points after playing both ways all year. But it seems like we have a fairly deep (though less star-laden, even if the names are the same) roster this year, and the tournaments are long, so I can deal. I think I will play some D points as needed at Nationals, but generally will stick to O.

So, we were set up for two shots at making Nationals. Finals are at 10:45, though we tell everyone 10:30 (but still people saunter in; having a local tournament is great and was definitely an advantage, but players try to maintain a semblance of normal life and so are more likely to skip out on parts of the weekend). And what a difference for the weather. Saturday was hot, probably in the 80s and with a lot of sun, but it's in the 50s with some wetness and more wind than the day before. We pull to start the game and are up 4-2 with several chances to add another. There is an injury after one of their turnovers, and I am called in for O. I expect to be the first cutter, but someone else goes first, unsuccessfully. I fill but the pass is behind me and it goes through my hands. A few passes later, the mark is broken and my guy catches the continuation for the goal. Well, that was an excellent 30 seconds of ultimate. Next point, I throw an open side pass several yards behind the receiver, and we are broken for the tie. I take myself out. At 7-5, receiving for the half, we become embroiled in a hell point. I have one turnover that point, a pass similar to the potential game-ender that Goat would later have in the Open finals, and another pass that was not caught (I think it was mostly a drop, but it wasn't a perfect throw), but I continue to work hard, cutting deep at least twice, and am about to cut to the end zone a third timebut see Mooney streaking that way, so I do a highly effective stand still and act like I'm about to cut, and the thrower hits Steve for the goal.

Somewhere in the first half, I have one of my trademark triple-bobble catches. The field had a lot of bare spots in the middle, and as I cut for a simple dump, I trip. I get a hand on it to keep it alive, maybe the defender hits it once or twice, but by the third or fourth contact I have in under control even though I am still on the ground, and snag it.

At halftime, especially with us receiving, they apparently decide to open up the bench in order to prep for the backdoor game. They score only twice more and we can begin our (dry, unfortunately) celebration.

It was terrific and even a little bit emotional to win with this crew. We have about a dozen of the old DoG plus several others who have been around the block, but also several players for whom this will be their first trip to Nationals, and I'm happy for them, more than I was happy for my 23 year old teammates in previous years (nothing against them personally, just that 23 year olds generally haven't been around the game long enough to truly appreciate it). And though we didn't win by less than 4, I never had the feeling that playing the games was just a formality, as was so often the case in recent years, where our typical chances of making Nationals were well over 99%.

So, one $450 plane ticket later, I am on my way to Sarasota. At some point, Alex and I realized we have to contact Joe Seidler so he can update his Hall of Records. Yeah, addendum!

Open seedings

2007-10-09T17:44:00.001-07:00

Well, you gotta rank Boston ahead of Sockeye since Boston is 1-0 head-to-head.

Of course, I don't mean that. A team will play 30-50 games over the course of a year (more when you count the split squad teams they send to some spring tournaments), but some just want to take the results of 3, 2, or even 1 of all those games as the primary determinant of which of two teams deserves a higher seed. It's particularly silly in this example because it was a one-point pool play defeat in a tournament that Sockeye won (while Boston lost in quarters), a tournament that had 9 of the Nationals qualifiers plus Revolver and the Buzz Bullets.

Anyway, as promised, here are my seedings. I wrote a post last year about the method. The only change this year was to give bonus points also for making the semis at a top tournament like ECC or Boston Invite.

The method is to take a team's tournament RRI as shows up in the Score Reporter, give bonus points for finishing high, take a weighted average (with bigger tournaments counting as more), add bonus points for last year, and regress them to a low-Nationals-team level if they don't have enough tournaments this year.

One big problem I can't figure out is how much credit to give Jam for last year. Qualitatively, a team gets credit for both how they did and for how their Regional equivalent did, so Jam would get some credit since they won the Regional and the top finisher from the NW won Nationals, plus they're from the NW, which always seems to be worth extra points. They have the second highest rating prior to the bonus points, but three teams would jump ahead of them if they got no points.

So, without further ado, here are the results:
Team w/2006 No 2006 RRI
Sockeye 1 1 1
Bravo 2 4 4
Furious 3 11 7
SubZero 4 3 3
Jam 5 2 2
Ring 6 5 5
Boston 7 7 9
Condors 8 6 6
Chain 9 10 10
GOAT 10 9 8
Rhino 11 12 12
DWide 12 8 11
TStop 13 13 13
Machine 14 14 14
VBB 15 15 15
Pike 16 16 16

Comments:
1. Furious is an interesting case. RRI by itself has them 7th, but they drop to 11th because they didn't do well in elimination games (other than Can Nats; they lost in Sectionals and came in 3rd in region). But then the bonus for last year lets them leapfrog all those teams.
2. Otherwise, there is a disappointing lack of difference from straight RRI, whose main flaw in seeding is that it overvalues close losses. It's a predictive algorithm, so it is more accurate looking forward, but doesn't properly give credit for wins and losses. I may have discussed this already, but compare Boston and GOAT at CUT and Boston Invite. GOAT has a higher RRI at CUT than Boston, even though Boston beat GOAT twice and won the tournament. Similarly, GOAT won Boston Invite and beat Boston but had only a small advantage in RRI. In both cases, the tournament winner happened to have some close games along the way while the other team had bigger victories in the other games. I think this is probably where the algorithm is most off from how I would seed teams (and it was designed to mimic that method). Two of the Regional runnerups (Chain and Condors) had higher RRIs than the champ.
3. Most teams were pretty consistent, even comparing tournaments like Sectionals and ECC. "Inconsistent" Boston actually had the 4th lowest variance, but perhaps their inconsistency is manifested within a tournament rather than from tournament to tournament. The VBB had the second highest variance, but that is due to one significantly higher performance. That touranemnt? Nope, it was Sectionals, which was more than 200 points (equivalent to a 15-11 win) higher than any other tournament.
4. Sub Zero was surprisingly high. They were helped out a lot by their dominance at Regionals, which was the highest RRI for any team at any tournament this year (2954 including the 40 point bonus for winning).

I guess what I might want to do instead is to somehow figure out a strength of field for a tournament, allocate points based on final placement, then adjust for wins and losses during the tournament (so someone who wins while going undefeated would do better than one who wins while losing twice in pool play). Sounds doable.

The remaining issue I haven't addressed yet is how to handle inconsistencies. Sockeye emerges as #1 but lost their Region. They are so far ahead of Bravo that my solution is to bring Jam in front of them for the overall #1 and leave the others in the same order. DW and Chain are also inconsistent, but in this case, their average score is right in the middle of some other teams, so the final seedings by this algorithm are:
Jam
Sockeye
Johnny Bravo
Furious George
Sub Zero
Ring of Fire
Boston Ultimate
Condors
Doublewide
Chain Lightning
GOAT
Rhino
Truck Stop
Machine
The Van Buren Boys
Pike

Well, even I don't believe it, but once the method was set, there is no subjectivism. GOAT and Rhino seem low, but what higher team deserves the 11 and 12 seed?

formats

2007-10-05T18:53:00.000-07:00

I was just checking out the other regions that had pools of 5 to see their schedules. Three of the Divs at South Regionals had 10 teams (5 per pool), and each had a different schedule. The one in the format manual is the one we used at Sectionals. Here it is:
4 v 5 2 v 3
1 v 3 2 v 4
1 v 5 3 v 4
1 v 4 2 v 5
1 v 2 3 v 5

Kinda sucks to be 3 in this format, opening with 2 and then 1. What is especially interesting is that finishing 2nd in the pool instead of 3rd can be quite beneficial, more than the difference between 1st and 2nd or 3rd and 4th. In a 5 team Masters Regionals, 1 and 2 play off for the 1st spot to Nationals while 3 plays 4, then there is a second game to go. Thus, if 1-3 are equal, the teams that finish top two have a 75% chance of advancing, while 3rd has a 50% chance. So, what might be the most pivotal game of the pool is played in the first round, then the next most pivotal games are in the 2nd round (not only 1v3 but also conceivably 2v4 if 4 is underseeded).

Speaking of opening with 2 and 1, I'm still a little ticked about the seeding and format at 1990 Nationals. We (Earth Atomizer, the little engine that could) had made Nats in 1989 ahead of Graffiti, had split with them during the year (and neither had won anything since NYNY and Boston #1 (let's see, they must have been First Time Gary that year, but let's just call them Titanic) were winning everything in the area), but they won the final game, and somehow they finagled the 3rd seed (or maybe it was because our seeding representative, Bruce Jacobson, was too nice). We were bummed because we wanted a shot at Titanic in the semis instead of NYNY, who always handled us. (As an aside, we played Titanic closer than Graffiti did, while they played NYNY closer than we did.) Anyhoo, it all went to seed until we dismantled Graffiti 19-9 in the game to go, but it was too late to play the 2/3 game, so we played it the following week and won, 21-17, to earn the #2 seed from the mighty NE. Titanic had lost by 1 in the semis at Nats in 1989, and were in year 4 of a 17 year streak of making semis. So, out of 12 teams, they seeded us....

9th. Just ahead of Titanic at 10th.

And our schedule had us playing the top seed LA in the first round, then 2nd seed (3rd overall) Windy City in the second (and final) round of the first day. Didn't seem fair. We got smoked by LA, 19-7 (this was the first year pool play games were to only 19 instead of 21), then lost a two-pointer to Windy City to end our tournament. We won our last three games after that so we could play the what-if game. We definitely would have benefitted from a different first day, but then again, maybe the next games wouldn't have gone the same way had we played them early. The Condors game in particular probably would have had a different tone. We got them on the last day after they had fallen apart. They went in seeded 3rd in the pool but played and acted badly, and actually kicked off one of their players (a captain, maybe? I hardly knew who anyone was back then, being only slightly older (25) than most of you reading this blog, and rsd did not exist yet).

