Inside College Ultimate

College Ultimate

2008-10-17T14:44:00.001-07:00

If you're reading this blog, I'm going to assume you are aware of the Conference 1 (C1) controversy that Cultimate started by announcing its plans to run a college national championship separate from the UPA college series.

Since the story broke a week ago, there has been a flurry of posting on rec.sport.disc and UltimateTalk about the implications of C1. I've had numerous people ask me my opinion about Cultimate's plan, both from the perspective of someone who's running for the UPA board of directors and as someone who cares deeply about women's college ultimate. It's rather hard to determine a definitive "stance" on C1 as there are a lot of unknowns. Cultimate has not publicly released details on its full plans for the college season, the details it has published on C1 still leave many questions unanswered, and discussions between the UPA and Cultimate are not over.

Even with all that uncertainty, there are a few things I know for certain:

Over-hauling the college season is a good thing. Not throwing it into chaos, mind you, but re-designing the college season. This is something that the membership overwhelmingly called for in the UPA's strategic planning initiative and in online forums. It is also something that the UPA has made a priority (even before C1 emerged on the scene). I am strongly in favor of restructuring the college season to help address some of its current problems. As I see it, those problems include a lack of a meaningful and coherent regular season, poor distribution of bids to the championship tournament (e.g. calculating strength wildcards solely on the previous year's performances), huge disparity gaps between teams that must play each other at Sectionals, and geographic problems with the way teams are distributed in sections and regions. C1 has clearly been designed to try and solve many of these problems. Any over-haul of college ultimate needs to address these issues.
There should only be ONE umbrella system for college ultimate. Players and teams should not have to choose between signing up with either the UPA or Cultimate to play out their college seasons. I know that both Cultimate and the UPA are looking into finding common ground for a plan that both parties can get behind. Their joint statement mentions the importance of an undivided championship and I don't think it can be stressed enough. From my personal communication with certain Cultimate employees and the UPA board of directors members, I think collaboration is possible. I also believe that stakeholders should be pressuring both Cultimate and the UPA to work together on this. The captains of teams invited to C1 are in communication, and I hope that they use their leverage to really push for a joint venture between the UPA and Cultimate. As should the general membership. It truly is in the best interest of everyone for there to be one college system.
No team should be excluded from a shot at the title. While there have been certainly been dynasties like Stanford Superfly, there is actually a tremendous amount of flux among the top teams in the college division. In the past 10 years since the regional re-draw, a total of 55 different schools have been represented at the college championships in the women's division. Multiple teams have made it all the way to finals in their first appearance at the championships. That's a lot of turnover from year to year, suggesting that it is important for all teams (regardless of previous history) to have a shot at making it to the championship event in any given season. I think that different levels of play (e.g. Div I and Div II or a modified C1 and C2) are definitely appropriate for college ultimate as a way to both encourage growth of newer teams and to increase the level of play for high-level teams, but the dividing lines should be cross-able. No team should be excluded from a fighting chance at the start of the season unless it wants to be.
The open and women's division should have the same structure. There are obvious differences in the number and distribution of open and women's teams in college. That doesn't mean that the competitive systems designed for the two divisions should be drastically different. Ideally, a new structure for the college division has the capacity to handle expanding numbers as more teams form around the country. That structure should thus be able to accomodate the different numbers of teams in the women's and open division. I'm certainly a proponent of regions being drawn differently for different situations (e.g. regions in densely populated areas like New England must be drawn-up differently than in more sparsely populated areas like Arizona), but the competitive structure of what it is required for a season should not differ on account of gender.

I'm excited for change coming to college ultimate and I know that the people at Cultimate and the UPA are too. I sincerely hope that they are able to build off of the common ground they share and build a new future that helps push the division forward.

Women's Worlds

2008-08-12T21:32:00.001-07:00

With all the talk about Worlds and the state of ultimate around the globe, there’s been surprisingly little discussion about the women’s division. Without a doubt, women’s ultimate is growing around the world with more people playing and with more teams competing at a higher level. WUGC 2008 was a testament to that growth. Of the fifteen countries represented, three had not sent teams to the last WUGC in Finland four years ago. Additionally, the caliber of play showcased athletes and teams that were quite talented—I would say that the top nine teams were better than the top nine teams at the UPA Club Championships, easily making this THE most competitive tournament around.

I wanted to make sure that the teams playing their hearts out this past week got some press, so here is a bit about each of the fourteen other women’s teams at Worlds. First, the teams the USA didn't play, then the teams we played in pool play, then the teams we played in bracket play.

Teams the USA Didn’t Play:

France – Props to the French women for making the trip half way across the world, especially considering the country didn’t send teams for every division (notably absent: a French open team). I didn’t get to watch these women play at all during the tournament, but they played incredibly tight games against both Colombia and Ireland. I will say that their blue and white warm-up jackets were hot commodities at trade night and I wasn’t lucky enough to score one.

Sweden – I remember playing a tight game against Sweden four years ago in Finland, so I was surprised to see the team’s results this year. The team seemed quite young compared to four years ago, so perhaps the country is in the process of passing the torch from a veteran crew to the younger leaders. Given that the Swedish open team also seems less competitive now than it was in the past, I wonder how ultimate is faring in Sweden in general these days. Hopefully all the new opportunities for international play in Europe will help the Swedish ultimate scene grow as well.

Colombia – The Colombian team was able to pick up Miranda Roth as one of its community player additions, although she was sidelined for much of the tournament with a slipped disc back injury. Ultimate in Colombia has grown by leaps and bounds recently, and the team was filled with athletic women coming from five different club teams, all willing to lay it on the line for their country. The team’s fast paced style helped them earn a surprise finish in the quarterfinals by beating Finland in a crossover game. Not bad for a team’s first appearance at a WUGC event! With the strength of the girls’ junior program, expect to see more good things from this team in the future…

Great Britain – Fury was lucky enough to play GB at CalStates back in June on the team’s North American tour, and they provided our closest game of that tournament. With solid handling and great receivers, GB has a pretty patient offense that allows its downfield cutters to get open for big yardage gaining cuts. The number of women who routinely make huge bids and athletic plays on the disc for this team is impressive—one of the more athletic teams at the tournament from top to bottom, I would say. Although losing in quarterfinals with three chances at game point must be terribly disappointing, the team has made huge strides in its cohesion and overall skill level from four years ago, aided in part by the creation of a British elite women’s league. I wouldn’t be surprised if the team wins Europeans this year.

Teams from Pool Play:

Mexico – this was the first year that Mexico sent a team to WUGC and I’m glad that Worlds was geographically close enough to enable the team to attend. The Mexican ultimate scene is still just getting off the ground, and the team benefited from picking-up two Texan players from the club team Showdown (Naz and Amanda Berens) to help boost their roster size and add some on-the-field leadership. Not as many women play athletics in Mexico as in many other countries, so the Mexican ultimate team included a number of women who had never played sports before finding ultimate. This is also the case for many women discovering ultimate for the first time at college in the U.S., and I’m always happy to hear of ultimate providing an athletic outlet for women that had never had any experience with sports before. The Mexicans had a number of handlers with solid disc skills and I can’t wait to see how far their team will progress in four years.

Switzerland – we had watched some game footage from 2007 Europeans of the Switzerland squad (where the Swiss took 3rd place) as preparation for our pool play game against them, and this team has a number of skilled players. Primarily playing a spread/horizontal stack offense, the team utilized break mark throws for big yard gainers and was not afraid to look deep—setting up most of their goals against us with long forehands. This team also won the Spirit Award for the tournament, a much deserved prize given what a pleasure the team was to play against. The team combined their competitive drive with a clear love of the game.

Ireland – Fury had played against the Irish women four years ago at the 2004 WUGC in Finland, so I can attest first hand to how much better the team is now. Four years ago, the Irish were best remembered for their youth, cheers, and winning the Spirit Award. Now, that team has matured into a squad that can consistently score points against the best teams in the world. Our 17-7 score against them this year felt like a completely different game than the 17-1 match we had in Finland. Benefiting from a coach (Lucy Barnes, formerly of Brute Squad) and the luxury of try-outs and regular training sessions, this team now takes itself seriously. Hopefully the women’s scene in the country continues to expand and get better in the coming years.

Italy – We have a player on loan from the Italians, and it was great to be able to show them how valuable Manu Argilli is to our team. The Italian team this year was significantly younger than the team was four years ago, but the squad benefited from its first coach and all 17 players worked hard for the game they obviously love. In our post-game huddle, the Italians passed out fliers for Paganello and their beaming smiles while talking about the infamous beach tournament makes me want to save up for the trip more than ever.

New Zealand – I was surprised to learn that the last time New Zealand sent a team to the WUGC was in 1994. As a result of lack of recent international results, the team was seeded towards the bottom of the draw, so they made quite a splash by going all the way to the quarterfinals. The team ran a German-iso-type offense with three handlers across, one isolated cutter in the middle of the field, and three other cutters positioned across the field further away. What made this offensive set work for the team was the strength of its handlers’ break mark throws. USA’s marks were challenged so much by New Zealand’s yard-gaining inside-out and around breaks that we had to make a number of defensive adjustments during the game to try and contain their throwers. I also have to say that our post-game huddle and games with the Kiwis were top notch.

Finland – After winning Europeans last year and earning the silver at the 2004 WUGC, we knew that the Finns would be formidable opponents. We didn’t have much opportunity to scout them before our game on Monday, so we had to adjust our match-ups and defensive schemes throughout the game—a tactic that could have served to keep them off-balance as we were constantly changing our D. This team has some of the most precise deep throwers I’ve played against—a deadly combination when you figure that they also have a bevy of tall, athletic receivers. Running a horizontal stack, the Finnish downfield cutters seemed to have endless space to work with, putting a lot of pressure on one-on-one defensive assignments. I know that the Finns were disappointed with their performance against us, but I was truly shocked that the team didn’t make the quarterfinals. I thought the skill on the team was easily on the caliber of teams that have made the semifinals of the UPA Championships in the past. I guess it’s a testament to the level of play at the tournament that such a talented team was squeezed out of the top eight.

Australia – Fury had the pleasure of playing the Aussies in an exhibition match before Worlds began, making them one of the few teams at the tournament that we knew our match-ups for ahead of time. Another tall team that runs extremely hard, Australia had a number of offensive weapons that were difficult to contain. Defensively, the team’s 1-3-3 or “Puppy” zone caused problems for teams and guaranteed a few turnovers a game for the Aussies. This was a good example of a defense resting on the shoulders of personnel, as the main marker in the zone had a smothering, aggressive mark that was very difficult to break once it was set. Another thing that really struck me about this team was its perseverance through an entire game. They really never let up and managed to have come from behind wins on double game point against both Zeitgeist and Riot in their pre-Worlds tour and against Great Britain in the quarterfinals in Vancouver. Those victories show an impressive amount of heart and desire that is even more amazing considering the team was a national team that had a limited time playing together before Worlds.

Teams from Bracket Play:

Germany (Quarterfinals) – The team’s statistics showed that a few players on Germany bore the brunt of the workload for this team, and those players were quite good. The term “workhorse” instantly comes to mind in describing their cutters—always on the move attacking space after space for the entire possession. Combine that cutting ethic with quick disc movement by the handlers, and you have a formidable offense to contend with. Our quarterfinals game was a bit lopsided against them as their defense wasn’t able to generate many turnovers against us, but they challenged the Canadians earlier in the week and definitely deserved their quarterfinal berth.

Canada (Semifinals) – After being Regional rivals with the Vancouver women forever, Team Canada was definitely the team that we knew the best of all the teams at Worlds. While that may have helped with our match-ups, we were definitely caught off guard by the fire they brought to our semifinals game—enabling them to instantly go up 3-0. The team’s six out-of-province players definitely helped the squad by adding handling skills, defensive intensity, and great cutting to a team already full of great handlers, savvy defenders, and athletic cutters. Our game was a battle every step of the way until we earned a couple breaks with an unconventional zone, but I expect Traffic to be extra motivated in its hunt for a UPA medal now that the players have had the bitter-sweet taste of bronze.

