Sectionals

See, it is one thing to bang out a quick recap of what we do at practice. Writing a full weekend's worth of game updates is much less pleasant - add to that the fact that I can barely sit still this week in anticipation of Regionals, and man, I don't know how much effort I'm going to put into this. I guess I gave away that we made Regionals.

We got there somewhat latish, cause the bus got lost? I dunno, I was amazingly fast asleep on the bus. Hibernation. Warm ups, scrimmage ourselves with a litany of spies from the other teams in the section watching us, etc. Luckily for us, we got all of our weak playing out in that first scrimmage.

A few teams never showed up, costing the section a bid to regionals, and turning a 4 (and, for a brief moment, 3) game tournament into 7 games for us, the top seed. Started against Bridgewater State once the situation was fixed. Umm. It wasn't close. They've got a good handler guy. Nobs took a girl to the house quite a few times. Huge layout Ds by Carson, Cobbles and Dermott in this game.


Then, UNH. We've played them a bunch over my tenure at Dartmouth, they always seem to have some type of chip on their shoulder - hard to explain exactly what I mean, but they certainly don't like us. Last year at Sectionals some short chump threw up a big spike on us when they scored to make it 12 - 2, which I didn't appreciate. Anyways, we played them hard, and stuck to the fundamentals. They have some very legitimate talent, which we shut down for the most part. A lot of teams in the section like to rely on the deep game, not wanting to do the work required to be a good ultimate team, and we never let them this weekend, which was baller.

Next was Colby. I always wonder what it would be like if I was playing Denton King in these games, and he was just some dude in a blue shirt with a big C on it, instead of this glorious ATLien I know and love. Anyways, I don't recall all that much about this team except that it had some good Ds against us - really the only team that I recall actually blocking discs we threw, as opposed to getting turns off our drops. Not that they did it often, but I recall a few shots to the endzone getting knocked around.

Last game of the day was Bowdoin. Now, this is a legit team. We're better, no doubt about it, but these guys have some good skillsets - interesting D looks, good break throws, rips in the air, etc. I think they actually broke us before we broke them, but once we busted out our zone look, we got Ds pretty reliably. This was by far our closest game of the day, in fact of the weekend, 13-8. As Socks said afterwards, we done well, but man, we need to fire it up, actually force those turns instead of waiting for them.

Bus to Chinese buffet and then to Graham's, I slept through what I'm told was a nice desert. In the Maineline motel, we got a bunch of rooms. Some folks played video games, Dermott watched Planet Earth, I saw the Flyers sucker punch the Canadians in Montreal, then flipped over to the end of True Lies.

"BYE!"

Ok, so we went back on Sunday morning, I don't recall much of the last pool play game, but then we had Dalhousie in the semis. Dal, I feel, has always demanded some respect on this team, ever since they destroyed the Pain Train in 04 or 05 with a bunch of ineligible players. In years past, they haven't brought many guys - it is a long, long drive, and usually during their finals or something. THis year, they had a lot of dudes, and I'd estimate the median age at 47. But we came out firing on all cylinders, really ready to lay it down. They planned on forcing us out, but we both managed to easily get open under and take those deep shots they were giving us when they were open. Beautiful, really fun game. There was an awful travel call against me, but so goes life.

In the finals, we saw Bowdoin, victors of UMF. So we were spared having to directly dreg up memories of last year's nail biter in the semis, 16-14. No question, NONE WHATSOEVER that we would have rolled the Beavers, but it's nice to keep your mental health in positive spirits the whole time. Bowdoin, as they showed with their 3 man team last year, only really cares about making it to regionals, which they had done by making the finals. So, they opened up the rotation a bunch, and we rolled to Sectional victory 15-7.

So, because of various other Sectionals results, we've earned the second seed at Regionals. Harvard is top dog on the other side of the bracket, having bested Tufts in Sectionals. Below us are B Mo, The EMen, Umass, WUFO, BC and MIT. We'll face Rhode Island in the first round on Saturday morning, and from there it's all up in the air. One thing I am happy about is the fact that Bowdoin and UMF got some respect in the seedings this year - I feel that they are strong programs, and while they are rarely talented enough to get out of the first round of regionals, they can certainly do damage to any team in the region.

Ok, that's all from me for now. It is raining in Hanover, which meant we just had tossing, no practice yesterday - but that's ok, we needed to get our legs back under us, and touches in the rain are valuable as well. Wow, regionals in like 4 days. Go pain train.