Then again, it worked out ok for Titanic (better, actually). They opened with NYNY (and lost), but then got #2 seed Tsunami, who IIRC didn't have everyone there the first day because they knew they were just going to have two games they would win. Titanic won that won and made it to the finals.

Anyway, go DoG.

What happens at Clambake...

2007-10-05T14:46:00.000-07:00

Gets blogged about here. But I won’t name any names.

Helluva party. I got there at 9:30 to a raging multi-pronged scene, left a little before 1, figuring that no good could possibly come from me staying any longer, and it was still raging. Favorite moments:

Mullets for charity. Pay $20 (to go to Special Olympics, the targeted beneficiary of the event), get a mullet by a drunk female. The best one was when the haircutter stabbed the haircuttee (the first one, I believe) in the ear and he began bleeding. It brought back the memories of my last head wound, seeing all that blood spurt out. Pretty cool.

Breast shots:
Some woman with a cleavagy shirt nestled a shot of tequila (or some other fine liquor) in her bosom and some willing payer got to drink it. Not sure how much overeagerness was allowed before the shot was ended. This of course led to body shots, and perhaps some other type of shots that can’t be blogged about.

Music:
There was a house band off in another room, plus a DJ that had lots of people on the floor.

Frisbee games:
As I drove in, I could see several sets of illuminated sticks for Cups, which seems to be the game of choice these days. A guy at work described a Frisbee game recently and wondered if it was ultimate. Nope, it was Cups.

Food and beer:
Lots of it, everywhere.

So, the breadth and depth of the party was like nothing I’ve seen at a Frisbee party. No matter where you wandered to, there was something going on, not just a bunch of dudes hanging around a keg swapping stories (although there was that, too).

So, definitely a worthwhile experience. The one eerie part was that it was really far away from everything. While I was driving up, it reminded me of an old movie called "Race with the Devil", where some campers in an RV in the middle of nowhere witness a Satanic human sacrifice, then spend the rest of the movie trying to flee.

So, the ultimate. Saturday was a bit slow. We appeared sluggish all day (or maybe I'm just projecting), and we took all of our games, each a litttle closer than it should have been. We tried working on some of our defenses, but nothing seemed to work especially well. With a full squad (and more of the veterans), perhaps some of our zones and transitions will be a bit more effective.

Sunday had a late start. First round for anyone was at 10, but as people strolled in at 10, there wasn't even a full setup at Frisbee Central. My wife's dumb old team didn't have a program and weren't sure what fields they were supposed to be on, nor was anyone else. So they just sort of wandered over to where they thought they might be and set up, but it looked like it might have been a too-narrow sliver between two other fields (it was 31 yards wide). So they moved to some other field and got started sometime around 11, about the same time as everyone else. The TD had warned that they needed to start on time as games in teh past had been capped at 4, but they just decided to push the whole schedule back, meaning that were we to make the finals, we probably wouldn't get out before dusk. Well, it was a nice day out, so I guess that's ok.

The boy and I then went inside and played some in the gym. They had an indoor track there, and the day before we had done some 55m sprints. He had a pretty good surge every time at the end, I was proud to see. This morning, we went into the batting cage and played some foot baseball and running the bases. He loves to hit the ball in our yard and run around the bases, and seems to understand the basic rules about getting tagged out and having to be on the base and foul balls. Here's a video of him about 3 months ago. His swing has continued to improve. At the beginning of the summer, I would basically have to hit his bat with the pitch in order for him to hit it, but now he does pretty well no matter where the pitch is. I haven't instilled plate discipline yet, which is not something his old man is famous for, either, but if he wants to make it to the pros, he has to learn it.

So, we played against the Pitts brothers in our first round, former teammate Darden and his much older brother James, whom we used to play against 10-15 years ago. They were nice enough to play zone against us the first point and we never looked back.

Our semis were against Harvard, who apparently hadn't entered the fall series. I recognized a few of their guys from Sectionals the previous weekend, but damned if I could tell you which team they were on. Well, I'm guessing either New Noise or Gunslingers, but I wouldn't wager a lot of money either way. So, of course, we immediately get broken to start the game, then again, then again. We finally score to make it 3-1, then come down in zone. From their end zone, they throw a looping forehand to my side. I drift back, leap for my third competitive Callahan goal, and have it bounce out of my hand and get caught. They proceed to score without turning. We continue to trade, clawing back one or two here and there, and eventually tie it at 10 and 11. But we couldn't score again, and couldn't force a turnover, and those Harvard kids get the thrill of their young frisbee lives, second only to making Nationals probably. Well, in our bid, we did promise to "provide plenty of opportunities for opponents to school one-time greats of the game who still delusionally think they're awesome."

In retrospect, we should have done something about getting beat deep so often other than trying harder or hoping it would stop. Afterwards, I mentioned how defenders need to "orbit" around the cutter as soon as he turns upfield after a comeback cut, rather than continuing to chase after and hoping to catch up if it's thrown. But perhaps after the thir or fourth huck would have been more timely. I suppose that's where Dick Brown comes in handy, to throw his handy, storm off the fields, simmer for a few minutes, and eventually tell everyone how to play better.

Of the three "I can't believe I lost to this team"
games this year, this one was the most that the other
team did to earn. Against Gunslingers at Sectionals,
it was equal part us playing badly and them playing
well, and against Colt .45 at WMO, it was mostly about
us plus one of their guys having the game of his life.

At the end of last blog entry, I discussed individual
game RRIs, but misinterpreted their meaning. A game
RRI is a sample, but of both teams. So, if we have a
single game score typical of an Open Nats team, in
reality maybe half of the difference is due to the
other team playing worse than usual. Additionally,
the winner is typically luckier (for instance, a
Harvard guy yesterday bobbled the disc twice into the
end zone and fell down and had the disc land on him
for a goal, oh, and I dropped a Callahan that ended up
being caught and they scored without turning it), so
even if the teams played identically, a second
sampling would probably result in the loser being
closer. So maybe only 1/3 of the difference in RRI
between a team's overall RRI and an individual game
RRI should be attributed to the team.

So, onto Regionals tomorrow. Three go in, two come out. (Plus two other teams.) Big games at 10:30 and 12:30 should reveal where we are. We've played the last two weekends, but against faster but less experienced players, so it will be different against Masters. Paradoxically, it might be more difficult in certain situations to get open, as simple setups just won't work as well.

Ok, gotta run. Good luck to all.

Sectionals 2007

2007-09-26T18:55:00.000-07:00

Alex recounted the details of the tournament pretty well over on his blog, so I’ll just recap them here and give more impressions, which is really what all of you want to read.

We started out terribly, losing a grudge match against the Gunslingers, 13-9. There were numerous rookie mistakes that game on all parts, people just a little too anxious to impress and make plays, and not enough of the seamless efficiency we were famous for. As with the rest of the weekend, we played a basic offense with a four-person play and fills. We stayed with man-to-man defense for too long that game when it wasn’t working that well. I didn’t leave that game with a good feeling about things.

Game 2 was similarly unimpressive. We got broken twice (out of four points) against a college zone D in the first half, the lowest point of the weekend and possibly my career.

I missed the third game to attend the Bolton Fair with my wife, son, and parents for about 20 minutes. There was horrible traffic management there. Coming from the east, fairgoers were forced to wait for 30-45 minutes just to park. There were three huge parking lots, but all the cars from the east (which had 75% of the cars) were shunted to the first lot. However, the parking lot traffic directors were inefficient. They would frequently stop traffic to allow a few cars from the other direction to come through, and occasionally stopped traffic for no apparent reason. There were a few cones in the lot intended to direct foot traffic, but no one enforced it and so car access to the lot was frequently restricted as a result. Only once in the 20 or so minutes I stood watching did they do something proactive, waiving about 20 cars ahead to one of the other under-utilized lots. I am reasonably confident that I could have gotten cars parked twice as fast with no more than one accident. So, instead of spending an hour there, I had just enough time to pay admission, stand in line for tickets for my son to go on rides, and watch him ride one thing. The rides were a ripoff, too, generally $3 per person for a typical carnival ride. They did have a lot of other county-fair type activities (including a Frisbee-catching dog!).

Back to the fields for a brief warmup prior to the Red Tide game. In another low point of my career, I did the math incorrectly in evaluating the tiebreak possibilities, at least twice. (It was easy enough to do that as soon as the game ended, I thought about it for two seconds and said, “Hold on, that’s not right” without even running the numbers.) We started out with a gift turnover and break, expanded our lead, and won convincingly to take 1st place in the pool.

Semis on Saturday was another grudge match, this time for us. If you remember correctly, this was the team that sent me to the hospital when we played them at Boston Invite. The offender was pointed out and acknowledged me but never bothered to mutter even a simple “sorry about that”. I know it wasn’t intentional, and I am obviously ok now, but it was a bit reckless, and I did need stitches. I think I made a joke about being entitled to kick him in the groin at some point. Again, we had our chances this game, and it would have been nice to win to get a chance against my old mates and the new kids.