Japan (Finals) – There’s no doubt that the Japanese were our biggest rivals this year. After being rather humiliated by them in March at the Dream Cup, we dedicated hours and hours to studying game film to identify their offensive strategies and top players’ preferences, improving our fitness to be able to run with them, and practicing our offensive sets that were going to be needed against their zone and poaching D. Despite all that preparation, the average quickness on that team still surpasses ours, we still struggled against their zone during their come-back in our cross-over game on Wednesday (we were up 10-6, but lost 15-14), and their handlers still made minced meat of some of our marks. Losing those two games was probably the biggest reason we were able to come out on top in the finals—it’s much easier to overanalyze your losses than your wins and we were able to rally around the small adjustments we identified after our crossover loss. There is no doubt that across the board, the Japanese team is extremely talented. The precision, decision making, and execution of the team’s handlers are tremendous and the downfield cutters make well-timed cut after well-timed cut, all at breakneck speed. Both our crossover and finals games against them had a number of turnovers, but many of those were forced by incredible defensive efforts and I have a virtual highlight reel still running in my head from the number of plays made by both teams in those games. It’s great that so many of those moments were captured in photographs and on film as I’ll want to relive the battle for years to come. I’m incredibly honored to wear the #5 jersey I traded for with the Japanese captain this year.

I could go on and on about my teammates on Team USA as well, but this post has already become long enough. Suffice it to say that I’m incredibly proud of the way that every person on the team came together and contributed to the team effort. Earning gold at a WUGC has been something Fury has been working towards since 2000, and it’s so amazing to finally realize that dream. Luckily, our performance at Worlds was not flawless and we still have lots to work on to keep our focus sharp for the upcoming UPA Series. Let’s see if we can find that elusive double peak…

Some scattered late thoughts Friday night

2008-05-16T23:35:00.000-07:00

So sad to see (or really, hear about, only caught a few points) Texas losing to Michigan State. They were so fun to watch in both the UW and Wisconsin game. I love wide open ultimate, with lots of hucks to athletic receivers, and tenacious D that fights for every point. Texas and Wisconsin played their hearts out in that game, and both got killed the next round...that's ultimate, and life, but it was so very sad.
On that note, no one gave much love to the bottom four seeds, and I was very impressed with all of them. I caught a bunch of Northeastern games - they had solid fundamentals and were SCRAPPY! And teams played down to them, so what the hell does that mean, when every team you play "plays down" to you? Something about their style forced the other teams, including UBC, out of the comfort zone and into a turnover-laden, swilly huck place. Not pretty. But I imagine the other teams underestimated how much Northeastern's D was interrupting their flow. Maryland was also scrappy and hardworking, but really hurt from the lost of their star player, Charlie Mercer. MIT had lots of heart, particularly in the final round. And Michigan State! Well, they're in the prequarters so you'll be hearing a lot more about them.
Players that pop - Lucia Derks, Wake Forest, carries the team on her back; Anne Mercier, man, no one can stop her, and she just seems so much older and more mature, and she's a sophomore!; Michelle Ng and Gina Phillips, they played fantastic in the two Texas games I saw; Georgia Bosscher, baller for Wisconsin.
Everything's all messed up so now UCLA has by FAR the easiest road to the finals. UW has to go through Ottawa; UCSB has to go through Oregon or Wisconsin. UBC seems Michigan, who has played really well all tournament. UCLA sees the winner of Carleton/Michigan State. And no all Canadian finals :)
Last note and then I'm finally going to bed. It is so so so hard to cover all the games. I fee l like I miss so much, and I don't get to talk to players and coaches the way I want to. I'm also trying hard not to be biased and watch only the teams I know, or only the teams that I think will make it far, particularly in pool play. But there are six games per round and sometimes all the games are really close. And sometimes something unexpected happens, like Texas losing to MI State, and I have to sprint from field to field to get the story. So, I'm sorry if my coverage of your team isn't as complete as you (and I) want it to be - I'm doing my best. Beg the UPA for 2 reporters per division! (And THANK YOU FRANKIE - he's here and helping me)
Off to bed. That write up took 3.5 hours and I didn't get any sushi

Nationals Bracket

2008-05-14T13:43:00.000-07:00

As I was filling out my bracket for Rodney Jacobson I was amazed by how hard it was to pick the outcome. The level of parity in the women's division grows every year, but this must be the first year where no team's seed is safe. For every favorite (UCLA) there is a wildcard (Ottawa). For every perennial qualifier (Carleton) there is a newcomer (Northeastern). For every exciting regional re-match (UBC vs. Oregon) there is a battle yet to be played out (UW vs. Wisconsin).

Despite the difficulties, I didn't back down from the challenge of picking a bracket. Call this a preview, call it bulletin-board material, call it a spectators guide, call it biased, call it what you will. These are my predictions:

Pool A:
UCLA (2-1)
Michigan (3-0)
North Carolina (1-2)
Maryland (0-3)

Congrats to Maryland for qualifying for the first time in the school's history. Beating Pittsburgh at Regionals is not a small accomplishment and Maryland's top line is solid. However, I think the team will earn it's victories on Saturday in the consolation round as opposed to on Friday in pool play. After being beat by UCLA in the first round, UNC will have re-focused and dispelled with any jitters by the time the Pleiades meet Michigan. UNC beat Michigan soundly back in February in windy conditions, but Michigan has been steadily improving and honing its game, punctuated by a flawless performance in gusty weather at Regionals a few weeks ago. I bet that Flywheel avenges its loss and goes on to upset UCLA. A bold prediction given how many strong players UCLA has on its roster, but I think that Michigan may have more players able to utilize deep looks. Calling this upset has big ramifications later in my bracket, but I'll stick to my guns to make it interesting. Either way, this game will be a battle down to the wire.

Pool B:
UBC (3-0)
Oregon (1-2)
Carleton (2-1)
Northeastern (0-3)

Northeastern is a young team (mostly juniors and sophomores) who won the Northeast Region by beating MIT in finals. On its first trip to Nationals, the team will likely struggle against the wide-open, faced-paced offenses of UBC and Oregon. Carleton is the team in this pool I predict will outplay it's seed. Syzygy hasn't posted an incredible win-loss record this season, but the team played incredibly well at Regionals and had the opportunity to beat Wisconsin. Meanwhile, Oregon has a number of great players on its roster, but does not play a conservative style of ultimate, which could hurt the team if Carleton doesn't relinquish the disc much. Offensive efficiency is why UBC will win the pool. Oregon will give the Thunderbirds a much closer game than the blow-out at Regionals where the Fugue decided to save its legs for the backdoor, but UBC's depth and consistency should win out.

Pool C:
Washington (2-1)
Wisconsin (3-0)
Texas (1-2)
Michigan State (0-2)

Michigan State won Club Nationals in 1983 before the women's college division was formed, but this will be the first time MSU will have qualified for Nationals since the late 1980's. The team has a few skilled athletes and a number of seniors who could catch Texas off-guard if Mele isn't careful. Texas has been known to drop games to teams it looks passed, but I'm assuming that Texas will be fully fired up to be playing in Boulder. Wisconsin is also stoked to have another shot at the title and won't be happy with another quarterfinals exit. In fact, I expect that Wisconsin takes it to Washington in the last round of the day. The top of Washington's roster includes a number of exceptional players, but Wisconsin could earn turnovers by putting pressure on the Element players who don't play club. It will be a battle for which team gets to refer to itself as UW.

Pool D:
Ottawa (3-0)
UC-Santa Barbara (2-1)
Wake Forest (1-2)
MIT (0-3)

This is the only pool I have predicted going according to seed, but that doesn't mean there won't be a number of hotly-contested matches. All eyes are going to be on Ottawa to see the team that has been in hiding since winning Vegas out of the blue. Ottawa's small roster should be fresh on Day 1 and I anticipate they win out their games. The real test will be against UC-Santa Barbara's athleticism and deep game. Wake Forest is another newcomer to the Nationals scene which will be used to the run-and-gun offense that UCSB plays because it is so prevalent in the AC region. Depth could be an issue for Wake matching up against the higher seeded teams. MIT upset Dartmouth twice at NE Regionals, but did not had a particularly impressive season before that and I would be surprised if they pulled out a victory in pool play.

Pre-Quarters:
Carleton (B2) v. (C3) Texas
Washington (C2) v. (B3) Oregon
UC-Santa Barbara (D2) v. (A3) North Carolina
UCLA (A2) v. (D3) Wake Forest

I think all of these games go according to seed, with the two games between the B and C pools providing the most nail-biting entertainment. Winning the tough pool play game between Carleton and Oregon essentially decides which team will make quarters since the difference between the 2 and 3 seeds in pool C is noticeable. I would love to see a rematch of Washington and Oregon--the two played a close cross-over game at Regionals where Washington won 8-6 at the hard cap. These teams know each other well off-the-field and it would be a showdown between the Suver sisters. Not good for the NW strength bids, though. :-(

Quarters:
Michigan (A1) v. Carleton (B2)
Ottawa (D1) v. Washington (C2)
Wisconsin (C1) v. UC-Santa Barbara (D2)
UBC (B1) v. UCLA (A2)

This is getting exciting! I like how the quarters field I predicted is exactly half west coast and half non-west coast teams. I think that Michigan will hold off Carleton and earn Flywheel its first semifinals berth since I can remember. Nice accomplishment for the team that proved it was a contender early by winning both CCC and Elite Eights in the fall. The Washington is one of the few teams at Nationals that Ottawa has played this season, beating Element 10-6 in the quarters at Vegas. Both teams should be fresh for this game and will invoke an old rivalry between some of the Junior Worlds players from the USA and Canada. Ottawa is the taller team and if Washington can't contain the step-around breaks of some of the Lady Gee Gees' handlers, the game will go in the Canadians' favor. UCSB versus Wisconsin will be another tight game. The two teams have split their games this season, most recently with Wisconsin pulling out a one point victory at Centex. UCSB will benefit from additional coaching help this weekend, but I like Wisconsin's chances of knocking off last year's finalist. Wisconsin has really impressed me with how focused they've been the past few seasons and I think this is the time for it to pay off. UBC against UCLA is another great match-up. UCLA is the only team to have a winning record against UBC this season, which is part of the reason for UCLA's number one seed going into the tournament. UBC dominated NW Regionals, but never actually had to play against a quality team who was in an elimination situation. Despite having the best player in college ultimate, I predict that UBC falls to UCLA in quarters.

Semis:
Michigan (A1) vs. Ottawa (D1)
Wisconsin (C1) vs. UCLA (A2)

Michigan will have made a great run through the tournament to get this far, but I don't think the squad will have enough experience to counter Ottawa's club-savvy roster. Ottawa makes it to the finals to uphold the recent women's division history of teams making the finals the first time they qualify for Nationals (UW in 2005, UCLA in 2006, UCSB in 2007). Meanwhile, UCLA will be trying to hold of Wisconsin for the third time this season. UCLA will have played a extra game by this point, but I have faith that BLU's coaching staff will have made good use of its deep roster to allow the team's stars to shine in this game. UCLA makes it back to finals.

Finals:
Ottawa (D1) vs. UCLA (A2)

Not the all-Canada finals that some have predicted/hoped for, but I think these two teams represent the field well. Ottawa represents the teams that benefit from Juniors and/or Club experience while UCLA represents the home-grown teams without those advantages. Playing on the third day of a tournament with tough games each day will be different than Ottawa's experience at Vegas where (because of a low initial seed) the team only saw Nationals-caliber squads on the third day. Additionally, not attending any tournaments in-between Vegas and the Series means that Ottawa's women might be in "track shape", but they might not be in as good "tournament shape" as UCLA. This is definitely going to be a fun game to watch and I would bet on multiple lead changes. My money's on the Americans pulling it out. UCLA's program has been building towards a first place medal for years now, and I think this is the season when those dreams come true.

