The teams to beat

I recently posted a run-down of the top ten women's teams in the country. While trying to gauge which teams I think will be especially good this year, I came up against the age-old problem of not enough information. As such, I thought the blog would be a great place to get feedback from people about who else to keep an eye on. Keep in mind that my list was meant to get the dialogue started and not be the be-all and end-all of rankings. Here is the list of teams I picked for the top ten:

1. Stanford
   
2. UCLA
   
3. Wisconsin
   
4. Emory
   
5. Colorado
   
6. Carleton
   
7. Washington
   
8. Oregon
   
9. Texas
   
10. Florida
    

There are obviously a lot of good teams left off this short list. From the west coast, UC-Berkeley and UC-San Diego have proven they have programs in place that consistently produce solid teams, while Western Washington and UC-Santa Barbara are programs on the rise that could give higher seeds a run for their money. UC-Santa Cruz, Southern California, and British Columbia can't be counted out either. With a combined 6 bids to the championships coming out of the Northwest and Southwest regions, there's bound to be a lot of jockeying for position.

Who are the powerhouse and up-and-coming teams from the rest of the country? Specifically, some questions I have are: will more teams from the Metro East make it out of their region to play out-of-region competition? How have the teams from North Carolina re-built themselves for this season? Are Dartmouth and Tufts ready to fill the gaps left behind by their graduating stars? Is Michigan for real this year? Who else should be on the radar screen?

UVTV coverage of WUCC

Now that UltiVillage has footage of women's games in addition to the open coverage that previously dominated the site, I felt obligated (and excited) to buy a subscription to UVTV. I also wanted to see if I could catch glimpses of my sister and friends that were playing in Perth at WUCC. In no particular order, here are some of my observations from the 5 days of women's highlights:

• The subscription is worth it, in my opinion. When the finals get posted, there will be footage of 6 days of ultimate. The scarcity of women's video makes every chance to watch skilled women play a valuable learning tool. Being able to picture what good throwing technique looks like is one step towards emulating it...
  
• The Japanese teams are good. Watching MUD, HUCK, and UNO in particular, I was especially impressed with how quickly the players were able to move the disc. They swung the disc and hit the continue with smooth precision. Any team playing a vertical stack offense should watch some of that footage to see what good timing and disc skills look like. Of course, it helps when you're as fast as some of those women too!
  
• I wish there were more defensive plays included in the highlights. The most exciting D shown was a fully horizontal poach layout block that Bliss got on Ozone. More please... Great Ds (even if they don't lead directly to a score) are some of the best parts about ultimate. I'm sure at such an elite tournament, there must have been more than the handful that made the footage posted to UVTV. At least I hope so.
  
• It was hard to tell exactly how windy it was, but a lot of the long throws seemed to be particularly affected. A fair number of deep looks either were caught by someone other than the intended receiver or lead to more difficult catches than would have been necessary without any wind. Or maybe seeing hucks on film makes them look less accurate than in real life. Anyone care to comment on how much the wind was a factor?
  
• I found it puzzling that even though Rough Riders were competing in the women's division, some of the team's core players were playing in the mixed division on Team Fisher Price. I guess they did get a gold medal out of their decision, but who knows if they could have been the difference for Rough Riders to make it to the semis?
  
• I know it's been said before, but it is a shame more teams didn't participate. It wasn't just the US teams that were missing. Out of the 18 women's teams in attendance, 6 were from Australia/New Zealand, 6 were from Japan, 3 were from Canada/US and 3 were from Europe. I know that the host region always gets a better turn-out than regions farther away, but to only have a 1/3 of the teams come from outside the Asian Pacific area seems particularly skewed. I would have loved to see Fury and Riot match upagainst MUD and UNO. Sigh...
  

The Future of IC Ultimate

Now that the club season is over, its time to turn my attention more fully to the college season. However, this year I am faced with some serious dilemmas about how to proceed with IC Ultimate. It's quite obvious that the website hasn't been updated recently, and in general I have only been able to keep up with it in bits and spurts. Thus, I've come to the (perhaps unsurprising to most) conclusion that I simply don't have time to coordinate information from various sources, generate practically all the written content, and update the website code to keep the site as up-to-date and informative as I would like.

Nonetheless, I still feel it's really important to have a source of information for the women's college division, and I'm still willing to invest time and energy into it. I just can't do it all by myself. Especially since I won't be coaching Stanford this year and won't be at nearly as many tournaments. So at this point, I'm open to suggestions...

Some possible directions IC Ultimate could take:

• Turn the focus on the blog. Get more people signed up with posting priviledges who would be interested in writing about teams, tournaments, players etc. Would offer an area for opinions and discussion about women's college ultimate.
  
• Focus exclusively on tournament updates. Get more people to commit to being IC Ultimate reporters who submit content to me to upload on the site. Have some way that others can add input on games played or watched. This would hopefully allow people to follow along with the season's ups and downs more indepth than on the Score Reporter and rsd.
  
• Focus exclusively on team and player profiles. Get captains/coaches to submit assessments of their rivals/opponents. Get more nominations for players to feature. Assuming that tournament scores are on the Score Reporter, this would allow people to follow the more personal side of the season and leave tournament recaps to rsd.
  
• Retool the website to make submissions easier to obtain and manage and allow the website to be updated more efficiently. This will definitely have to happen if IC Ultimate is going to stay up as an entity outside of the blog.
  

What do people think?