So, impressions. First off, it remains weird playing in a tournament I don’t think I have a chance to win (although some part of me thought it _could_ happen). This was especially so because it was Sectionals, where I hadn’t lost a game since 1991. That was also approximately the last time where I was actually looking forward to Sectionals. That was an interesting year, by the way. I had a foot injury that fall and so didn’t practice or play much. I sat out most of Sectionals except for the game against Titanic. Our team may have beaten Harvard by just 1 goal, in fact, but we made it to the finals. I was warming up by playing football with our opponents, and Gary Lippman felt it necessary to point out how bad we were that year, and that just really pissed me off. In a game to 13, I threw three goals and caught five more. On the bad side, though, I had a critical late turnover on their goal line and we lost by 1. Rats. There were two more scares for the #1 Boston team since then. In maybe 1995, we were close late in the game against Snapple, but they gakked it away as they were wont to do. And we beat Dos Manos by only 1 in 1998 as we were working on our split stack offense the entire game. (Late in the first half, I asked an opponent the score, was told we were losing, and didn’t believe him.) So, Boston #1 continues to have the longest streak of Sectional titles in the country.

It is also weird to take pride in finishing 3rd in the Section and in losing a close game to a team that will not make Nationals (but no pride in losing badly to a team not expected to make the second day of Regionals). But it’s action, isn’t it?

I think I had four blocks on the weekend, five if you count the one where I called a foul on myself, completely surprising the offensive player. The block itself was clean but I was pretty sure I went through his body to get there. He wouldn’t have called anything, either. All but one of these were on handler cuts, and I left my feet on two of them. I was only overmatched once all weekend, by a little squirrelly guy. I had been told he was squirrelly and volunteered to take him, but I thought he was a squirrelly handler. He was instead a squirrelly receiver, so he combined actual running with his squirreling and so had me spinning. Oh, I also took out a pivoter. The lanky opponent had caught a disc near the line and I thought he may have been out, so was thinking about that a little as I jogged downfield with my guy. I think I followed in my guy’s steps, a foot or two outside the pivot foot (but six feet from the thrower’s body), only to be surprised by a rapid pivot back to the forehand side, and I bowled him over. Whoops. I should have been more alert and known that was a possibility. I apologized to the guy on the other team who yelled at me about it, to the thrower, and again later to the thrower, and now to the unwashed masses.

As typical of the past couple years, I felt better later in the weekend than at first. I played basketball last Monday but then nothing again until Saturday, which explains it a bit. I would like to get in one speed workout per week the rest of the season, and will try to break a sweat the day before Regionals. (Goals must be achievable, you know.)

Overall I felt really good, though. I was able to move quickly, went up nicely the one time I had to, got open pretty easily both downfield and near the disc. With another tournament (Clambake) this weekend, I expect to be rarin’ to go at Regionals.

I don’t think I changed my opinion of Sectionals, though, as a result of being “one of those teams we have to play because the UPA says so.” While it would have been nice to play a game against “Boston #1” where they were trying hard, not playing them didn’t significantly alter my Sectionals experience (other than it meant we lost a game we wanted to win). Boston Ultimate blanked the first two teams they played, and even shut out New Noise in the first half on Saturday, I heard. In a Section that has a handful of teams, perhaps it is necessary to the UPA for a team like Boston Ultimate to play, but here, where there were 25 teams total, there were still plenty of opportunities to play good games even without them (and for lower level teams to play someone significantly better). I guess I still don’t see the point of playing a 15-2 game, for either team.

I’m a little disappointed that we don’t have an Open RRI, just a Masters RRI. Oh, heck, let me just figure out an estimate. I looked at all of our games, pro-rated it to a game to 15, and took the RRI of the team that expected to finish with that score against that opponent. For instance, first game was a 13-4 loss to Boston Ultimate. Translate that to 15-4.6. I went to the Score Predictor for BUY and saw that the middle team that would lose 15-4.6 had an RRI of 1974. Repeat for the entire schedule. Average the scores.

Result: Average 2331. Best game was 15-7 against Phoenix at Boston Invite (2656), then 13-12 over Bro White at WMO (2598) and 13-7 over Red Tide at Sectionals (also 2598). A typical low-level Nationals team has an RRI of about that, but I don’t buy that on our best day we would be on an equal footing with them. There is, of course, the problem that each of those games is just a sample and likely not indicative of our true “best” game. Our average is right around the teams that will probably go into Regionals in the 5-9 range. Our worst performances were against Gunslingers at Sectionals (1958) and Boston Ultimate Y at WMO (1974), which puts us at the “didn’t qualify for Regionals” level. It would be kind of interesting to repeat this best-and-worst for other teams, but nah.

Workout this week: did a sprint workout in front of my house tonight. 4x100, 6x50, 8x30, 6x(backpedal fast for 5 seconds and sprint back). Started each rep on the minute, 5 minutes between sets.

The game is afoot

2007-09-20T20:27:00.000-07:00

Big Ego Ultimate/DoG plays its first tournament since June this weekend, entering Sectionals as the #4 seed. We open with a pivotal game against the Gunslingers, who we beat by 1 at Boston Invite, and close with Red Tide, playing a couple college teams in between, then the usual format machinations on Sunday to guarantee that if the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 5th best teams are in one pool and all teams play consistently, the game to determine the antepenultimate spot to Regionals is fair, or something like that.

Ok, I was kidding. They don't care about the antepenultimate spot.

We're in the Score Reporter as Big Ego, but I submitted our roster as simply "DoG", although whether it stands for "Death or Glory" or "Delusions of Grandeur" has yet to be determined. As usual, our shirts our nowhere to be seen. During our heyday, I don't ever remember having team shirts at Regionals (other than the year where we didn't get new shirts and just used the ones from the year before), and at least once they showed up at Nationals (and one year at Worlds, they didn't even show up, and we played with only a light shirt). Now, we need freakin' numbers on the shorts. Is there a chance this rule is going to be revoked? Anyway, we gotta get working on that.

So how does the team look? It's hard to say. We'll have something like 20 of our 30+ at the tournament, I think, although not everyone has bothered responding to the poll. We've averaged about 10-12 of us (plus some outsiders sometimes) at the four practices we've had the last three weekends. Since we've had so few and needed to play so much, we haven't really talked a lot about what our strategy is. We will probably use our bye this weekend to do some walkthroughs and even chalktalk about things like defense against the ho stack.

We will treat this weekend as a learning experience, and also a bit of a reunion. It will be less about subbing to win than about getting familiar with each other and having some good times (although the prohibition against alcohol will inhibit that).

If we keep winning (or if we finish 2nd on Saturday), we'll get to play Boston Ultimate. Perhaps we'll ask them to play zone D in order for them to practice and us to score. Or maybe we'll just pull off the Best Win Ever and take them down.

The Masters race is wide open in the Northeast this year. There are three teams competing for two spots (plus two other teams, as well as five Grand Masters teams), and it's anyone's guess who will make it. Two Canadian Masters teams which finished 1 and 2 at their Nationals (one of which won NE Regionals last year) combined, but apparently they will be bringing a reduced team to Regionals because of Canadian Thanksgiving. Above & Beyond has made Nats three years running, losing in semis last year and finals in 2005 (although we did steal Mooney back from them). We beat A&B twice this year at Masters Easterns, but that was early June. A&B lost to Wesleyan (!) at Sectionals last weekend, but they probably had only half of their players. Of course we think that we're the best team (hence the name Big Ego Ultimate (hmm, Delusions of Grandeur also applies)), but we also know it's up for grabs.

We are also going to Clambake. I think this is only the 2nd time I've played there, and I'm really looking forward to it. From what I remember and all I hear, they throw a really good event (it's a Clambake theme). It's a bit of a shame this year that it falls on the only weekend between Sectionals and Regionals, or else it might attract more top teams from the area, but it has in the past and there is no reason that it can't again with a little bit of effort (vintage DoG went once, recent DoG went once). Great chance to bond as a team. More to come about this when it's time.

Workout this week: played basketball Monday night. I avoided covering that one guy who cheats most of the night, but in the last game he matched up against me, then did a couple pushoffs, so I worked him hard and didn't let him get away with his lowering the shoulder or hand to the stomach when cutting. I'm sure we'll match up again. It's kinda fun in a way, and as I get better from playing, I'm sure I'll own him, but I could also just blow my top. We'll see.

goaltimate strategy

2007-09-16T12:08:00.000-07:00

We played some goaltimate at the start of practice last weekend and actually had to stop in between games to explain some basic strategies. Although I was surprised that we had to, I guess I shouldn’t have, as most hadn’t played before. The two key ones were:

Get the disc to a power position just in front of the goal.
Position yourself on defense like you’re playing basketball, not ultimate.

Now, the first of these may be partially or mostly dependent on the style of offense and defense that we play, which is largely unchanged since we won $2500 at the Inaugural Goaltimate tournament in San Diego in 1999. Atlanta had great success against us at the Goaltimate Grand tournament by setting up 5-10 yards outside the goal and extending the defense, but otherwise we’ve not really gone with any setup much different from “get it in front”, and the defense is generally “clog the front”. But perhaps this is due to offensive success at the fast break, quickly taking advantage of any defense that extends all the way out to the clear line (and fails to get the turnover). Hmm, another factor is that probably half of all goaltimate games played in the Boston area in the last 10 years have been in the snow, which acts as a great impediment to wanting to run a lot. Whatever the reason, we tend to play half-court.
For defensive positioning, we face-guard a lot when we play ultimate but that is deadly in goaltimate. Even when the defender does more triangulation, the basic position is between the thrower and the receiver. In goaltimate, the default has to be between the receiver and the point beneath the center of the arch, facing the clear line with body turned to the outside. But some were initially playing even with or in front of the receiver, allowing the receiver a clear path to the goal for a leading pass.
There was also a little bit of unawareness of feet, with at least two uncontested, not that difficult catches coming with a receiver just beyond the goal.