There you have it, folks. I know that many of these predictions will turn out to be false and hopefully others disagree with some of my picks (so I can win the bracket competition...). But what fun would it be if everything was a foregone conclusion?

Good luck to all the teams and competitors!

AC Regionals* Women's Write Up

2008-05-01T19:29:00.001-07:00

*This post is heavy UNC. Sorry. It was the best I could do.

About two months ago, I wrote about Brian's "Exceptional" speech to the UNC women's team. At that time, Brian was speaking to the girls about NYNY and their first trip to Nationals. At some point during NYNY's regular season, the team got together and decided that to make Nationals, they would have to do something more, different, rare....exceptional. Therefore, the team started practicing at 6am. They made Nationals that year for the first time ever.

Now, for all I know, Brian could have been bullshitting me and the girls. Either way, it got the girls taking exceptional measures to accomplish what was so uncommon - a Nationals birth. They had already traveled to two Cultimate tournaments when the funds were not there and some members of the team were upset about the money. In retrospect, they probably did not even need to go to those two tournaments to make it to Nationals. But, they wanted to be sure. Each individual player began putting in extra time outside of practice. I would end practice right on time and players left and right would drop to the ground and start doing planks, pushups and situps. I would begin to walk to my car, and would take one last look down at the turf, and there they would be, still doing their conditioning. Brian and I both offered to stay late, come early to practice, to work with girls individually on skills. Many took us up on those offers. They took exceptional measures. They truly deserved to have accomplished something that UNC has not done since 2001.

Sorry this is a biased review of AC Regionals. People can feel free to make their own comments.

Pool Play
Our first game was against Duke. Oddly enough, even though they are only 20 minutes away from us, this was the first time we played them all spring. Brian and I decided to throw as many zone looks as possible at them and then go man when it went to swing handler. It basically worked beautifully and we won the game pretty easily. Our second game was against UNCW, which was after a bye. It was hilarious to me that one of UNCW's best players traveled every time she hucked a forehand and then complained when we called it. But, the observers did not over turn any travel calls. My first real tournament ever, back when I played with Michigan State (which, congrats Infamous ladies), was Terminus in 2002. We played UNCW first game on Sunday. Michigan State was basically a new team. I think a women's team competed the year before at Sectionals...but, most of the year they played on the guy's team. Anyway, EVERY throw we made they called a travel. Even when they were up like 10-2. I will always remember asking their captain to lighten up a bit. I am not saying that we should have been allowed to travel, but seriously? Anyway, it just made me laugh inside so much to see these UNCW women traveling so much, getting called for it, and then throwing a fit.

Well, we beat them, but I must admit it was tight in the end. Lia English is a pretty damn good player from UNCW and we gave her too many backhand hucks. For the most part, UNC runs two teams (one offensively focused and one defensively focused) and at the end of the game, I had to call lines. The line I called in worked it up the field for probably almost 50+ passes and then turned it on the endzone line. It was not on a greedy look, just a poor execution. They got it right back, scored, and then pulled. We got it back again, and scored. 15-12, game over. UNCW must have spent everything in that game because they lost the next backdoor game 15-8.

Semifinals
We played Florida in the semifinals. I was interested to see how Florida's best receivers would do as handlers, and they did just fine. Unfortunately, they did not have the supporting cast necessary to match us, so the game was somewhat of an "easy" win. The girls stayed in their teams most of the time and I remember that our "D" line really, really worked hard out there. The points they were in created LOTS of turns and exhausted FUEL. I was always tempted to put in Janna or Kate Scott on those "D" lines to give them more offensive help, but honestly, they were doing a better job by turning it and playing hard D on the UF ladies. The best players on UF were exhausted after our "D" was in there and our "O" line had no trouble marching it up the field. Later in the game, I began to give our "D" more offensive power, just so we could end the thing. I distinctly remember players like Lauren Edwards and Lisa Kirkley from the "D" line playing exceptionally well. They were constantly open and making cuts and grabs that they have not made all season. Also, we have a wonderful freshman named Maquire who was always making the right cuts and completing very perfect reads on the disc.

Finals
Wake Forest. Man, we can not get our heads around Wake Forest's defense. Also, I think I made a coaching mistake when it came to guarding Kennedy. They went up 3-0 on us, we called a time out, tried to adjust, called lines, and got nothing. I think the score was 5-1 at one point, Wake, and Brian and I both looked at each other. Either A) we had to go on one hell of a run now or B) we had to start thinking about the game to go. Half time was approximately 9-1 (yes, we were playing to 17) and we both agreed that plan B was the better option. Surprisingly enough, when we went with plan B, the girls started scoring and the second half was much more even. Leslie Peck had a really nice layout D during this run and the girls just were not going to give up. The score of the second half was 8-6 Wake and that was with everyone playing evenly and Janna Coulter not playing. Wake has a starting seven and definitely two of the girls (Lucia and Kennedy) hardly ever come out. What I really like about our team is that we do not have to depend on any one or two people that much and everyone plays. I can not handle calling lines, it makes my head spin. Long story short, we lost, we moved on. Congrats Wake Forest.

Game to go
Vs. UGA. I have never in my life seen that many lay out Ds by a women's college team in my life. The rain started falling and the girls were bound and determined to go to Boulder. Jill Simmerman, Julie Ellison, Heather Zimmerman, Erin Wiltgen all hit the ground. Jill Simmerman had three lay out ds with one of them being exceptionally sick. I do not think Heather had ever laid out on D before this game. Erin did not get the layout d, but she had also never hit the ground before on D. Kelly Gillis made a sick layout grab in the corner of one end zone toeing the line. Julie made 2 incredible bids with the disc coming to her player on a deep shot, about shoulder height, and she would get the D. I think both times the UGA player called foul. First time, the UGA player retracted her call I believe, second time, we did not go to the observer but should have as he later admitted he would have ruled it as a clean D. Somewhat of a coaching mistake because that D happened right before the lightening delay and Julie wanted the Observer to rule on it when we got back to the field. She talked to Brian and I about it during the lightening delay (which was about an hour and we were up 5-1) and we said to not go to the observer as they did not have the best angle. We resumed play, UGA kept the disc but went back to thrower and they scored. And they scored again. 5-3 now and probably would have been 6-1 if we would have let Julie go with her gut. But, no worries, the girls took half 9-4 I believe. The layout Ds kept coming, the rain kept falling, and Lynn Pudlo, Kaitlen Baden, Karen Kimel got multiple run through Ds. Suzanne Willis and Sarah were getting hand blocks. Claire never stopped running. Janna was pulling end zone to end zone in shitty weather (and did I mention she is a freshman? I can not tell you how nice it is to have a player on a women's team that can pull like she plays open. It really helps your defense). Julie Ellison was bombing 60 yd flicks around four person cups to Ashley Barfield streaking deep. Dorothy Scott was the ever consistent, smart, solid handler. Kate Scott never stopped running. I kept yelling to her - "Kate Scott, get the disc in your hands, now!" She did, and that was exactly where we wanted the disc. In the hands of our 5th year veteran.

We won that game 17-7. If you were there watching it, you would probably agree the the girls played every point like it was double game point. The girls played every point like it was their last. They played like if they lost that point, the "curse" would creep in.

After the game, Lisa Kirkley, one of our seniors and someone I played with during my two years on the team, came up to me and said, "Thank You." I responded with a quick "No. Thank YOU."

Looking forward to Boulder. Good luck to all participants. Thank you Rachel Joffe for a well run Regionals. And, Thank YOU Pleiades 2008.

South Regionals Preview

2008-04-24T12:06:00.000-07:00

SOUTH (Baton Rouge, LA)

The South Regionals aka The Highlander Classic (“There Can Be Only One”) is going to be a very interesting tourney to keep an eye on for a few simple reasons: 1) there is only one bid, 2) there are eight teams with a realistic shot at getting the bid to Nationals, and 3) the amount of quality ultimate in the region is growing rapidly. I can hear the murmuring in the wind already – ‘If you build it, the South will rise again.’ Or something like that.

I am a fair amount older than the players who will be playing this weekend, so I’m not sure if the 80s cult film ‘The Highlander’ is something that this generation is familiar with. For those unfamiliar with the story, it’s basically about a bunch of immortals who can only be killed by being beheaded. There are only a certain number left walking the Earth, and they are summoned to battle each other until there is only one left.

Just as ‘The Highlander’ was not going to win any Oscars, the South is highly unlikely to produce a National champion (or even a team that reaches the semifinals). Regardless, this year’s tourney has the potential to be the tournament of the year, drawing attention to a historically overlooked region and signifying a turning point in the region’s evolution.

Pool A
In the role of Connor MacLeod is St. Louis SLULU. [No offense to the St. Louis women, but that has to be the second worst name in women’s ultimate. St. Louis St. Louis University Ladies Ultimate? What’s next? The William and Mary Marys? The University of Virginia Virgins? The Illinois Illini… oh, right.] Despite being the overall number one seed, SLULU is the underdog that everyone wants to root for. Led by Kara O’Malley and Tricia Wong, St. Louis showed vulnerability at Frostbite, but otherwise, they have had an impressive season including an upset over Texas at the Texas Throwdown.

[On a side note, if I have a daughter, I’m naming her Frankie O’Malley Jr. Or maybe O’Malley Rho. Or just Rho’Malley. There’s something about that name that equates to being a high caliber player.]

St. Louis will have to contend with last year’s representative at Nationals, Truman State aka Juan Sanchez Villa-Lobos Ramirez (played by Sean Connery). Just as we know that Truman is not one of the fifty states, we know that Spaniards don’t have Scottish accents. Though they are 1-2 against St. Louis this season, their last two matchups have been decided by one point. Amanda Carron, Mona Baucom and Noelle Peterson will be their keys to success.

Playing Daniel Larusso is Oklahoma. They are a long shot but they have proven that they can compete with several of the other contenders in the region. What they haven’t proven is that they can consistently beat every single one of them when only one spot is on the line. Jessica Hoppe, Mary Henson and Mr. Miyagi will be crucial to their success. [I know that this is the wrong movie, but don’t tell Oklahoma that. If they just listen to Miyagi and the rockin’ tune ‘You’re the Best’, all the teams will fall like the members of Cobra Kai.]

Pool B
Because I can only remember so much from ‘The Highlander’, I’ll reach into the world of Star Wars and increase the dork factor of this preview by ten.

Texas A&M is Darth Maul. Except for the select few in College Station, nobody could have predicted their Sectionals win over Texas. Very little is known about where they came from, who they are and where they got that cool double-bladed lightsaber. What is known is that they beat Texas and that makes them scary.

Unfortunately for the SkyU ladies, Kansas is Obi-Wan McGregor. Kansas is a hard team to read. They’ve lost decisively to teams like St. Louis, Truman State and Wash U., but they’ve also beaten both St. Louis and Truman State and notched other quality wins against Wisconsin-Eau Claire and Oklahoma. They lack the consistency needed to be a major threat for the top spot. Tasha Parman and Paige Blair lead the way for Betty.

Auburn is an exciting young program but they don’t have the depth to seriously compete this year. Consider them the young Anakin Skywalker (not the annoying adolescent version but the cuddly one from the first crappy movie).

Pool C
In the role of the big, bad Kurgan is Texas Melee. They are the powerhouse, heavily favored to start the season but their stumble at Sectionals has put a major chink in the armor. Coupled with a loss to St. Louis at the Texas Throwdown, they are definitely beatable, but if they can maintain their confidence, those two losses will look like aberrations after this weekend. Look for Michelle Ng, Becca Shelton and Gina Phillips to be a crucial part of their success this weekend.

