Boston, Day Two

Why am I tired this morning?

Where am I this morning? It is dark, I clearly hear cars passing by. IT sounds sleepy yet a little active. Seems altogether too welcoming to be a hotel... We're in Boston this weekend, right? I think I'm at Elizabeth's place. A quick survey of the room confirms it. Right on.

Though I'm hardly awake, I'm being offered coffee. What service! Am I supposed to leave a tip? We slowly get ourselves together for the day ahead. For some reason, despite our huge roster yesterday, I'm a little tired. As I contemplate the specific way in which I'm tired, it becomes clear that it was more of the "I stood in the sun for a thousand hours yesterday" sort than the "I killed myself on the ultimate field all day yesterday." Fair enough, I know just the remedy. Get a little stretching done, down some coffee and visualize perfection for the day ahead.

We drop by another Dunkin' Donuts (They're everywhere!) on the way to the fields and, of course, saw other ultimate players there. Dan Yi and other miscreants this time around. Traveling toward the field, all I could think of was getting more dialed in today and staying there, no matter what other distractions entered into the equation. Whenever some option other than staying focused came through my mind, I would chose to stay focused.

Warmups were pretty good for me. I got a good sweat going, woke my muscles up and completed all of my passes. Got my feet moving on the mark and tried to think about my acceleration out of every direction change, small or large. Didn't get quite enough deeper throws in, but I felt confident nonetheless.

First Game vs Truck Stop, 11-15
This was an odd game. Our D had the disc twice on the first point and failed to convert. As the game went on, our D would alternate between getting scored on in 1 throw and grinding through a long point of solid D only to get scored on. When we got turns, we did not capitalize. I imagine TS could say the same, based on how bad I felt this game was all around. The Boston group heckling our final was clearly horrified by the number of turnovers in this game. I think it is fair to say that TS and Pike were as well. It was disappointing to lose to them, but not entirely unexpected considering the number of times we'll likely face off over the course of the season. Some things were better than yesterday, some were about the same. Some great stuff on which to improve came out of this game.

Bye
Watched some Wicked/Ambush, had a little chat with Danny and Ryan about what was wrong with Pike's offense, finally stopped by the scoreboard and checked out how everything had gone thus far.

Second Game vs Zebra Muscles, 15-9
While they strung together some nice pairs of points, we were ahead pretty much the whole way. I was continually covering a squirrelly handler-type who would do the strangest thing from the dump position in the middle of the stall count: Go Deep. I mean, yeah, there's a ton of space in front of you, but you run by all of the defense who can presumably use the power of sight to provide help D. There was a little shoving match in this one that I helped break up pretty quickly. Stupid ultimate players. I'm pretty sure that this was the game where Schmucker laid out over some guy's shoulder on an in-cut to get a D and then immediately caught the upwind huck for a bookend. That may be the most ridiculous thing I've seen on the field in 07.

Third Game vs The Van Buren Boys, 13-11
They only have 9 guys. I hope this won't be like Goat at Chicago a couple of years back. Or Boston X/Y at the Pike Invite, for that matter. Small teams often rally so well together that they give everyone tough games. Team chemistry counts for a ton in ultimate. This team also plays to their strengths very well by putting up deep shots to classically American corn-fed athletes early and often. Their active zone was a little challenging as it was aggressive and a bit sneaky. We did manage to push through in this one for the tourney ending W, which was nice.

Julie, Jamie and I got going pretty quickly after our game ended as Jamie had to travel after he got rid of us in Jersey City. On the trip back, we stopped at a roadside restaurant of some kind and had a discussion about the omnipresence of corn products in the American diet and a number of other completely unrelated things.

The rest of the drive was uneventful and we arrive back in Jersey a bit after 10pm.

The whole car ride was full of thoughts about ultimate and so many things I wanted to write down and tell my teammates or captains. Definitely a disappointing trip in terms of direct result, but I feel that we often learn best from failure. Now we have a better sense of what we need to improve upon in order to reach our goals. Time to use the lessons of the past to plan the course of our future. Now the real season begins.
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Workout Total:
3 games of ultimate