We played again today and though it was better, there was still a little more faceguarding than is good. We also got plenty of good experience at dealing with bad calls from the other team, and one of our games ended up with both teams declaring themselves the winner.

I suggested once or twice that we ought to play a full game (or even a point) completing following the rules, but then I thought, "what's the point?" other than to prove a point. Notable violations would include miniscule travels, saying "stall" or just "one" instead of "stalling", invasion of body space, and offsides by both teams if playing ultimate. I vacillate between being a rules lawyer and a hippie. Most of the time, I end up following the rules myself, noting others violations, and doing nothing about them other than an occasional snide remark.

Got off one good zing as a teammate was misintepreting the rules on a few occasions, as he does with the golf rulebook. "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, Jordan." Alex laughed, as did I, and that's all that matters.

Anyway, any comments on goaltimate strategy?

Another year, another title

2007-09-06T18:57:00.001-07:00

The Cougars rallied to win the B Division playoffs in the Sudbury Men’s Modified Fast-Pitch Softball League. We lost the first game in the series 18-14, then in the second game hung on for a 9-8 victory as the potential game-winning run took a called third strike, setting the stage for our heroics. Copying the template that won us the C league championship two years ago, we went down big (8-1), began rallying with a Parinella home run, and scored several in the last inning to win it.

[Quick rules: 10 fielders, fast-pitch but with no windmilling, no leading or stealing, “courtesy” runners allowed for gimps, everyone bats, otherwise regular rules except for the occasional 6 feet high/4 feet wide strike zone. We averaged about 10 runs per 7 inning game this year.]

The final inning was as boring as a comeback could be. Down three, we got a bunt single, two outs, a bloop, an infield single, three outs, and another single up the middle, followed by complete dejection from the bitter opposing captain, who normally pitched for the team but got relegated to catcher due to wildness in his previous outings (roughly two walks per inning in 5 games against us this year).

Our team got outhomered 35-7 this year, and even outscored 218-208 despite putting up a 12-8 record (4-1 in the playoffs). We had three blowout losses (16-1, 11-1, 16-4) and no blowout wins (biggest was 15-9).

I put up a discouraring offensive line of .412/.424/.588 (BA/OBP/SLG), not very far off from the team line of .397/.468/.518. In a high run environment like this (about 1.5 runs per inning), slugging is less important than in baseball, since each runner is more likely to score. Previous years:
2006: .535/.549/1.070
2005: .439/.455/.756
2004: (just 2 games) .667/.571/1.333
2003: .536/.567/1.000
career: .508/.523/.958, an extra base hit every 4.2 AB

This year I just could not hit the ball squarely, with just two HR, a gift 2B and 3B, and a smattering of hard-struck singles and line outs in 51 AB. I figured out the end problem (bat is hitting bottom of ball, popping it up) and the preceding cause (right shoulder too low) but could not get at fixing the root cause (too upright of a swing plane). I can't say that I tried to fix it with practice, as almost all my swings all season were in games (took a few swings in BP a couple times, made it to a cage about a week before the end of the year). It was my most frustrating season in ball since age 11 when my coach thought he had all these hot shot 12 year olds.

On the plus side, this was easily my best fielding season, aided in large part (I think) by the purchase of a new glove. I had been using a Bobby (yes, Bobby) Bonds baseball outfielder glove purchased in the '70s, and the larger softball never seemed to bounce too easily into it, leading to a fair number of imperfectly fielded grounders. But I got a new softball infielder's glove for Father's Day and immediately noticed a difference, and fielded practically every grounder cleanly the rest of the season. That combined with my strong arm and above-average range led to a high Range Factor/Zone Rating/Plus-Minus/pick your advanced fielding metric.

Just like completion percentage in ultimate, fielding percentage in baseball or softball is only telling when other things are equal, and they usually aren't. Even in a high-quality league like the majors, the variation in errors at a position is significantly smaller than the variation in number of plays made, even after correcting for opportunities. Advanced fielding metrics today calculate on a play-by-play basis, comparing the fielder in question to a league average on balls hit in that area at that speed.

The parallel to ultimate stats is that an individual's contribution to scoring goals and avoiding turnovers is only partly captured by the number and percentage of passes he completes. A guy who clogs or cuts at bad angles is every bit the turnover machine as a teammate without a forehand, yet might show up high in the throwing stats. An effective cutter could actually appear worse relative to his teammates because he always provides them an easy target while never getting to throw to himself. And at a higher level, throwing percentage is to some extent simply a choice, inversely related to the yards per throw.

So, I actually got a little belligerent at the bar afterwards when discussing fielding, as one of my teammates was listing errors as a proxy for how well the team fielded, so I countered with "plays not made" (which I actually listed as "errors"), including what would have been just a single had he cut it off before it hit the gap, and a hard-hit ball that the third baseman couldn't field, and a short fly that fell in, etc. There are many more of those in a game than errors, and even if each is only a 50/50 proposition while errors happen on balls that should be outs 95% of the time, the net number of extra outs is greater due to plays not made.

And I would be remiss if I didn't trumpet the triumph of our demographic in this game. we have two guys younger than 35, and our pitcher is 62 (but still throws hard and locates the ball well), while our opponents were probably a median age of 22, with many of the players members of the state champion high school baseball team a few years ago.

ulticritic is an idiot

2007-08-11T19:14:00.001-07:00

That is all.

Hingham

2007-08-09T18:52:00.000-07:00

Alex did the play-by-play over at his blog, so I’ll skimp on some of the details.

Other than summer league, this was my first ultimate endeavor since the end of June at Boston Invite, where I left the field spewing blood. Some people were nice enough to ask me if I was ok now. Thanks. I didn’t play any differently, no lingering effects other than I have to part my hair (as much as I part it) on the other side so as to hide the scar.

The team rocked. I jokingly referred to us as the best team in the history of sports. While we do have two players who last missed the elimination round of Open Nationals in 1991, and that certainly helps, it’s not the answer, as our team generally did about as well regardless of who was in. (See my private blog for what I really think, of course.) I think the answer is that we didn’t have any black holes, at least when they play on our team. Every other team had several players who through either lack of skill or lack of good decision-making were turnover machines.

I definitely changed my defense a lot based on who had the disc. This weekend at least, I generally played honest when a truly good thrower had it and poached off to varying extents when someone else had it. This led to one amusing quip. An opponent underthrew a too-long pass and I intercepted it, and he said, “I didn’t see him,” figuring it was a poach block. What he didn’t realize was that it was my guy he threw to and I knew that he wouldn’t be able to throw it as far as would be necessary. But this also led to some missed assignments deep when the disc quickly transitioned from unskilled to skilled thrower, and I couldn’t make up the ground.

This was some great old-fashioned training for me, especially Sunday where we had maybe 7-8 guys and I played maybe 80% of the points. I thought I was going to throw up on one hell point in the finals after doing a few extra sprints on about the 8th turnover, but instead I just stopped running and watched from far away as my man caught the goal.

My junk throws, none of which were among my five worst choices of the weekend:

Lefty backhand. Tall lefty Rick Kenyon threw me a high backhand and cut to the end zone a few yards away, and I had a narrow time window to throw the disc. The only throw available was a lefty backhand (or maybe a righty air bounce push pass), so I threw it. I had caught the disc with my left hand on top, standing and facing the thrower. It was an odd little throw, high count, I had just been cutting to try to give him something but couldn’t find the right spot and so just stopped about 5 yards away from him, a yard upfield. At 8, he threw it to me as my defender stood, then he cut as my defender came in to mark me. I just instinctively chose this pass, and stand by my choice. This may have been my first lefty throw in ultimate, although I have thrown 10-50 dumps that way in goaltimate. (I might have thrown some back in 1995 at the tournament after dislocating my right index finger. I knew that I practiced them but I think I went back to righty for the tournament (Tuneup). I’ve also thrown a couple two-handed passes.)
Lefty backhand. Almost identical situation, although not for the goal. I had announced that I was retiring my lefty throws, since I was a perfect 1 for 1 with 1 goal thrown (not “assist”) and had nothing left to prove. But then it came up again, and the parallelism required me to throw it. Other than that, though, I didn’t need to throw this one, and should have probably just passed it up. At the point I decided to throw it, the previous throw probably increased our chances of scoring from 95% to 99%, but this one probably just changed it from 92% to 93%.
Inside out banking scoober from the forehand side of my body. After the game, I led a discussion as to what my decision-making process was on that one (prompting replies of, “Oh, great, let’s talk about YOU again” and “There was a decision-making process?”). I eventually decided that it reminded me of a goaltimate situation where I caught a leading pass in front of the goal and got a give and go cut in front of me and I had to lead him into the goal (under the arch). This was also similar to my beach throw at Fools 2006, where I caught the disc just outside the goal line and stood there with a backhand grip on the forehand side, looking for a 3 yard little flip pass for the goal but got a 10-15 yard cut instead. Although the catch was contested lightly, I felt that this choice significantly decreased our chances of not scoring compared to looking it off and turning for something else. Again, though I had never thrown it before and might never throw it again, I stand by this choice.

There was something funny about each throw preceding mine. Prior to the scoober, Simon had zipped me a short forehand that I was barely able to stab. That was definitely too hard for how short it was, so I guess I overcompensated on the next one. So, somehow an interesting event can trigger the creative part of my brain. In no case did I go into the point thinking that I was going to do something different; it just happened.