Vanderbilt enters as Luke Skywalker (the Empire Strikes Back version as opposed to the 2 Live Crew version). They are young and decently battle-tested, but they are still not quite ready to take down the Texas Empire. Despite being seeded second in the pool, I think they are likely to finish third. They keep the bulk of the team intact next year, so look for them to take the step up and return with a green lightsaber and black uniforms that make them look like a cross between Italian Blackshirts and Catholic priests.

Washington WUWU (owners of the third worst name in women’s ultimate) stumbled in pool play at Sectionals, but lost both games by one point. Being seeded ninth belies the fact that they are a legitimate threat to Texas and the top spot overall. There’s no adequate analog for WUWU relating to The Highlander or Star Wars; however, this is Washington we’re talking about. I’ve heard that they’re twelve stories high and made of radiation. They also possess the most disturbing uniforms in all of women’s ultimate. Ninja Turtles to watch include Kate Stambaugh, Abby Stephens and Tracy Horner.

Prediction: Texas. As much as we all want to see an underdog come out on top, we all know that The Kurgan would have kicked Christopher Lambert’s ass in real life. Truman State will upset St. Louis in pool play. Kansas upsets Texas A&M but loses to St. Louis in the quarters. Texas holds seed and beats St. Louis in the semis and Truman State in the finals.

NW, SW, and ME women's Regionals Previews

2008-04-23T15:55:00.000-07:00

BY GUEST BLOGGER: Frankie Rho

Now that Sectionals are over, it's time to get giddy about the fight for the right to throwdown in Boulder. I'm going to start with the regions that I think are mostly likely to produce the eventual national champion.

NORTHWEST (Davis, CA)

As always, the depth in the region is very good with six (arguably seven) national caliber teams. Though the region has essentially been the House that Stanford Built, I would be surprised if the top three seeds (Washington, UBC and Oregon) don't qualify for Nationals. The biggest mistake for any of these teams would be to overlook Stanford, Western Washington, Cal and Pacific Lutheran.

Pool A

One of the great stories this season has to be Element's rise to the top while dealing with the loss of their captain Sarah Plants. Element will dominate their pool on their way to a potentially intriguing crossover game against Oregon. In the battle of 'Who's the Best ______ St.?', Humboldt St., Oregon St. and Sonoma St. will fight for the two spot. I'm putting my money on Humboldt, but Sonoma St. is a sleeper here; D'Vine features Brinn Langdale, an exciting young player to watch in the years to come.

Pool B

Despite falling to Washington twice at Sectionals, UBC has the feel of a team that knows their time is now. This being Kira Frew's senior year coupled with winning the inaugural NCUS title, the Thunderbirds will face a lot of pressure knowing that the Callahan and the South-of-the-Border-Nationals is tantalizingly within their grasp. PLU is a very interesting team on the rise and their rematch with UBC will be an interesting one. Having played UBC to a tight 8-10 loss at Sectionals, they will be going into the game with a lot of confidence. Their coach, Jaime 'Idaho' Arambula, is a brilliant motivator and may help the young Reign squad find an edge to pull off the upset.

Pool C

Oregon will have to contend with the revitalized Pie Queens squad. Not much has been written about Oregon and their emergence this year under coach Lou Burruss. Their top seven, which includes Molly Suver, Jessica Huynh, Shannon McDowell, Chris Norton and Julia Sherwood, is as strong as any in the women's game. They are more than capable of taking down Washington or UBC, and I think the likely Washington/Oregon crossover will be one of the more interesting games to watch this weekend. Berkeley started the season with solid results at Santa Barbara and Vegas but they've taken the Britney Spears ride to shame since then. Much of this has to do with Nat Wu's injury. With her back in action, she and Cree Howard give them a forceful combination that could lead to an upset.

Pool D

It goes without saying that the Spawn of Rasputin has the knowhow to take one of the spots. Amazingly, they have only missed the trip to Nationals once since 1995 (in 2000). Superfly has a lot of pride and their solid showing at DUI has them primed for a strong performance at Regionals. The key for them is whether their role players step up and perform at a high level to take the pressure off of Cassel, Barghelame, Founds and Damon. Western Washington features an aggressive game and the coaching wisdom of Ron Kubalanza. They simply lack the depth needed to take out the top three teams. I wouldn't be surprised if they have an impressive Saturday but fade late in bracket play.

Prediction: A lot of excitement but boring results -- Washington, UBC and Oregon in that order. Oregon beats Superfly in a tight game to go.

SOUTHWEST (Tucson, AZ)

Most agree that five teams are in the mix - UCLA, UCSB, Colorado, Arizona and USC. The weather has forecast warm temperatures this weekend (highs in the mid-90s), and depth will play a pivotal role in this weekend's outcome.

Pool A

The top spot out of the region is UCLA's to lose. Their big five - Taz, Gizmo, Cosmo, Kix, Fresh - gives them the confidence and swagger to compete with anybody. Their Achilles' heel appears to be playing to the level of their competition and their continuing problems with their nemesis, the Burning Skirts. At Sectionals, they played very sharply in the semifinals but lost some of their edge in the first half of the finals against Santa Barbara. They'll have a decent test against Arizona in pool play, but otherwise, they should be able to march into the title game with relative ease.

The big question for Arizona will be how much the lack of elite competition will hurt them. They recently traveled to DUI to play some of the elite teams and that decision may help them compensate for missing out on the Stanford Invite and Centex. Scorch has been a team that has been grossly overlooked all year (currently #20 on the RRI, #26 on the UPA), and have received essentially zero attention despite having a great deal of depth and a couple star players like Julia Tenen and Jodi McCloskey. They'll be going into this weekend with a big chip on their shoulder and will factor in as the weekend's biggest wildcard. Don't be surprised if they take away some of their male counterparts' thunder if Sunburn fizzles in San Diego.

Pool B

This pool has the potential to be the most exciting pool this weekend with UCSB, Colorado and USC duking it out. There could easily be a three way tie with point differential determining who faces UCLA in the finals. UCSB will definitely be the favorite, having beaten both Colorado and USC this season (2-0 vs. Colorado and 1-0 vs. USC - the margin was two points in all three games). The Burning Skirts played well at Sectionals despite being without Katie Barry (broken toe) and Andrea Romano (foot injury). Barry is almost a lock to play at Regionals, but Romano's presence remains a mystery. As a senior, she'll obviously do whatever it takes to play, but having been out all season may pose some chemistry problems in Tucson. Kaela Jorgensen is becoming a star, and along with fellow sophomore Carolyn Finney, they'll take the reigns next year and keep the Burning Skirts highly competitive.

Colorado has had an up and down season with their recent down being a disappointing performance at Centex. They'll have to be ready for the hot weather in Tucson. They certainly have the athletes and the talent to finish out the year in their backyard, but they'll have to find the mental edge they've been lacking all season. Kali split their previous matchups to USC, both of which were at the Stanford Invite.

USC has had a breakthrough season but lost Alice 'Swift/Balls' Chen, one of their captains and playmakers, to an ACL/meniscus tear in the game against UCSB. Her loss hurts the Hellions, but Anne Ohliger, Mary Kate Hogan, Lindsey Cross and their emerging young players will keep them in the hunt. Colorado St. could steal a spot into bracket play if any of the top three letdown their focus.

Prediction: Pain. Clubber Lang says, 'Ain't no fool who gonna predict nothing when they put themselves on the line.' Actually, I'm fairly certain he said no such thing, but Mr. T rules.

METRO EAST (Princeton, NJ)

Being originally from the East Coast, I'm a big fan of double-elimination bracket play. In geographically larger regions, it doesn't make as much sense; but when it is in effect, there is something wonderful about teams fighting to stay alive every step of the way. It also makes Sunday at Regionals feel even more like the playoffs.

The Anton Chigurhs did a number on their section, taking it to a very respectable Cornell squad with an impressive 15-7 win. Having been fairly invisible since Vegas, Ottawa validated their status as a frontrunner by allowing exactly seven points against them, all of which were in the finals.

The trio of Pittsburgh, Maryland and Cornell figures to be the most likely to take the second spot. I wouldn't be surprised to see Pitt and Maryland face each other twice, once in the semis and once in the backdoor finals. The winner of their likely semis matchup will have an interesting option in the finals against Ottawa -- go all out for the win or save some energy to avoid the common pitfall that has plagued many teams who have lost a tough game in the finals.

NYU is seeded above Cornell but they haven't proven over the course of the season that they can beat several quality opponents in a row. For them to have a legitimate shot, they'll have to beat Cornell in their likely quarterfinal matchup. Getting to the semis is crucial in this format.

Prediction: Ottawa and Pitt. Maryland beats Pitt in the front door semis but loses to them in an epic backdoor final that goes to double game point.

AC Regionals Preview

2008-04-22T20:20:00.000-07:00

It is hard to give predictions when it is the Thursday (almost Friday) before Regionals and it is still unclear who is going to regionals and what the format is. It looks like a team has dropped (my nightmare as an RC), and I am sure folks are scrambling to either 1) replace that team or 2) pick a format. If #1 is being thrown out, I am not so sure why a schedule has not been posted. #2 is easy. Adam Tarr and co. made it easy. Just plug the teams into their spots. So, I am assuming #1 is what is going on.

Anyway.....it does not matter.

It will be quite simple in my opinion: anything can happen. In the last couple of years, the South has been exceptionally strong. I highly doubt a South section team will be seeded #1 or #2, but that does not matter. UGA, Florida, and Emory all have players on their teams that know how to win at Regionals. They will win games at Regionals, they will threaten upsets, and the teams from the Carolina section better be ready.

Wake Forest appears untouchable. They have probably the most versatile player in the region on their team with Lucia Derks - but here is the kicker - the rest of the team catches and throws now. I know there are going to be Wake girls pissed at me for saying it like that, but it is the honest truth. Now, I dont know if it was just because Lucia was not throwing to other girls or if the other girls just could not get integrated into the offense quick enough for her or if they just could not simply not catch and throw. Does not matter now, because they are a good, deep team with a lot of players with solid fundamentals. Besides Lucia and Kennedy there are about ten other players who will make plays, pivot, catch, advance the disc, and slowly kill your team. Defensively, Wake will eat you alive if you do not score quick and early in the game. They love their clam looks and their four person cup that is very much NOT flat. They love playing man on down field and they love for you to turn it over and have four people who play in the cup (runners) taking off for their deep deep (Lucia) to throw it against your three handlers (typically, not runners/defenders) trying desperately to play D and figure out why in the world you can not beat their D. That is Wake.

UNC appears to be at the front of the pack as well posting decent wins against decent teams at their two cultimate tournaments. For the first time in like 10 years, UNC has not won sectionals and honestly, THANK GOD. Maybe for once, UNC is focused on winning some games at a much more important series tournament.

Then, you have the South Section. The sleepers. The scary teams. The teams that have not done much yet this year as in quality wins, but they know how to win. Florida, UGA, Emory = a lot of turnover. Wind will benefit Florida more, but there will be no wind. Florida graduated all of their handlers and their big hope is that it is windy enough so their two receivers who have now turned handlers can huck it deep, call it a good pull, and play their junky zone. UGA is led by Jam and a few others and being they are from a good program, they are going to be dangerous. Everyone has to remember that they upset Pitt at QCTU and Pitt is like 9th in the now. They also upset Pitt on a windy, windy day and that means UGA has some players who can catch and throw. We all know catching and throwing is that much harder on a windy day. Emory, I honestly know nothing about except for they lost a lot of people. I would expect them to be least likely to pull out an upset over the top 2.

Virginia, Richmond, and Tenn appear to be the dark horses from the blue ridge. Tenn made a nice run at regionals last year - beating Wake Forest - but have more than likely lost some folks to graduation. There does not seem to be much on the score reporter about them. Richmond and Virginia look very dangerous and UVA is a solid program that has been to the big dance before. They made Nationals in 2004 and there should still be some players from that team remaining that knows what it takes and what it feels like to make it.

