At Long Last...

THE ROCK .... HAS RETURNED ... TO HANOVER.

Ok, so I am sort of declaring blogger bankruptcy for the moment. I sort of, um, lost my password for a while, and was busy, and there's this war... anyways, lots of excuses for not keeping this lil blog updated. But I'm back, and I'm doing a quick recap of the regular season, and then I'll be all over this blog through the rest of the Series.

VEGAS

Las Vegas was awesome. We made our annual sojourn to Nevada (ask Carson how to pronounce it) in February, and played one of the most outstanding games I have ever been a part of, against UCSB. Despite our best efforts, we didn't stay off UltiVillage (an oft-repeated goal), which is sort of nice, as some damn good ultimate is now going to live forever on the interwebs.
We also played UNT, Whitman (right?), St. Olaf, Wesleyan, Humboldt, Colorado and Davidson. Although the Tide game rightly stands out above all the rest (it was a Universe point loss, by the way. No matter.), I was particularly pumped by the game against Colorado. We kept it close, losing 10-13, and that was without playing particularly well or firing on all cylinders. I wrote on this blog last year that I was disappointed after we faced Colorado for the second year in a row (it's now been three) because we didn't make much improvement. This year, there was no question that we were in the game with them the whole way.

SPRING BREAK

Spring Break was interesting. We lost the first weekend to God's wrath in the form of tornadoes, but still got in games against NC State (win), GA Tech (win) and Minnesota (Universe loss). We then spent a fun, if a bit too Spring Break-y, week on Folly Beach, playing brutal, uninspired ultimate in our daily scrimmages against a series of chumps in shirts.
HOWEVER... Southerns. Long my least favorite tourney, we have hit up Statesboro on our first weekend of Spring Break for the last two years. This time, however, we showed up after having been out of New Hampshire for a week, and we took it to teams. Boom boom boom.
Day 1, in pool play, we take down Ohio, Rutgers, Northwestern and LSU. Nothing too amazing happening here, but we did take care of business, which was a good thing for us to learn to do. Come Day 2, we faced WUFO first, and man did we do it. Watson had to leave us that morning, but we adjusted, Schmidty and Dekrey ABSOLUTELY DOMINATED and it was as if we weren't missing one of the best players in the region.
Next, Ohio State. I don't really get why people like this play ultimate, which may seem odd coming from me, a guy known to get chippy from time to time... but seriously, how is that mindset fun? We were up big at the beginning, they clawed back and we put the cap on, apparently 15 minutes too early. Curses were exchanged, blah blah blah, but then we got the chance to come out and take the last two points, to win the game on our own terms.
UNC-Wilmington awaited us, the one seed at the tourney, like us a Centex-invitee that stayed out of Texas this weekend. After living and dying with our D line all weekend, the O line played clean, efficient, almost flawless ultimate during this game. That allowed the few breaks our D line eked out to provide enough, and we won this one on Universe. This is when you learn to win these games, not at Regionals. Man, awesome.
So then we showed up, played Tufts in the finals. They were up big in the beginning, and really patrolled the skies. But they didn't have the depth our roster allows us to employ, and towards the end of the game we were able to just run them into the ground, playing boring, handler-based ultimate. We won going away, taking the tournament.

wow.

YALE CUP

We didn't play very well. I hesitate to play psychologist and write this off to the fact we were the one seed - I really don't think we came in thinking we were going to get this tourney on a silver platter or anything. We just didn't play well. It is good to know that we haven't done jack yet, that a win in Georgia doesn't get us any closer to achieving our goals at Regionals, nor does a loss in Connecticut push us any further away.

So that's where we stand. We're 23 guys, 22 days away from playing at Regionals. Keep checking back, I'll be jotting down notes about workouts, practices, team meetings and tournaments as much as possible.

lamar