The party was sparsely-attended and ran only from about 9-11:45, while the parties I remember ran until 2 in the morning and were jam-packed. Games on Sunday back then didn’t start until noon, either. At least that’s what I remember.

It was a very long weekend. My wife and son went out of town on Thursday morning to visit her family, and I used the most of the opportunity to do some guy things. 36 holes of golf on Friday in the 90+ degree heat, ultimate all day, more golf on Saturday afternoon after downing a few beers on the sideline (not really a smart idea, really, either one), party, sleeping on a floor, more ultimate on Sunday, and a relaxed post-game celebration. Even now, I am still recovering a bit.

Boston Invite

2007-06-24T18:35:00.000-07:00

Well, didn't add another tournament victory to the list, but had fun, nonetheless, plus I'm sporting 7 stitches in my forehead thanks to a collision.

Here are the results.

After a little to-do about format, we were seeded 10th in the lower half of the Elite division, which says something about us (we rock!) and the tournament (less rocking). This meant we had to finish in the top two of our pool in order to have a shot at the A quarters where we were hoping to take a crack at Boston Ultimate (or, as I referred to them this weekend, our farm club, although I think they are all a few years of seasoning away from being ready to play with us).

As compared to our previous Open tournament where we had 11 on Sat and 9 on Sun, this time we had 18 on the roster for Saturday and 14 for Sunday. Except that I forgot that one of them wasn't going to show up for either day (and I had just golfed with him a few days prior), one cancelled for Sunday, and two just didn't show up on Saturday, putting a crimp into my plans to make money on entry fees. And the usual assortment was late, so once again at start time on Saturday we had about 7 or 8. Our first game was against Chuck Wagon, whom we had beaten at WMO. Rough game for me, throwing away a goal on the first point on a dumb throw that had been working for me, got partially point blocked, dropped two less-than-perfect dumps, and almost certainly did something else bad. I had made a comment on George's blog about how anything more than 10 warmup throws was inefficient, so I felt compelled not to do any warmup throws at all. I learned my lesson and threw a handful of throws before our first game Sunday while waiting for my teammates on the line for the first point. Nonetheless, my mastery as a motivator must have been worth a few points as we won 15-12. By now we were up to our full squad for the day (but still missing a bunch of guys who were great players in the '90s).

Our next game was against Phoenix, whom we had played as DoG at this tournament not two years ago in a tight game. We had a tight first half, but then pulled away for a 15-8 win. This, we thought, guaranteed our spot in the pre-quarters (we were mistaken, as HOV was losing to Chuck Wagon, meaning that we were in as long as we lost by no more than 5). However, our hopes for a quarters matchup against Boston Ultimate took a hit as they lost to PoNY. There was still a chance if we lost our last game and BU beat Pike (and of course we won our pre-quarters), but it looked a lot less likely.

Our final pool play game was old-fashioned DoG. We knew we were in and we just cruised. HOV kept getting mad at themselves while we looked past our mistakes since they didn't matter, and found ourselves up and expanding the lead. (I will admit to being confused by other teams discussing point differential but it didn't dawn on me.) I sat out all but a few points in this game in order to have some legs left for the pre-quarters. Final score 15-10 and first place, giving us a matchup against Zebra Muscles.

ZM played a lot better than a team that got shellacked 15-6, 15-4, and 15-2 already (or maybe they were fresh). They didn't make the drops or simple mistakes that some of these other teams had done. Our best chance at winning this game was early, as we went up 4-2 while still squandering a few opportunities. They got a run to take half 8-6 and expanded it to 12-9. At 13-10, we got a turn near their goal line but failed to put in the upwinder, they scored the downwinder and then closed us out 15-11. We tried hard but we weren't that disappointed since it meant we did not have to play at 8:30 in a game we knew we would lose (especially so given that we probably would have had 4 players there on time).

So, we had a 10:30 game against the winner of Colt .45, who had gone winless on Saturday in lower Elite, and the Gunslingers, who had won all their games in the non-Elite section. We still struggled to get a full team there on time. The Gunslingers are a young Boston team, possibly none of whom were born when I started playing (1983). I had a good game, making several blocks (at least three, maybe more) and some good offensive plays while playing every point. We took half 8-6 but couldn't put them away, and found ourselves pulling upwind at double game point. They had a simple throwaway (either a miscommunication or a disc that stuck to the thrower's hand) in their own end. After a disputed line call on a second chance catch, we forced up a stall 9.9 pass into the end zone that found its way into our of our hands for the game-winner.

I have to admit, it's been awhile since I felt so involved with the team's successes, even if it was the B pool quarters. Even in those recent years with DoG where I was still playing almost every O point, I still felt a little bit outside the team. I expressed it once that it almost felt like there were two alternating games going, one when we received and another when we pulled, and they somehow combined the scores of those two games to determine a winner. It really is a different perspective that I had mostly forgotten, to go into a tournament with your normal team thinking that making the quarters would be a good showing, but I guess that's the reality for an awful lot of players out there.

We moved fields, again (we did not play two consecutive rounds on the same field all weekend, George), for our B pool semi against New Noise, who had barely lost to Pike in the pre-quarters the day before (but had also barely made the pre-quarters, winning a one-pointer in their last game). They were similar to Gunslingers but a couple years older and possibly having some ties to Amherst instead of/in addition to Boston. I hadn't done anything other than walk or sit from the end of the previous game until the first point had started and I found myself setting up for a cut to a long backhand from Alex off the walkup. But then I realized that even though the cut was open, there was no way that I was actually going to run that much right then, so I yelled something about how I wasn't going to cut there and instead cut back to the disc. On the next upwind point, they again pulled it out and this time I told one of the other players to get in the same place I had been and to cut deep for Alex's backhand. He tried, but his defender was backing him so much that it was impossible. After a few seconds more, I found myself at the back of the stack so I just cut deep. I saw the throw hooking so I angled toward the cone, only to find that it hadn't hooked nearly as much as I thought. Fortunately for me, the defender (mis)played the disc, not me, and it went over his head to me for the goal.

They took half, but we broke twice to start the second half. I believe that we kept trading after that. At 12-12, again going upwind, they turned it about 20 yards outside the endzone. Alex walked it up, and I cut for his hammer after making sure that the stack got away from that space. He had overthrown me in almost the identical situation the previous game, so maybe he overcompensated by hanging this one a bit. It hung long enough for a poacher to come over and clobber me in the head sometime after the disc had been tipped away. I yelled "Jesus Christ" at his carelessness and started to play defense only to see blood spurting from my head. I rotated my body to try to avoid getting blood on my shirt and lay down. I popped up again to yell at the sideline, "I'm bleeding here! Pretty bad. Someone get me something. Call for help." Someone got a towel, and the trainer came fairly quickly, so I realized I wasn't going to bleed to death. But I still needed immediate treatment and got taken away in a cart so he could clean me up a little. He drove me back to frisbee central, cleaned the wound and put some bandaids on, and told me I really needed to get stitches in the next hour or so to reduce the risk of an ugly scar. So I got them to call for a cart so I could talk to my wife. I waited, we drove over, I tried interrupting their game by calling "Injury time out" (strictly speaking, it would have been) after yet another turnover (I said, "I hope this isn't a hell point," and got the reply "It already is"), but yet they continued. After another turnover, I caught my wife's attention and yelled, "My head is cut, I'm ok, I'm going to Emerson Hospital to get it stitched", at which point the girl she was defending cut. It was incomplete, and by now several people on the field knew they might want to stop play, so they motioned to the thrower to call timeout (someone on the side even said, "yeah, we haven't used any yet"), so of course the thrower decided to keep playing. This time, however, the pass was caught for a goal and I got to repeat the information, adding that my head didn't hurt and it definitely wasn't a concussion and of course I was fine to drive. So, back into the cart to be driven across the grounds to my field, expecting the game to be over but finding that it was only 13-13. As I later found out, we traded yet again, but then turned it over twice on double-game point to lose 15-14. Once again, it was a bittersweet defeat, as the team was already pretty spent and another game might have started to see my teammates dropping like the elderly during a heat wave.

So, off to the hospital for the first time ever in 25 years of ultimate (one other time at practice I got hurt, stopped playing, and went to the doctor the next day). I gave my name at the desk, sat in the waiting room for a bit, talked to someone at the desk finally, got shunted off to another room, waited, talked to another person, and then was told to wait some more. At some point I debated acting delirious in order to be seen more quickly. I was disappointed in the wait because I had chosen the hospital in the more affluent area, figuring there would be fewer Sunday afternoon trauma cases to delay me, but it still took me about 2:30 before I finally got out of there. Anyway, at this point I decided to go clean myself up a little and finally looked in the mirror to see dried blood all over my face and even in my ear. Sweet. My wife and the boy finally show up as I'm being shown to my room (where I waited another 30 minutes). Finally, more cleaning, some anesthetic, and I get stitched up and released.

Overall, we ended up where we were seeded, just about. I think we would have had a better chance in the games we lost had they been earlier in the day, but that's part of the nature of ultimate tournaments. I don't really know what to make of our team's chances this year. I would really like them if only everyone were 38 again.

Anyway, I had a good time, and am surprisingly not sore right now. I need a couple more tournaments like this between now and September to go along with the other things I'm doing and I'll be raring to go.

Field sense

2007-06-08T07:22:00.000-07:00

Here is a cool article on teaching field sense. Here's one really good quote:
Farrow has found that players who make poor decisions tend to glance at targets, rather than pausing on them. They're also more drawn to motion. "In a lot of team sports, you're attracted to the area of greatest movement," Farrow says. "But just be-cause there's a person running fast and waving his arms doesn't mean he's the best person to kick to."