Alright, just waiting for the schedule now.....

Sectional Previews (2nd Round)

2008-04-10T18:14:00.000-07:00

BY GUEST BLOG WRITER: Frankie Rho

The main slate of Sectionals tourneys takes place this weekend. Here are a few select tourneys that are worth paying attention to.

METRO EAST

In recent years, the Metro East has been kicked around on the national level, finishing no higher than 9th since 2004. This year, the fight for what should be two bids promises to be a fascinating one and could produce a legitimate contender for the title. Ottawa, Cornell, Maryland, NYU, Pittsburgh and all have legitimate hopes of procuring a bid and historically strong programs like Delaware, Penn St. and Penn cannot be overlooked.

Upstate NY

The Anton Chigurh of women’s ultimate is Ottawa. They mysteriously showed up at Trouble in Vegas and slaughtered the opposition. Since then, they haven’t been heard from. I guess that makes them sound more like Keyser Soze. Either way, they’re definitely for real and they get a solid opponent in Cornell as both teams prep for Regionals. This tourney should give a sense of whether the Lady Gee Gee’s deserve to be one of the frontrunners for Nationals.

Penn

Like Ottawa, Pittsburgh is a new face in the national picture and this tourney should be a warmup for Regionals in Princeton. Having placed 4th in the region last year, Lucy Gillespie, Amanda Virbitsky and the rest of the Danger crew should dispatch Penn St. and Penn without too much trouble. Their successful run at Centex may be the edge they need over Maryland and NYU.

Colonial

Maryland is the prohibitive favorite in the section. With two tourney wins under their belt (Roll Call and Huck of the Irish), they will be going into Regionals with as much confidence as anyone. While they have many quality wins (NYU, Illinois), the one knock on the crew led by Charlie Mercer, Jess Trinh and Heather Smith is that they are lacking games against elite competition.

ATLANTIC COAST

North Carolina

The favorites to qualify from the Atlantic Coast region come from this section. Wake Forest will battle with UNC to lay claim to the top team in the region. Kate Scott and Lucia Derks are two of the big names in the region and both teams will be relying heavily on them to take them to Boulder. They have split their two previous matchups, both of which were fairly convincing wins. Duke is capable of surprising either team though their lack of depth will be a problem come Regionals.

Blue Ridge

The Blue Ridge will always be worth covering for me simply because I’m from there. That said, this section is almost a complete mystery. Virginia and Tennessee are the top seeds and will be fending off challenges from William and Mary, James Madison and Richmond.

NORTHWEST

Bay Area

Stanford and Cal are generally perceived as being a sizeable notch below where they were last year. Both could be very dangerous opponents at Regionals, especially if the Pie Queens get Nat Wu back. Stanford also had a successful showing at DUI and they have a habit of making people pay when they are counted out. I’m convinced that Superfly is actually the Spawn of Rasputin.

Santa Cruz and Davis are both in rebuilding years, and they will be duking it out for third. Lillian Berla gives Sol an edge over Davis and their army of short Asian handlers.

Oregon/NorCal

Oregon has been flying under the radar a bit but they are making a strong case to be in consideration for the national title. Lewis and Clark and Humboldt are both decent tests for Fugue as they get ready for Regionals.

SOUTH

Ozarks

This is suddenly one of the more interesting sections in the country, a reflection of the growth in the South region that was once known as that region where Texas is. Truman State upended Texas last year, the first time since 2001 that Texas didn’t represent the region. While Texas has returned to its place as the favorite in the region, several other teams join Truman State as viable challengers to Melee including St. Louis, Washington University and Kansas.

Unfortunately for the South, the region will likely receive only one bid to Nationals. This tourney will be a vital step in determining who will be Texas’ main challenger.

Sectionals Previews

2008-04-04T12:13:00.000-07:00

BY GUEST BLOG WRITER: Frankie Rho

This weekend kicks off the official start of the College Series. The So Cal and Washington/BC Sectionals are two of the strongest in the nation this year and feature teams that are in the mix for the title. The South Section features three teams that were national-caliber last year and find themselves in the new position of being the challengers.

So Cal Sectionals Preview

UCLA BLU and UCSB Burning Skirts are having interesting parallel seasons. Both had a very successful 2007 season (UCLA – National Semifinalist and UCSB – Finalist), both have been successful this season despite having lost a large group of core players last year and both feature a small group of talented seniors who lead a very young and promising group of rookies.

One of the great rivalries last season, BLU and the Burning Skirts look to get an edge on each other this weekend. Something key to watch will be whether Andrea Romano plays and if so, how much her foot injury will be affecting her play.

Meanwhile, USC is the new kid on the block looking to upset both teams. Claremont, Caltech and Cal Poly SLO (who has been strangely quiet this spring after a solid showing at Socal Warmup) are all looking to position themselves into the top three.

Whoever ends up in the finals will almost certainly go into Regionals as the number one and two seeds.

Washington/BC Sectionals

The finalists from Centex, UW and UBC have laid claim as two of the favorites to take it all in Boulder. Don’t be surprised to see them as the number one and two seeds at Regionals and at Nationals. Will the two teams play all their cards against each other to get a psychological advantage at Regionals or will they play it close to the vest?

Pacific Lutheran and Western Washington are looking to upset Element and the Thunderbirds, but that will be a big challenge for both of these young squads. Reign and Chaos are both poised to make a big breakthrough win to vault them into the next tier.

South Sectionals

Last year, the Georgia/Florida/Emory trio finished 1-2-3 in the region with Emory and Florida going to Nationals. This year, all three teams are rebuilding as the balance of power in the Atlantic Coast has shifted to North Carolina.

Georgia enters as the top seed and has a couple quality wins under its belt (Pittsburgh, Vanderbilt) and gained big game experience from Centex. South Carolina is curiously seeded below Florida despite having beaten them at College Southerns. The winner of this section will have to take on the likes of Wake Forest, UNC and Duke at Regionals and likely enter as the number three or four seed.

Bama Sectionals

The teams to watch in this section are Vanderbilt and Auburn. Both teams could be dark horses in the South Region and give the favorites (Texas and Truman State) a run at the end of the month. Of the two, Vanderbilt seems to be in better position to pull off the upset, despite being seeded second below Auburn. They have experience from Centex with some tight games (UCLA and Georgia) and a nice win over Califonia. The offense runs through Katie Patterson, Sara Gibson and Sarah Edmonds (transfer from Oregon).

The Auburn Tiger Lilies are a relatively new team led by captain Annie Newton. In their third year as a team, they've notched some solid wins in the spring (Georgia, Iowa State) and they will definitely be a team to watch in the future.

Dream Cup 2008

2008-03-19T15:11:00.000-07:00

I just back to the States yesterday after a whirlwind trip to Japan for the Dream Cup. Wow. I was really impressed on all fronts: our hosts were amazing, the food was wonderful, Mount Fuji was beautiful, Tokyo was exciting, and the level of ultimate was astounding. There's already been a brief discussion and a Sockeye recap on rec.sport.disc about the Dream Cup, but here's a loooonger version of how it all went down:

Fury and Sockeye arrived at the Narita airport on Thursday, March 13th, and filed into a huge charter bus to take us out to Fuji City. With players (Fury had 18 plus our coach and Sockeye had 21) and fans (Fury had 2 and Sockeye had 8) we filled the bus to capacity and had to use little jump-seats in between the rows to fit everyone in. Not exactly the best situation in case of an emergency, but luckily we never had to evacuate the bus. The drive out to Fuji City took a couple of hours, and a rest stop along the way allowed us to have some of our first dining adventures. Namely sugarcoated crickets. Mmmmmmm...

When we pulled up to the hotel, there were banners saying "Welcome, Ultimate Tournament" in Japanese and businessmen in suits waiting to welcome us into the lobby. Inside, the reception area was decorated with discs on the wall, there were posters advertising the tournament with pictures of Fury and Sockeye, and there were five women in traditional kimonos with flowers to hand out the team captains. What a welcome. Apparently, the Japanese never waste an opportunity for ceremony, and this was the first chance for our PR rep Bryn Martyna to make a speech. Both teams thought Bryn's speech got higher marks than Sockeye's, spurring an ongoing competition between the teams for who would win the trip. Fury was in the lead for much of the tournament, but Sockeye caught up late in the weekend and last I heard the score was tied at 7-7 heading into our last night in the country. I'll just assume that Fury won based on the dancing and drinking skills of my teammates. ;-)

On Friday, we first went to the field site for opening ceremonies. More speeches (2-0, Fury) and thank-yous before we got back on the bus and went to go visit Fuji City's mayor. I think that one of the main reasons to take visitors to meet the mayor is that the conference room in the city council building is situated with a goregous view of Mount Fuji. However, the day we were there was so cloudy and grey, there was no mountain to be seen--a fact apologized for in every speech made by our hosts that day. After the mayor meet-and-greet we went back to the fields where we got to watch some college teams play and get a chance to practice ourselves. The teams playing on Friday were competiting for a chance to get into the main tournament and were mostly younger teams. Even such, I was quite impressed with the fundamental skills of these college players. It was raining off and on during the day, and Fury took to the field for practice after Sockeye finished theirs. As luck would have it, the skies opened up for that second practice slot and by the end of our scrimmage there were 6 inch puddles of water on the field. We got back to the hotel fully drenched, showered and dried off, only to get drenched again walking to the sushi restaurant.

Dinner was great. Ordering off of the pictures on the menu, my table stuck to the standard sashimi, tempura, and nigiri (all of which was excellent), but the other tables were a little more experimental and I'm not even sure what some of the wriggly things wrapped in seaweed were that they ordered. Jody Dozono's parents had made the trip with the team, and her mother, Noriko, was a wonderful translator for us. She and our other translater, an American living in Japan named Graham, were invaluable for helping us navigate the language barrier during the trip. Fury and Sockeye competed for points by outfitting the people helping us with our team gear and Graham was sporting a Fury hat and Sockeye jersey for much of the weekend. Sockeye got our bus driver, who turned 69 on Saturday, to sport a Sockeye hat while watching play that day, which I think helped them close the gap to 5-3 by the end of the day (or something like that...).

After dinner on Friday, much of the two teams converged on some of the Sockeye guys' hotel rooms for some drinking and partying. The whole group couldn't fit in one hotel for the first two nights, so some of the guys got put up in a neighboring hotel that turned out to be a place one could rent out by the hour. Each room had its own entertainment: one room had a mini-pool table in in, another had a mini air-hockey table, and they all had free porn on TV. Given that we had started drinking as soon as we got back from the fields, we all put in a nights worth of partying by the time jet-lag fully kicked in around 11 pm. A 16 hour time difference is no joke... The next night, most people had even less energy and things stayed pretty low key after dinner. Fury went to a place where your group cooks its own food on a hot griddle inset into the table. The specialty is a batter mixed with different ingredients (like mochi, noodles, veggies, meat, etc.) that you cook into a dense pancake. Really wonderful as long as you don't touch your knuckles to the hot grill like I did.

On Saturday, the mountain reared its head and watched over the fields as Fury played two games against college teams. The first was against the Huskies, who had competed on Friday to get into the main tournament and had upset an expat combo team to play us. A number of the Huskies hung out with some of us after the game, and I was blown away by the fact that their best player only had played for two years. Robin Knowler tried all weekend to figure out if there were any special tricks to bring back to Stanford practice on how they learn to throw in Japan since even the new players all seem to have more fluid and precise throws than the majority of college players back in the US. In the end, we concluded that it comes down to how much time players spend practicing. The Japanese players we talked to were shocked at how little Fury practices during the season (twice a weekend with weekly work-outs), leading me to believe that they have much more rigorous practice schedules.