And here is another interesting link, though interesting in a different sense.

Leverage

2007-06-04T20:29:00.000-07:00

In baseball, the term leverage is used to quantify the importance of the next event in determining the outcome of that game. Events in close games have higher leverage than those in blowouts, and during a close game, events near the end of the game have higher leverage than those earlier in the game, since there is less time to recover. (You can also factor in how much a particular outcome will change the probability of winning, instead of just considering the state prior to the at-bat; google "Win Probability Added" for more detail.) One application of this is that teams should use their best relievers during the higher leverage moments where possible. Now, there is some debate as to what extent clutch hitting exists (i.e., the ability to perform better during high leverage situations), but

There are two applications to ultimate that I can think of (well, three if you count using fire in rocham). One is that I strongly prefer playing high leverage points, if such points are available that day. I think I realize that I'm not going to be able to play every point at any high level of output, so I'd rather those points be important to the outcome of the game. Thus, points when we're winning 5-2, or whole games where the outcome isn't in doubt, I don't have much desire to participate in. (For summer league or pickup where I don't much care about the outcome, even when it's in doubt, this doesn't factor in except maybe at double game point if I'm in or if there is someone on the other team I want to have lose.)

The other is in foul calls and contests. There are four calls I've been involved in these past two tournaments that come to mind. I held my ground on the two highest leverage calls and gave up on the other two (even though on one of those I was at least 100% in the right; in fairness, though, not only was this one not at an important part in the game, but it also didn't make a lot of difference in the expectation that we would score the point). I don't engage in gamesmanship in stuff like this, so it wasn't a matter of giving up a call now expecting to get one or more back later. Rather, I don't want to be a guy who is involved in a lot of calls or a guy who makes bad calls. I guess I'm willing to risk the latter a little bit in some circumstances because I also don't want to be a guy who helps his team lose by not making a (good) call.

I don't doubt that in each case, I was probably correct (and not just loophole/ticky tack correct, but spirit of the rule correct), although I'm not sure what an Observer would have ruled on them (or even what I as an Observer would have ruled).

Anyway, what really triggered this trip down angst lane was seeing a comment on the UPA Strategic Planning blog (and remembering similar comments elsewhere) about how unspirited it is to pull out calls when the game is on the line. The paradox is that the commenter would think it more unspirited to make those earlier calls, too, even though that would make the amount of rule-breaking required to call a foul more consistent. (I also tend to factor in how respectfully the other player plays and how he makes the call; given a certain level of how sure I am about a call, I find myself more likely to contest a call if the other player is belligerent about it.)

I can think of examples from other sports that back up this point of view. In pro football, the coach will throw the challenge flag only if either he's absolutely certain or if the difference in the outcome is huge (score/no score or possession). Years ago in pro hockey, many players had sticks with illegal curvature on the blade, but they were only challenged on it in the last minutes of tight games. And in the George Brett pine tar incident, the Yankees knew about it for a long time but waited until Brett had hit a 3 run homer to ask for a measurement.

For the record, the calls (the first two were detailed in the WMO post):
1. 12-11 us, game to 13, I'm chasing a hammer on defense, as I'm about to jump, the receiver shifts his position and jumps back toward me. The disc goes over his head, but my momentum carries me into him. I ask him twice if he's sure he doesn't want to take the call back, then don't contest.
2. 12-12, game to 13 (next point), 30 yard pass in the end zone for the game winner, I jump up and make the block, then have some (incidental?) contact on the receiver's body (nothing on the arm). I am more certain that an Observer would rule in my favor than I am that I did not commit a foul. I send it back without trying to convince the receiver to retract his call.
3. 0-1, we receive the pull, quick swing, defense is still not down yet, I cut (pretty much laterally) before I get to where the D is and catch the second pass (this is generally what I do as the Man (3rd person in the play, first downfield cutter) on a low pull, take the free yards rather than actually having to cut and possibly gain more). Pick is called. I pace off 6 steps to my man who called the pick and explain the 3m rule. I add that I was never within 5 yards of the spot where he was standing. Argument ensues. Dumbfounded and angry, I sent the disc back.
4. 13-12 us, game to 15, they throw a long pass. I am looking back at the disc as I run downfield. I feel there is an excellent chance (more than 50/50) that I will cause this pass to be incomplete. About 30 yards from where the disc ends up, while the disc is still high in the air and upfield (toward the thrower) from us, I run into the receiver, who has stopped so as to have me run into him. There is no possible way that he has simply misread the disc. I raise my arm immediately and stop running. He catches it in the end zone. I state "didn't play the disc! Sending it back!" I send it back. He doesn't argue much, but whether that is because he knows I'm right or if he just thinks it won't make a difference, I don't know. Of course I am aware that an offensive foul in this circumstance is a turnover, but I wouldn't want a turnover in that circumstance. I made a similar call in the game to go in 1986 Regionals.

Purposeful walking

2007-06-01T19:58:00.000-07:00

At the White Mountain Open, I was given a backhanded compliment along the lines of "you're old and slow(er) but you still get way open. How?" After kicking him in the groin, I explained to him that it was all about positioning and knowing when to just run.

Good defensive positioning is a dynamic process. What might be good position at one point is suddenly way out of position a few seconds later as the disc is swung or the players move a few yards. The defender basically decides what cut is not a threat to the team and so doesn't have to respect that cut. Examples: player 50 yards away, a deep pass is not a threat, defender plays in front. Cutter at the back of the endzone, only cut is back to the disc, defender plays in front. Marker takes away dump pass, handler defender doesn't overcommit on a cut to the dump. The defender will follow if the cutter goes to those places, but the defender won't try to beat the cutter there.

So, what you do on offense is to try to change the position so that the defender either continues in their relative positioning (thus opening up what was previously not a threatening cut) or alters their positioning (thus opening up the cut they were trying to prevent at first). For instance, you are handling, standing about 10 yards directly in front of the thrower, being forced one direction, say, forehand. The inside-out is a very tough throw here, and the around break will take long enough to deliver that the continuation isn't that much of a threat, so a good defender will position himself to allow you to cut inside-out. What you do, then, is to take several steps to the open side. If the defender keeps the same relative position, the inside-out cut is now wide open and is an easy throw straight up the field, and a threat to deliver a continuation pass. If the defender adjusts to be more in front of you instead of to the side, you may be able to cut back to the disc for a swing or laterally for a leading "away" pass.

Downfield, you are more likely to work in/out positioning rather than side-to-side. Say the disc is being walked in, and you are planning on cutting first. Put yourself somewhere near the middle or middle-back of the stack. Prior to check in, you reposition yourself further back in the stack, slightly on the open side. By starting out in the middle, the defender will usually adopt a position that at a minimum respects the deep cut (and sometimes even takes it away and concedes the in-cut). As you get deeper, they will usually maintain the same relative position to you, but suddenly the deep cut is not an option, and the in-cut is that much more open. A smart defender will adjust at this point, but amazingly, there aren't that many smart defenders out there [insert general disparaging comment about the intelligence of defensive players versus offensive players]. In the last couple steps before you actually cut, you can also drift more out into the open, making it more of a straight shot clear of poachers. Then simply plant and run hard to the disc. You may also throw in a step away or right at the defender before cutting in, but it's just one step, and you are not waiting for a reaction from the defender before going.

(This is what I have previously called a "quick fake", where you do a fake and continue on to your real cut or throw without waiting for a response. A quick fake is a diversion. A "slow fake" involves making a motion and then reacting to the defender's response. A bunch of back-and-forth jukes from a handler is a slow fake (even if those jukes are quick), because the handler is waiting for a sign that a defender has overcommitted or not reacted before deciding where to go. Sometimes a quick fake becomes a slow fake. A thrower might lift the disc suddenly to set up a low breakmark forehand (the quick fake), but if the defender anticipates correctly and shuts off that forehand, the thrower pivots to the backhand break (the slow fake). A cutter is on the open side and has both short and long open. Do a quick fake out to set up the in cut, go hard in for two or three steps and then read the defender's reaction. If the defender has anticipated the in-cut and has maybe even overcommitted to that, you immediately stop and cut deep as hard as you can.)

Sometimes, through no effort on your part, an "opportunity cut" will present itself. Maybe you're in the stack a little on the open side, your defender is fronting you and not watching the disc at all. At that moment, you're not a deep threat because the disc is not in a position to be hucked. However, you see a swing pass go off to the open side and the receiver is someone who can huck it. Suddenly, you're in great position to cut deep, provided that your defender keeps his focus on you. Allow him to do that by pretending to prepare for your own in-cut. Then, you make a hard step in and immediately reverse and cut deep. The defender will be backing up and even if he is faster than you, you will have enough of a head start that it shouldn't matter.

So, the basic idea is that you need to identify an area that you would like to cut to, then purposefully walk (or shuffle, or run if you must, I suppose) in the opposite direction, giving the defender the opportunity to make a mistake in positioning.

White Mountain Open

2007-05-24T17:12:00.000-07:00

WMO was good overall. It was disheartening to lose the quarterfinals after being up 12-9 and 14-12 in a game to 15, and against a team that is probably about an 8th-10th place at Regionals quality. No doubt about that feeling.

But considering our limited roster, it was a big success. 11 on Saturday, 9 on Sunday, including my wife, whose team bailed on Saturday morning. It was hardly a Murderers' Row, as few of the vintage DoG were there, although on average the team was much younger and probably more mobile than our full team.