An interesting aspect about the tournament was that each game was played to time, not a score. There were 50 minute rounds and when the whistle blew to start the line, the pull was expected to go up. The time in-between points didn't seem to be timed, but the protocol was that the team that had just been scored on would walk back to the line and make any line-up changes on the walk back. By the time they reached the other end, they had 7 on the line with a hand up. This never took longer than a minute, so we often found ourselves scrambling to call our lines, get our match-ups, call our O, etc. We managed to fit in around 20 points a game in this fashion, and our scores were on the order of 17-3, more or less. With shorter rounds and only a couple games a day, it seemed that the Japanese squads tended towards much smaller rosters than I see at US tournaments. The second college team we played, the Nihon Humingbirds, only had 8 players on its team.

Sunday, we played a third college team, Chukyo University, before we matched-up against MUD in the semi-finals. MUD has been the dominant women's team in Japan for years. MUD won the Dream Cup for five out of the last eight years, won Worlds in Perth in 2006, and has traveled to ECC to play North American competition in both 2003 and 2007. Fury played MUD and UNO (another Japanese club team) at ECC last season, winning both games 15-8. This time, MUD was playing without a number of its star players as they were playing on the Japanese National team and we were able to win the game relatively easily. MUD did play a zone on us for a few points that gave us pause since it baited the disc into a trap and then had a person covering the dump while the cup set the trap. There was no wind to speak of during this round, so our handlers were able to use bendy outside-in throws to get out of the trap, but this zone would be our downfall during the finals when the wind picked-up.

The finals teams were as expected: Sockeye versus the Buzz Bullets and Fury versus the Japanese National Team. Worlds in Vancouver this August is the "country Worlds" where each qualifying country can send one team, but different countries decide who that team is in different ways. The UPA has determined its bid goes to the winner of the UPA Club Championships the year before and that team can add up to three "ringers" on its roster for Worlds (a clause I don't think either Sockeye or Fury are going to use this year). In Canada, the CUPA mandates that the winner of Canadian Nationals pick up five other players from around the country to promote growth and increase the strength of the team. Japan will be represented by a nationals women's team that was hand-picked to combine the top players from UNO and MUD. One advantage this all-star team has over similar national teams from other countries (like Australia, for instance) is that all the players live in the vicinity of Tokyo and have been practicing together since the team was formed in late November. That preparation certainly showed in the finals against Fury.

The finals was played to 15 rather than 50 minutes, although there was a soft-cap after 70 minutes. The time in between points was also timed, with someone counting down in a megaphone "10...9...8..." before each pull. The Japanese team jumped out to an early 2-1 lead and then extended its advantage to 8-4 at half-time. Fury had been sending out team work-outs for the 6 weeks leading up to the Dream Cup, but it was clear that the Japanese women were in much better shape. They used their quickness effectively to poach the lanes of our horizontal offense and we didn't adjust to utilize our second and third options soon enough. The wind had also picked up during this round, and our long game suffered as a result. The Japanese team made good use of the same zone MUD had just played against us and generated a couple easy scores off of drops and miscues near our goal line. Before I really knew what was happening, they were up 14-4. Yikes. We finally scored upwind and then started playing zone ourselves. Some might say we should have played zone a little earlier in the game, but hindsight is 20/20... Our four person cup generated some turnovers, and we had a few easy scores of our own from turnovers near the goalline. We strung together 5 points in a row with our backs against the wall before the Japanese team finally worked through the cup to score the final point upwind. 15-9 is a much more respectable score than 15-4 would have been, but it was still disappointing to have lost by so much when all weekend we'd been encouraged to bring our "A" game. Nonetheless, the Japanese team clearly out-prepared us for this game (their whiteboard chalk-talks even showed the jersey numbers of our players they expected to be making certain cuts) and no doubt deserved to win.

After the men's finals (which I was so sure Sockeye was going to win--right up until they didn't), there was a closing awards ceremony where the top three teams from each division were recognized and received trophies. MVPs from each team in the finals were also recognized, and Alex Snyder and Mike "MC" Caldwell deservingly received the honors from the US teams. It was pretty amazing to see that almost all of the players from the tournament stayed at the fields through the closing ceremony--a stark contrast to many US tournaments where players routinely leave before the finals are even over. That night, Club Jr. threw the US teams a banquet with food and drinks to celebrate the weekend. More revelry and karaoke afterwards completed the evening. This night, people had finally overcome jet-lag and some were up till the wee hours of the morning. It was a great night, but it turned out to pale in comparison to the all-nighter people pulled in Tokyo the next night.

On Monday, Sockeye and Fury put together a clinic for young Japanese players in Tokyo. Many of the women were interested in learning about a horizontal stack offense as they primarily play vertical stack in Japan, so hopefully we provided them with useful insights based on diagrams and limited discussion (turns out, it's hard to explain an offense when you don't speak the same language). One of the best parts of the clinic was the opportunity to hang out with players in a less intimidating environment than during the tournament. After the clinic some of us gave out old jerseys as gifts (Kate Wilson is pictured here with Aika and Sammy) and a few of the players asked for autographs--a very surreal experience.

Despite both Sockeye and Fury's losses, I don't think that Mr. Yoshida san of Club Jr. regretted sponsoring our trip out there (at least I hope not!). Not only did our presence increase the fanfare of the 10th anniversary of the Dream Cup, but the extra competition surely benefitted the Japanese teams that will be looking to defend their 2006 club Worlds titles in Vancouver. I know that Fury will certainly be a different team once August rolls around, and a big part of that will be from the fuel Dream Cup provided. As a result, we all owe Club Jr. a thank you that extends beyond the generosity of paying for flights and lodging for 14 of our players or even showing us such tremendous hospitality during our stay. The trip to Japan and our schelacking in finals will be the defining characteristic of Fury's preparation from now until Worlds, so any success we have in the future will be in no small part because of our Japan experience.

Stanford Invite Women's Preview

2008-03-06T15:52:00.000-08:00

[Corrected as per comments]

Since this preview is all conjecture and opinion, I decided to post it onto the IC Ultimate blog rather than the main site. I've been getting a lot of really positive responses after bringing the site back to life and I LOVE how many people have said they'd be willing to volunteer their time to contribute. Maybe Match was right when he said I first started the site a little too early (2004), and only now people are more ready for it. Anyway, onto my predictions for the Stanford Invite.

Pool A:
UCLA (3-0), Colorado (2-1), Oregon (1-2), USC (0-3)

The regional match-up between UCLA and Colorado should be really exciting, both for the level of play and what the outcome could portend for Regionals. They haven't played yet at full strength this season, although UCLA did narrowly beat a split Colorado squad at Trouble in Vegas. These teams have had some intense battles over the years and should be relatively evenly matched. Both have a lot of younger players on the roster and a couple of key leaders. Keep an eye out for seniors Yvonne Leung and Cheryl Prideaux (pictured at the 2007 College Championships) on UCLA and Julie Fast, Amy Smith, and Heather Waugh on Colorado. Although Colorado seems to be improving rapidly this season, I would still bet on UCLA to win this contest. I think that UCLA will have another close game with Oregon, but that UCLA's experience will pull them through. The Oregon v. Colorado game should be a barn-burner with both teams eager to prove that they are a Nationals-caliber team again. Although Oregon has some star players in Molly Suver and Chris Norton, I think Colorado has a slightly deeper team and pulls out the upset. Southern California will put everything they have on the line in their first appearance at the Stanford Invite, but in the end I don't think they'll have enough to win any of these games.

Pool B:
Wisconsin (3-0), UCSB (1-2), Carleton (1-2), UNC (1-2)

With three tournaments under its belt, two of which the team won, Wisconsin is the most tested of these teams and should avoid an upset. Its captains, Georgia Bosscher and Courtney Kiesow, are two of the top players in the country. In terms of season record, UNC is not far behind, making the finals of both the Florida Winter Classic and Queen City Tune-Up. I think this is probably the hardest pool at the tournament and could easily see a three way tie for second between UCSB, Carleton, and UNC. Santa Barbara graduated a number of the players that led them to the finals of Nationals last year, but return Katie Barry and Andrea Romano. This team plays a fast, run-and-gun style that could catch Carleton off guard. UNC has a similar paced offense with stand-out Kate Scott at the helm and UCSB might not be ready for a taste of its own medicine. Carleton also has a few weapons up its sleeve. The team returns two-time All-Region player Megan Molteni (pictured in 2007) and picked up two freshmen studs from Seattle: Anna Snyder and Liz Arakaki.

Pool C:
UBC (3-0), Texas (2-1), Berkeley (1-2), Brown (0-3)

UBC is a very good team with a tremendous amount of depth that probably underperformed at Trouble in Vegas (where it barely made semifinals and lost to UCLA). Kira Frew is an impact player on the club scene for Traffic and she handles for UBC with precision. Candice Chan (who also plays for Traffic) and Tory Hislop (pictured at Regionals 2007) are other experienced players. I predict that UBC takes its pool with relative ease. The game of the pool will be between Texas and Berkeley. These two teams have been hovering next to each other on the NUMP poll recently, but have yet to play each other this season. Texas is led by the stellar play of Becca Shelton, who will be an exciting match-up for Berkeley's tall receiver Cree Howard. Natalie Wu will be the main handler to watch on Berkeley. This will be Brown's first tournament of the season and I think that the team will find itself out-matched. Brown's goals for the weekend are probably oriented towards giving newer players their first outdoor experience, a strategy that could pay off later in the season.

Pool D:
Stanford (3-0), Washington (2-1), Western Washington (1-2), North County A (0-3)

The reigning national champions won the Santa Barbara Invite back in January, but haven't played a college tournament since. I still have to stick by Stanford based on the depth in its roster. Returning 13 players from last year's roster, the handling core consists of Jenny Founds (pictured against UW at last year's Stanford Invite), Emily Damon, and Kara Johnson while the go-to receivers include Liz Cassel and Krystal Barghelame. Washington may actually have more star-power given that four of its players were on the Seattle club teams Riot and Shazam last season. Claire Suver is back from her ACL surgery and Lisa Nieman, Shannon O'Malley, Nora Carr, and Lindsey Wilson round out the top of the roster. The last time these two teams met, it was in a game-to-go at Regionals that Stanford squeaked out by one point. This re-match is certain to be one for the fans. Western Washington is an up-and-coming team in the Northwest and will certainly come out hard against anyone. Alyssa Weatherford is another Riot player and she does it all for Western. Hannah Kreilkamp and Mariko Kobayashi are other players to watch. Hailing from the San Diego area, North County, is overcoming a number of obstacles to make it to the Stanford Invite this year. The team didn't have a great showing at Trouble in Vegas, but will be looking to turn that around in Palo Alto.

I should have a full tournament write-up for IC Ultimate on Tuesday, so check back to hear how it all goes down. Good luck all around!

By the Numbers -- UltiVillage COTDs

2008-02-27T14:00:00.000-08:00

Recently, I've been thinking a lot about women's online presence in the ultimate community. Lindsey Hack wrote an insightful piece ("Second Class Citizens?") for MSSUI's new website, calling for women to promote women's athletics in general, and the women's ultimate divisions in particular. Lindsey specifically mentioned a disparity in UltiVillage Clips of the Day (COTDs) between the genders. I wanted to see the numbers for myself, so I performed an analysis of all the UltiVillage COTDs since August 3, 2007, looking at the gender and division the COTD featured and the corresponding hits to that link. This is what I found:

There were a total of 57 COTDs posted, 43 (75%) of which were of men playing and 8 (14%) of which were of women playing. 6 COTDs (11%) featured both genders (e.g. tournament trailers) or did not show ultimate being played (e.g. UCPC conference talks), and were thus excluded from further analysis. Of the remaining 51 COTDs, 19 (37%) were from the college division and 32 (63%) were from the club division. Women's play was shown in 2 (11%) of the college COTDs and in 6 (19%) of the club COTDs.