In our first game, we beat Bro White, the male half of last year's Mixed finalists Slow White (minus a couple guys trying out for the new team or otherwise absent). Bro White would later give fairly close games to both halves ofBoston Ultimate. Overall it was probably our best game of the weekend for efficient offense and getting turns.The next two games also went pretty well. We handled Koob, the final remnants of the team that made (Masters) Nats in '05 and lost the game to go in '06, and also beat Chuck Wagon (formerly Log, ofBurlington) decently, although the final difference was but two. (They finished about 6th at Regionals last year). Last game was against half of Boston Ultimate. I had already conceded the game and the day, as we were going to get another shot at the other half, we had 9.5 (one had left, one was hobbling), and we were 98% certain of getting a 1st round bye (Bro White would have had to beat Boston Ultimate; I'll leave the Bayesian statistics to the reader, but I estimate that going in BU was a 13-7.5 favorite, final score was 13-10; ok, my Pythagorean estimator predicts somewhere between 74% and 96%). We had real matchup problems, regardless, both in height and speed, leading to lots of easy long goals for them. But I didn't really care, and I can't say I played too hard or got up too much for the game since it was our fourth in a row and we were old.

We were probably a four-goal favorite for Sunday's quarterfinal, even allowing for our small numbers (as mentioned above, lost four and added two). It started out looking like we'd beat the spread, but we let them back in it. We put on a zone and got two breaks and a chance at a third. We built up a lead to 12-9, made it to 14-12, then kept turning it and allowing goals.Our problems that game and on the weekend were mostly throwing execution and choice. Only against Boston Ultimate were they related to age and slow footspeed. Another problem on Sunday was the lack of handlers. As a result, two of us who normally are receivers ended up spending a lot of time near the disc instead of being freed up to cut downfield.

We didn't have a lot of spare time to hang out, often one of the best times of tournaments with old people. Two of our first three games went well into the cap, maybe even to the next round.

In the Bro White game, we went up 7-4, then they came back. Late in the game, I think the point prior to double game, they threw a high hammer, I went after it, I was decently positioned to make a play at it but their guy jumped back into where I was headed, not where the disc was going, but he went mostly up and I was going forward and so I bumped into his back and he called foul. I asked him at least twice if he was sure that he had a play on it and he didn't just misread it, but he insisted on the call, so I let him have it uncontested, and they scored. At double game point, we turned it, and someone threw a medium-range forehand into the endzone, I came off my guy, jumped, and knocked the disc away cleanly, but contacted the receiver on the body afterwards, not hard but not light, either. Foul call, I laugh and say for the first time in my life, "But I got the disc first." Everyone sitting around says no foul, but I just ask the guy to send it back. I had almost decided to give it to him, too, but then I saw Alex walk up (actually he was probably just trying to see what was happening rather than to influence me) and decided to stick with the contest, feeling that had there been an observer there, especially one named Mike G, it would not have been called a foul. It goes back, a couple passes later one of their guys drops a pass while on the goal line, we work it down for the win and the clear path to a 9 am pre-quarters bye. I felt that between the two plays, there was about 1 foul, probably about 0.4 on each one, so I don't feel bad about sending the second one back. Had the first not happened, or had it not been double game point, I probably would have just given up the second one, too.

New pick rule is stupid (but not the people who came up with it!) but I insisted on it being applied about 4 or 5 times (all in our favor), and let two slide (1 for, 1 against). Maybe 1 or 2 of those times, it was probably a good outcome that the play stood, but the other ones it probably should have gone back. Part of the reason for the pick rule is for safety, yet this encourages players not only to continue but to initiate movement. (The times it was a "good outcome" were when the throw was almost coincidental with the call and no one had time to react.)

Alex covered the tournament on his blog, although for some reason it's more Alex-centric.

Big Ego Ultimate lifetime: 17-6, 2 tournament victories, 1 runnerup, 1 "other". Next meeting: Masters Easterns, June 2-3.

Call me Luke

2007-04-27T09:13:00.000-07:00

It’s been awhile, thought I’d let you all catch up on my sports life.

I’ve been playing in an Over-40 pickup basketball game in town. There is only one guy who I would call a good player, about half the guys have some skills, and the rest are what you would expect from an old man pickup game in an affluent suburb. This has been a great environment for developing my game, much like summer league was back when I first started making a conscious effort to develop more throwing skills. I’m finally making some basketball moves for the first time since that one year in college where I played at lunchtime most days. I even try hard on defense, harder than on O. There are two guys who play unspiritedly. One guy is old and a bit fat and is a bad player, but he’ll take down anyone who beats him and is set for an uncontested layup attempt. He’s quite dangerous, to be honest. He’ll also yell occasionally when a player is shooting. “Very classy,” I said once, but I don’t think he heard. I can excuse his behavior a little bit, because if he didn’t cheat, his team would be at a great disadvantage because he’s so bad. The other guy is more irksome, and actually caused me to lose my cool a few weeks ago. He’s one of the guys with some skills. When he plays hard, he can get open and sometimes he’ll go on a hot streak. But most of the time he’ll just play some clutching and pushing game, usually subtle enough that you wouldn’t notice it but it is what makes it easy to get open or to get in the proper place for a rebound. I got tired of it one day and grabbed his arm as he was about to push off, then did it again the next time to make sure he knew it wasn’t an accident, then gave him a gentle shove just to make it absolutely sure. I’m come very close to making a deliberate bad makeup call, but have limited myself to making snide comments.

Softball season started last night, a thrilling 4-2 win for the Cougars. I saw five pitches in three at-bats, taking one for a strike, taking one for a ball, and putting the other three into play. All of the strikes seemed like pitches I could drive rather than strikes nibbling at the corner. First at-bat was a weak grounder to shortstop that I normally would have beaten out but my legs weren’t loose despite an adequate warmup. Second at-bat was a medium-hard liner into short right-center, an easy single from the moment it left the bat. Third at-bat came in the bottom of the sixth, two outs, runner on first, tie game. It was a hard grounder that the shortstop was able to get a glove on with a good play, but it was a hit no matter how good of a play he could have made. I had hoped/expected to hit a line drive over the left-center fielder’s head. Runners on the corner. I possibly could have made second had I been thinking of it out of the box, but I had expected it to be a clean single with no possibility of making second. The next batter hit a groundball to shortstop. The shortstop fielded it cleanly and looked to toss it to second for the inning-ending forceout, but I got a good jump and got there first. The SS’s throw to first was late and then bounced off the 1B’s glove and squirted down the line. I continued round third and headed home. The throw got there first, but I slide to the outside and swiped the plate with my hand, completely evading the tag. (Merely beating the tag isn’t enough in this league, since the umps generally call any close, cleanly- executed play an out.) This insurance run took the pressure off us in the last inning and we were able to close them out. This game was a big contrast to our previous game last year, a season-ending loss in the first round of the playoffs. That final score was 21-20, featured a ton of errors and walks and home runs, while this one was cleanly-played (we didn’t allow anyone to reach on error, although there were two errors that allowed them to take the extra base). (I really ought to move away from the paradigm of “lack of errors = good fielding”. More important than avoiding errors is making the marginal plays. Our game-winning hit was one of those plays not made. My first grounder to shortstop would have been a play not made had I run a little faster. Those type of plays are at least as frequent as the errors (and many errors happen on those marginal plays where the fielder has to zing the throw).)

I’ve only been out to the golf course once this year, but had a good time, playing 27 holes in about 4 hours. 42-39-44 on the always difficult Stow Acres North. I had a 10 hole stretch where I was only one over par. Many of my recent rounds have featured a stretch of 6-10 holes where I was almost even, so I’m optimistic about my chances of extending that stretch one day soon to a full 18 holes. I got a new 3 wood this winter, replacing a club which I hardly ever used because of a lack of confidence in it, and I am quite pleased. I hit seven fairways in a row with it, and also nailed two strong shots from the fairway over a pond onto the green, shots I knew were stupid but decided to go for anyway. Shot-by-shot available upon request. Unofficial Handicap Index stands at 9.7.

The Frisbee schedule is surprisingly full. I wouldn’t be surprised if I actually played more ultimate this year than in previous years, both in the number of tournaments and points played per tournament. Played Fools already, scheduled for WMO, Masters Easterns, and Boston Invite this spring, probably summer league tournament and Hingham, maybe another summer or fall tournament, then Sectionals (if Masters teams are still allowed to play Open), Regionals and Nationals. That’d be 10, and I’ve played 9, 12, 9, 5, and 10 the last five years.

Red Sox are doing well, Yankees less so. I don’t really get into the “Yankees Suck!” cheer (even though they do), since cheers that focus on the other team are for losers, plus the Red Sox have been the Evil Empire Lite with their big budget and gamesmanship and nearly-unmatched string of championships this century (only five other teams, none of them from NY, has as many titles as the Sox so far). I haven’t seen or even listened to more than a token amount this year, though.

No ski days this winter so far. No long cross-country runs, except for that one nice day this winter where I jogged for about 20 minutes and had to stop once for twice for sore feet.

Fools, again

2007-04-04T19:00:00.000-07:00

Wow, I just finished reading last year's Fools report, and I realized I hardly need to type anything in for this year, even down to the comments. In fact, I'll comment on that article first:
1. It appears that this is the first use of the phrase "huck and hope" (although it wasn't capitalized or TMed yet).
2. "This is our year"
3. "I wouldn't want to win any tournament that this team could win."
4. Funny stories on the sideline and in the beer tent still abound.