As of this afternoon, the average hit count for the 51 COTDs was 2,733. For men's COTDs, the average was 2,833. For COTDs highlighting women's play, the average hit count was 2,194. COTDs featuring men playing in the club division had the highest average hit count (3,294), followed by women in the club division (2,404), then by men in the college division (2,128), and finally by women in the college division (1,564). The difference between the different divisions' hit count ranges was quite large. For women's college clips, the range (and entire data set) was 1,491 to 1,636. For women's club clips, the range was between 1,954 to 2,700. For men's college COTDs, the range was between 304 and 4,144. For men's club clips, the range was between 2,355 and 5,258.

I think that some of these differences are structural as opposed to indicative of the interest level people have watching women or men play ultimate. It makes intuitive sense that the club divisions would have higher hit counts than the college division because the club COTDs have been posted online for longer, allowing more time both for more people to access the links and for people to access the links multiple times. The two women's college COTDs and seven of the men's college clips have been posted less than a week. Additionally, by having so few women's clips posted, UltiVillage is probably selecting for viewers more interested in men's clips. People who are interested in women's ultimate may be less likely to frequently check the site out since it doesn't often provide clips showing women playing ultimate. Other structural factors include the title and timeliness of the COTD. Across the board, if a COTD title only included the names of teams and no specific mention of a player or play, that clip was likely to register fewer hit counts than the average for its relevant division. Also, the hit counts of COTDs culled from footage for a single tournament generally dropped the further away from that tournament the COTD was posted. These points are relevant when considering the gender of the clips because women's clips are often posted longer after a tournament than men's clips and fewer women's clips' titles include details about the play being featured on the COTD.

Seeing the numbers, I had two main conclusions. (1) Men's COTDs are consistently viewed more frequently than women's COTD. (2) The difference in hit counts between men's and women's COTDs does not fully support the ratio between men's and women's COTDs posted to UltiVillage.

My first conclusion sort of speaks for itself. Although I was expecting to find that men's clips were more popular, it was nice to see that a few of the women's club clips were quite frequently watched. Overall, I am still a little disappointed that more people haven't checked out the free women's clips. There have been some really great clips posted, although the site currently only displays the clips through August 20, 2007.

My third conclusion is specifically a call for UltiVillage to post more women's clips. Rob Barril has responded well in the past to requests for more women's footage, so hopefully increasing the discussion about what the numbers show will help the cause. The ratio between average hits of women's COTDs and men's COTDs is 77%. I'm confident that ratio would rise if more women's clips were available (to get followers of women's ultimate more interested in frequenting the UltiVillage site). That ratio would also likely rise if women's clips were posted closer to the date of the relevant tournament and if their titles were more descriptive of the exciting plays they contain.

Of course, COTD hit counts are only a vague and inaccurate proxy for the money that UltiVillage makes off of selling UVTV subscriptions and DVDs. Rob surely makes his decisions of what clips to post based off of predictions on what will help generate buyers of his content. I don't have access to the information on UltiVillage DVD sales and UVTV download rates, but based solely on the COTD public information, it seems clear to me that women's clips could be better supported (both by UltiVillage and the general public).

Conversation with the UPA

2008-01-28T18:17:00.000-08:00

I attended the UCPC conference this past weekend and thoroughly enjoyed it. Tiina Booth and George Cooke know how to put on a great event. I'm planning on blogging about my presentation (Strategizing for Tournaments) and the panel I was a part of (State of Women's Ultimate), but for now I wanted to let people know about what the UPA revealed about its new strategic plan.

First off, the UPA had not fully developed its strategic plan document (which I think it is planning on doing in the next month), so many of the specific details were not entirely fleshed out. However, they were able to identify a few key directions that the UPA will be pursuing in the next five years. This plan seems ambitious, so I am interested to see how it all pans out. I guess the UPA is reluctant to release too much information about the plan before they have the plan fully worked out so that they can avoid potential confusion. They did provide a short pamphlet at the UCPC that outlined some of what the UPA is committed to doing along the lines of Character, Community, and Competition. Hopefully if I quote directly from this handout, I won't be misrepresenting what they presented.

"Character: Increase integrity and accountability for competitive Ultimate

Prepare a written document which clarifies and defines Spirit of the Game and can be used for marketing both internally and externally
Implement spirit rating system based on Observer, coach, spectator input
Produce and maintain online rules resources including abbreviated rules, annotated rules, video enactments, cheat sheet of outcomes
Develop online rules quizzes for use by all players. Implement rules quizzes requirements for a) coaching certification, b) UPA Championship Series
Increase the number of and quality of observers across the country through increased training clinics (goal 75 new observers per year) and implementation of an observer pay scale system
Partner with existing college and club tournaments to experiment with an expanded scope for Observers
Revision of the Observer evaluation program; develop recertification criteria and procedures; explore a tiered system of certification
Ongoing modification of the role of Observers in competitive play. In year one alone, Observers will implement active force-out calls and hand signals; and experiment with active up-down and travel calls
Promote use of UPA established Spirit rating systems and awards at non-UPA events

"Community: Support others to grow, develop and promote the sport

Create a Youth Ultimate Promotional package containing youth/high school Ultimate video footage, promotional booklet with Ultimate info, how to start a school team or local youth league, basic skills. Distribute free to YMCA's, Parks and Rec Depts, PE teachers
Expand the role of State Youth Coordinators to increase development of local high school and youth league programs and improve competition at the state level
Stimulate a pilot for a local Ultimate program for underserved youth
Revamp Coaching education offerings to be better targeted and more accessible; review HS/MS curriculum and rewrite if necessary
Form league advisory council to facilitate ongoing structured interaction between UPA and league leaders; develop a league affiliate model
Create online community for league organizers; develop biannual electronic communication for league organizers
Design and conduct a regional leadership training program for women interested in teaching and organizing Ultimate on the local level
Develop relationships with College Club Sports Administrators and team faculty advisors in order to build on-campus support for Ultimate
Provide Alumni reunion benefits at Club Championships during Hall of Fame inductance years
Organize parents group to increase understanding of the sport and encourage attendance at Ultimate events

"Competition: Develop and enhance competitive opportunities at all levels

Explore the need and structure for non-school based youth play, and the potential role of the Youth Club Championships in that structure
Plan and implement a Division II College Series
Form partnerships to develop UPA College Pre-Series (Regular Season) competitive program
Redraw sectional/regional boundaries and adjust bid allocation system
Create UPA Grand Masters and Women's Masters Experimental Championship Event
Implement roster limits in the Club Series
Plan and implement UPA Club Pre-Series (Regular Season) Competitive program
Plan and implement a Division II Club Series"

I can't believe I just typed all that. I'll feel especially dumb if it gets posted to the UCPC website tomorrow.

The aspects that interest me most are the competition tactics. The UPA admitted that these were the tactics they had worked out the least as they are quite complicated. The ones I'm particularly curious about are (a) adjusting the bid allocation system, (b) Division II Series (both college and club) and (c) Pre-Series (Regular Season) program for college and club. The other ones seem like good ideas, but don't really affect me personally (re-examining YCC, club roster limits at 27 for 2009, grand masters (age 40+) and womens' masters (age 30+) summer championships in 2009).

As far as the actual panel discussion went, I felt the UPA representatives probably could have done a better job getting the audience really excited about the plan elements. All of their tactics were supported by information and direction from the membership, so I think the UPA could have spent less time justifying the decisions and more time offering an inspiring glimpse of where the plan could take ultimate. I'm still excited about the possibilities, but it will take seeing the final documents and getting a sense of the timelines they propose for implementing some of the elements before I'll have any real sense of how it's all going to work.

Women's final commentary

2007-12-14T16:21:00.000-08:00

I'm taking a cue from Jim Parinella in his play-by-play analysis of the master's final game, although my recap is a little wordier. Here's the link where you can watch the women's final game once you have a UVTV subscription.

Preview: There was a moderate cross-wind going from right to left across the screen (although also slightly towards the camera) and most of the time, the teams forced towards the downwind sideline. Based on their previous games of the season, everyone expected that the final match-up would be another close game that could go either way. I still think it could have become that anticipated tight game if a couple critical points had gone differently in Riot's favor. (Picture courtesty of Bil Elsinger)

0-0. Fury receives and its handlers move the disc past half-field before the D clamps down. Swing, swing to Alicia White with a nice grab. Swing, swing, reverse to Alicia for the goal. You'll see her name a lot in this recap as she had a great game.
1-0. I unintentionally lull Riot into giving me a poach D by admiring my pull a little too long instead of hustling to get my mark onto Jenn Wilson right away. Setting up a cut for Julie Baker's favorite throw (inside-out flick) makes for the goal.
2-0. Fury plays a trapping D, but Riot breaks it with a dump and big inside-out. The wind catches the pass a little and Miranda Roth reads it better than her defender, giving her a wide open backhand to Joanne Harmon in the endzone.
2-1. Tight defense by Smalls (Kathryn Lawson) leads to Fury miscommunication and its first turnover. Riot puts up a big backhand huck, but it's D'ed by Alex Snyder. An unforced dump turnover by Fury (why not throw a forehand instead of a backhand here?), but Riot throws its first pass OB on an upwind forehand. Alex rips a huge backhand huck and then follows the play to get a dump and poor man's break to Bryn Martyna for the goal. Of note is that this is the first point with multiple turnovers and I think it was a critical point in the first half.
3-1. Riot receives and gets trapped on the downwind side. A poacher clogging up the open side eats up some of the stall count and then the dump pass ends up a little behind the receiver. Fury's handlers swing the disc in their endzone O and Jody Dozono makes an upfield handler cut to get into the goal. Watching the Fury handlers move the disc between each other will become a familiar sight during this game, as will Jody getting open up the line with her quickness.
4-1. Fury sets a four-person trapping zone for the first time. Jenn Wilson takes a shot with her big backhand, but I'm able to get the D as deep deep. A Fury overthrow gives the disc right back 25 yards out of the endzone. Fury sets its zone again, but the cup isn't as tight and Miranda finds a hole to Jenn who throws the goal to Joanne. Inches short/seconds late on my bid. Oh well.
4-2. Riot sets its own zone and Jody hammers out of the cup to Julie who throws a hanging pass that Bryn gets up for over Val Dion. Riot transitions to person defense. Some quick passes get off before the D tightens, seting up Fury's endzone offense again where it's swing, swing, swing, swing, goal.
5-2. Fury forces backhand and gets Riot to put up another incomplete backhand huck. A deep forehand is just out of reach of Stacey Schoemehl's bid. Nice grab by Shannon, but Stacey gets a hand block a few passes later and then throws the goal with a backhand break around.
6-2. Riot turns it over (not caught on tape) and Fury again is in its endzone offense, moving the disc laterally. Manu Argilli makes an amazing go-to layout catch past Joanne to keep the disc alive but Fury ends up with its only redzone turnover of the game as Alicia later rushes a pass from her knees. Kari Deleeuw immediately puts up a big forehand huck to Shannon O'Malley who calls a time-out. Then, Jenn finds Miranda for the goal on the downwind side.
6-3. Alex puts up another big backhand huck, but I get fouled after being tripped from behind. Watching the replay, I still think this was a good call as I had position and a play on the disc, but in retrospect the disc should have probably gone back to the thrower since (as I prove later in this game) it's never a sure thing that someone will catch the disc even if they are open. Nonetheless, the observer upholds my call and I get to make Enessa Janes look good going up for the score.
7-3. Riot is trapped on the downwind side again and Val bends a forehand into the goal where Miranda makes a nice diving catch.
7-4. Fury doesn't really have any cuts from the middle of the field and Julie puts up a late count huck to Alicia. Shannon makes an amazing bid on D and gets Alicia to miss the catch (a visual D?). More turnovers, first as a Riot bendy forehand huck is misread, then as a Fury dump pass gets caught up in the wind (and on which Smalls makes a nice D play), then Sprout gets a phantom D on a Riot huck, then a poach block by Kari on Julie's inside out. Next is an odd play where Miranda makes a nice go-to catch (picture courtesy of Scobel Wiggins), calls foul after catching the disc, and then gets up and hucks a big backhand (which is D’ed by Alicia). Essentially forgetting the continuation rule, we bring the disc back to be checked in after her foul call. Regardless, Fury gets the disc back after an errant throw. More endzone offense and Julie makes a sneaky cut to get open in the goal. This was the second point where each team turned it multiple times. Riot really needed to score this point to gather some momentum and score two points in a row.