I suppose I can add some comments about this year, too.

Day 1 was about the same as the previous years, with one notable exception being that I was mentally prepared for it and so did not get depressed at not being able to run.

We were really bad throwing deep all weekend, such that once again the Indefensible would have been a terrific defensive strategy.

No warmup again this year other than before the quarters.

I was excited when I got to the fields Sunday and saw that games were to 9 with a 50 minute cap. I was going to have to leave no later than 4, which would have been sometime during the final, so I probably would have had to tank us in the semis so as not to have to miss a game, but this enabled me to be around for everything. Plus, games to 9 are short and might favor an old team. I got moving around, actually ran some lengths before the game, and broke more of a sweat then than I had all day Friday. Alas, we made a few too many turnovers and let the game drift away.

Got screwed over by the airline on the trip back, getting bumped from our flight despite being frequent flyer members and checking in nearly two hours before our flight. They couldn't put us on the next flight either and we had to wait until 2 pm the next day. Also had a two hour delay on the outbound flight, and they left our carseat at the Dulles Airport and so had to give us a loaner in Boston. I remarked to my wife that the Man really took it to us this weekend, and the only thing we got to stick to the Man was sneaking into the hotel pool after they declared it closed from 10-3 because state law required a lifeguard in their 4' deep pool. But then I managed to make a slightly longer list of sticking it to the man: 18 year old got to drink beer, we sped, I took a banana from the hotel buffet, I fed the boy a couple of pieces of fruit from the buffet. But I think the Man beat us overall.

I can't believe that the pick rule is as it was being played. If a pick happens, 12 players stop playing, but the thrower and a cutter don't, the thrower can huck it to the cutter for a goal, and it stands because it doesn't "affect the play". I can see that if the call is nearly coincidental with the throw, then the pass should stand, but there ought to be a limit of something like 2 seconds after which it goes back. There is nothing in the rules that says that the thrower has to (or even ought to) acknowledge the call, so he should examine whether something is wide open prior to acknowledging it, per the rules, some will probably say. Since the pick is intended to reduce the risk of injury, writing the rules to demand that players play on after a pick call is made seems counterproductive.

I didn't break anything, although there was a point I wanted to take something made of wood and beat it against the ground repeatedly. Unfortunately, none of the Canadians' mallets were available. Oh, yeah, I beat the Canadians in a bocce-off for the flip one game. I warned them that I was Italian, but they didn't listen.

change in Boston ultimate

2007-04-03T15:22:00.000-07:00

Well, I guess the word is out, so there is no sense in keeping it a secret anymore. Many people asked me about the impending change to Boston ultimate, and yes, it's true.

I sent my retirement letter to DoG a couple weeks ago.

It was remarkably short and dry, I must admit. I tried to muster up some mush, but I got all of my teary-eyed feelings about retirement out of the way back in 2004, my first "final" season. That year, I went through the fall knowing that it would be my last, so I was able to deal with all the baggage of experiencing my last practice, last trip to Sarasota, last time leaving the fields, last free beer at the tent, etc. (at least as an Open player; at this point, I still don’t think that Masters counts, even as I plan to play this year). I still really wanted to play and felt that I could play, but it just seemed like too much to handle anymore, especially having a small child.

But then I got a couple months away from the season, and I had already begun to miss it, and to forget the bad parts. I decided that I didn't really have to retire, and you know we gave Furious a helluva game in the quarters, so who knows what another year would bring? So I plunged ahead. (Cynics say I came back just to sell more copies of the book.)

The next year wasn't nearly as hard to continue. I had a strong performance at Nationals, and the team made semis for the first time in three years.
But now, well, I'm perfectly fine with not playing, although of course Mr. Big Ego thinks he can still cut it at the highest level. It's not that I'm retiring to spend more time with my family (in his wonderful book "The Game", Ken Dryden talked about how he and his wife would laugh at any athlete who claimed that when retiring; I highly recommend the book, especially to anyone at the end of his athletic career). And it's not that I'm ready to move on with my life. It's just that all things considered, getting the band back together is a much more intriguing proposition. Yes, we're going to dust off the old DoG guys and relive the glory days, minus the glory.

We're still in the process of figuring out how to structure the team and what sort of goals to set. (One opponent this weekend asked if we planned to win six in a row in Masters. I replied that it's more likely that one of us would die on the field first. He replied, "That's morbid. Probably true, but morbid.") I tried at Fools to convince other old-timers to get their bands back together so we could all go at each other, but I'm not sure whether that will work out. Would anyone pay to attend a DoG vs NYNY match, maybe with an Earth vs Graffiti undercard (maybe as a fundraiser for some worthy cause)? Would we resort to breaking out the canes to hit each other for old times' sake?

I had a very satisfying and fun career, and while I feel that I earned what I accomplished, I know also that I was lucky, both genetically and environmentally. Even as I made fun of those who were perpetually injured, I probably didn't do much to escape being in that group other than avoiding collisions and knowing when not to push a tweaking muscle. And sure, though I did "bust my ass doing wind sprints in the cold and rain", so did a lot of other people.

I will miss being a nanocelebrity, and being able to make preposterous remarks about how infallible and worthy I am and draw laughs instead of strange stares. I don't think I'll miss people stopping me to ask about rules interpretations, even if the new pick rule is indeed stupid. I'll miss the camaraderie, although that should still be there in Masters, if not moreso (though not the sense of a shared struggle through the year). Most of all I'll miss the occasional game that is so consuming that you forget there is anything else in the world. I can mention "the Ring game" to an old teammate and not need to clarify which one, or "that one huck", or "Bim's catch", and I'll get teary-eyed and we'll both say, "yeah."

Aging of course was a factor in the decision. As recently as age 37 in 2002, the year we were a couple plays away from winning Worlds and Nationals (although we won neither), I felt as dominant as ever on offense, up there with 1995 and 1998 as my peak years. My overall awesomeness wasn’t as great in 2002, though, as I stopped being put in on defense in about 2000, our second year with a roster of 25. (I played about a dozen points of D in 1999, many of them important ones, as I was surprised to remember while watching the Above & Beyond DVD recently.) But now the peak isn't as high, but probably more importantly, I can't play at near-peak nearly as often. The warmup period is too long and the cooling down too quick such that the ebbs and flows of the game just make it really hard to be at that peak all the time.

Thus, big ego ultimate is dead, long live Big Ego Ultimate. All you other old guys, block off June 2-3 for Masters Easterns and the end of October for the UPA Championships, and I'll see you out there, if not on the field, then in the beer tent.

Studs Theory vs Plug N Play

2007-02-06T21:00:00.000-08:00

UPDATE: Added graph that showed profile in games DoG won.
REQUEST: If you have subbing sheets for your team at Nationals, please contact me if you'd be willing to share them (after anonymizing).

At Nationals this year, DoG had the flattest playing time profile I’ve ever seen. Only one guy played more than ¾ of the O points, and even he was only at 83% (sitting out about 2 O points per game). In contrast, vintage DoG and practically all the top teams now have several guys who more or less played every O point.

Here’s the graph. Although not necessary for the purposes of this discussion, players are categorized as Handlers, Receivers, or Receivers who played handler if necessary.

Some points:

Lots of guys didn’t play any O; only me and Al didn’t play any D.
The top 7 O played only 2/3 of the time, leaving an average of 2+ guys on the line each point who weren’t considered starters.
D % played is less (7th most is less than 50%).
Only 3 or 4 guys got more than a token amount of points on both sides.
Although this is averaged over all games, and you would suspect that the numbers would be different for tough vs easy games, DoG didn’t have any easy games at Nationals last year, and there was no real difference between relatively easy and relatively tough. There were about an equal number of O and D points.

Some of this is obviously do to a flatter talent level, which unfortunately is probably due to us not having the players who would be selected to an All-Nationals team, rather than having every player be that way. I found it hard to sit out so much and then try to take on an important role when in. The flat profile means that there are only a couple real starters (and even they are barely so) and everyone else is a sub. Ego has to be part of an offensive player's package, and being handled as subs destroys that ego. To belabor the point, starters do not merely play more than subs, but they do more when they are in. By telling each player that he is a sub, the team also tells them that they aren't good enough to be the man when he is in the game. Equally importantly, the player has to draw one of the following conclusions, depending on how the subbing is done: either whatever I do has little effect on my playing time, in which case I don’t have to play smart, or I am going to be benched if I make a mistake, in which case I probably should play so conservatively that I’m not going to help the team.

UCPC, Day 1

2007-01-27T14:58:00.000-08:00

Ok, there's only one day, but it feels like a multi-day event.

First, I was surprised to find that there were several people who traveled great distances. Kudos to everyone who made it out. I'm sure it was worth your while.

As a presenter, I was sorry that I only got to attend two of the other presentations, neither of them by my ex-teammates, who were presenting at the same time. Each presenter gave his talk twice during the four sessions (14 presenters total, I think). Even the full-time attendees still then had to choose between presentations.

My talk (powerpoint here, one-page summary here ) went well, I thought. The two sessions had different feels to them. I incorporated some of the questions from the first session into the second, and as a result of that and other changes, I ran over on the second session after having 10-15 minutes in the first one just for questions. The second session went smoother as well, as I didn't have to fight over as many words, and knew when to just go ahead and leave one slide and start on the next.

I left before the panel discussion, as it was already after 5 pm and there was still a presentation going on in the auditorium.

Good job by George and Tiina assembling the myriad volunteers and vendors. You never would have known that this was the first of its kind by how well things seemed to go. Thanks to them.