Halftime assessment: Riot has thrown 5 incomplete and 1 completed hucks at this point on the video. All the incompleted hucks were going in the direction away from the main camera, the more upwind direction. Fury has not hucked once going "upwind" and is essentially 2 for 3 on its downwind hucks. Fury has also been very patient around the endzone, using the lateral space well. For Riot to overcome its deficit, it will have to be more conservative with the disc and put more pressure on Fury's handlers. So far, Riot has generated 3 turnovers with its pressure, while Fury has generated 6, by my count. Still, both teams can clean up the unforced turnover count.

8-4. A string of open-side passes for Fury. Jody tries to toe the goal line and the observers call her in, even though on tape it looks like her first ground contact was in the field proper. Of course, it's hard to tell exactly when she caught it since her body is shielding the disc, so it could have been legit, but she definitely didn’t think she was in and was ready to keep playing. Where's the other camera angle to show us the truth?
9-4. A no-turn score for Riot. Two backhand breaks in a row and Val throws the goal to Maddy Frey who makes a nice catch. Maddy was a rookie on Riot this year and will definitely be someone to watch out for in the future based on her athleticism and poise.
9-5. I catch the disc along the field's midline and my mark bites too much on the forehand fake, setting up a backhand opportunity to hit a wide-open Alicia for another goal.
10-5. Nice active marking by Enessa, but Riot still gets the reset. A pass later, Shannon puts up a forehand huck to Smalls, who makes the catch despite Alicia's backpack bid. Smalls is another Riot rookie this year who had a great season, lots of tenacity and speed.
10-6. Riot gets it a little off the line before I foul Miranda again on an in-cut. I just can't get around her without contact it seems. Obvious no-contest, but her next pass floats a little too much and goes OB. Julie makes a great layout catch to keep a deep dump pass in play
(picture from Massive Imageworks) and then hits Enessa with a nice break. Arlie then quickly hits Bryn for the goal.
11-6. Alex Ds a high-stall Riot forehand huck. Quick Fury disc movement: swing, swing, strike, dish, strike, and then Jody gets overthrown on another up the line cut into the endzone. Okay, so I guess Fury had two redzone turnovers this game. Fury gets it right back as Jody disrupts a misexecuted dump pass on the goalline. Handler endzone offense and Jody catches the goal (with, yep, an up the line cut).
12-6. A big roller pull put Riot on the sideline deep into its own endzone with a four person trapping cup around the disc. They can't quite break the trap and Fury gets the disc on its goal-line. Nice to see how Alicia set up her cut here to get open for the score from Martita Emde.
13-6. Somehow Fury gets the disc back (Riot's turnover edited out). The camera angle shows some cuts developing in the horiztonal stack for a bit. I wish this film angle was used more. Nice grab by Gen LaRoche to keep the disc up. She dumps it to Jenny Hanscom who swings it to Julie who hucks it to Robin Knowler who puts up a blade that gets saved at the last second by Gen in the goal. But wait. Apparently, Shannon called something way back when on Jenny's throw. Offensive foul or travel, maybe? I never found out and can't quite tell what the call could possibly be from the film. The observers overrule whatever it was, so the disc ends up back at Julie. Trademark low forehand break to Robin, but Joanne gets her hand on a dump pass: turnover. Shannon quickly puts up a huge forehand that flies past even speedster Joanne. Fury marches the disc up 70 yards mostly along the downwind sideline, aided by a nice high grab by Robin. The wind then catches a backhand inside-out break and Riot rookie Alyssa Weatherford almost gets the D over Jenny, but Jenny comes down with it and throws the goal to Gen. NW college scouts will want to watch out for Alyssa running the show at Western Washington this season. Seriously.
14-6 Tight D by Alex and Julie on the dumps and Riot puts up a late count desperation huck. Bryn gets the first piece of the disc and I help finish off the D. Fury has the disc to win on the goalline, but Kari comes up with a big footblock of a low backhand by Alex. Maddy makes another nice skying catch on a floaty high release, but then Julie gets a poach block on Liz Duffy (I think there was a foul called on this play, but it was overruled by the observers). Alex puts up a beautiful forehand to me in the goal for the game. I'm wide open and am so excited to catch the winning goal that I remember telling myself, “lay-out if necessary.” Well, I laid out and it wasn't necessary, so I dropped the pass. Probably my most photographed turnover ever. Ugg. Luckily Fury gets it back on a short Riot huck. This time Fury won't be denied. Julie to Alex to me to Lauren Casey to Bryn to me to Alex to Chewie (Joy Chen). Chewie was in full face paint--a tradition she started back in 1997 at Stanford--so it seems fitting that she caught the final goal (picture from Massive Imageworks).

Second half assessment: Riot was 1 for 5 on its attempted hucks this half, while Fury was 2 for 2 of hucks included in the video. More importantly, Riot didn't seem to be able to generate the defensive blocks it needed this half. Riot only got one D all half and didn't cause any other additional turnovers with tight pressure. Meanwhile, Fury got 3 Ds and tough defensive pressure lead to another 3 turnovers by Riot. This difference was rather uncharacteristic of Riot--a team that is known for its tight, aggressive defense. Perhaps its tough semifinal match against Brute Squad took something out of Riot's top players. Or perhaps Fury’s core was just clicking. Who knows.

Interestingly, I think that this year the women's finals had fewer turnovers than either the men's or the mixed finals. In fact, 14 of the 21 points were scored by a team that didn't turn it over on that point. There were still a couple points with lots of turns, and I have no idea how many turnovers were edited out by Rob (I know at least one more of mine was). But still, not bad.

Fury had a dominating Nationals this year, reminiscent of its 2003 run through the field. This is the third time in a row that Fury has won Nationals in a qualifying year for the WUGC (country Worlds), but the team has not had a good track record at Worlds yet. In 2000, Fury placed 4th at WUGC. In 2002, the team lost in quarters at WUCC. In 2004, Fury placed 3rd at WUGC. Rumor is that Fury is determined not to walk away from another Worlds without gold and is making Vancouver the top priority of its 2008 season. Hopefully this time the team can make it happen.

How accurate is the RRI?

2007-09-26T16:34:00.000-07:00

Club Regionals start this weekend, so what better way to test out how good the RRI is at predicting scores. If the RRI is correct, this is who will qualify for Nationals this year:

NW
3218 Fury
3190 Riot
3053 Traffic
(Runner up: 2998 Zeitgeist)

SW
2980 Safari
2864 Rare Air
(Runner up: 2733 Box Lunch)

NE
3119 Capitals
3025 Brute Squad
2764 Storm
2740 Lady Godiva
(Runner up: 2644 Ambush)

MA
2998 Backhoe
2760 Loose Cannon
2744 Wicked
(Runner up: 2644 Scandal)

CN
2901 Small Rackages
2823 MOJO
(Runner's up: 2642 Sisemen/2624 Nemesis)

SO
2811 Ozone
2769 Showdown
(Runner's up: 2671 Layuma)

I would be willing to bet that the RRI predicts the qualifers correctly across the board. At least in the women's division. I have a feeling there's slightly more parity in open and mixed which could mess things up for the RRI a little. Anyone willing to bet against the RRI?

Regionals Preview I

2007-04-25T10:05:00.000-07:00

The dust from Sectionals has settled and teams are eagerly anticipating the action that starts this weekend at Regionals. This post offers up my assessment of what could go down this weekend.

Disclaimer: I haven't been to a single college tournament this year (DUI hardly counts), so most of this analysis is based off of results on the Score Reporter, impressions of teams from years past, reviewing availble rosters, and insider information passed along the grapevine. Hopefully those with more informed perspectives will chime in to offer up their opinions!

NORTHWEST
Bids: 3
Teams: 13
Top contenders: Stanford, UBC, UW, Davis, Berkeley
Spoilers: Santa Cruz, Oregon

With three bids, there are a lot of teams that think they have a shot at going to Nationals. And they are right. Unlike many previous years, there is no clear favorite to win the region outright. Berkeley would have been the top choice before Sectionals as it had not lost a single game to NW competition in the regular season. However, Davis and Stanford have been steadily improving all season and were able to upset the Pie Queens at Sectionals. Stanford's improvement has been especially dramatic: it lost to Berkeley 10-3 at the beginning of the season, lost to Davis by one mid season, and turned around to soundly beat both teams at Sectionals. But will it be enough to hold off UBC and UW? UBC hasn't played much NW competition and is a bit of a wildcard. It has a winning record over UW (2-1) and beat Davis in March, so just because it hasn't played many tough games recently doesn't mean it can't win tight matches. UW's chances will likely rest on how well its starters are able to step up into the void left by Claire Suver's torn ACL and whether the weather forecast changes to offer up more zone conditions. The battles in pool play and throughout both the frontdoor and backdoor brackets are what make NW Regionals so exciting to watch. Based on my biased loyalties, I would bet on (hope for) Stanford to qualify, but the other two spots are too close to call...

SOUTH
Bids: 1
Teams: 12
Top contenders: Texas, Truman State
Spoilers: Kansas, Oklahoma, Rice

Texas is the historical favorite here as it has won South Regionals for the entire college careers of all the players in the region. Melee has also had the strongest schedule of teams in the South this year, and facing the tough competition at three Cultimate tournaments is a great way to prepare for the challenges of one bid to Nationals. Texas did lose to Rice at Sectionals, even though the game's significance is tough to interpret: were the 6-5 and 5-6 games between Texas and Rice simply a product of a weird format that only allowed for hour long games? Did Texas lose its focus at Sectionals? Has Rice become a real contender in the region? Meanwhile, Truman State has an impressive record this year (34-9) and faced tough out-of-region competition at both Mardi Gras and Centex. In fact, Truman State gave Wisconsin a closer game (6-13) than Texas has (1-13 and 3-13) this season. It's nice to see a little more parity emerge in the South and one bid certainly ups the ante. I predict Texas holds onto the region by the skin of its teeth.

GREAT LAKES
Bids: 1
Teams: 12
Top Contenders: Michigan, Illinois
Spoilers: Ohio, Northwestern, Ohio State

The Great Lakes missed a size wildcard by one on-time roster this year, so I sincerely hope that all the teams vying for the lone bid got their paperwork in before the early deadline. Michigan won the region last year, overcoming close games at every step of the way in the championship bracket, and then tied for 9th at Nationals. This year, Michigan's main competition at Regionals will be Illinois. The RRI and UPA Top 25's algorithms disagree over which team should be ranked higher, but the fact remains that both have had solid seasons thus far. Illinois' main claim to fame this year is that it took 5th place at Southerns amidst tough competition. Michigan traveled to more tournaments, including QCTU, Terminus, and Centex, and made quarterfinals twice (at QCTU and Terminus). Assuming Michigan and Illinois make finals, the game will come down to which team's big players make more big plays. My money is on Michigan's veteran cast to pull through in the end. Of course, Northwestern and Ohio will be fighting tooth and nail for their shot at the game-to-go and have the talent to offer up some surprises.

Anyone care to comment?

UPA Rostering

2007-04-14T09:45:00.000-07:00

Having to tell someone that they aren't eligible to play in the College Series is one of the hardest things I've had to do as either a Regional Coordinator or a coach. This week, I've had to break the bad news in both capacities. To avoid having that happen again, I've been thinking more about the UPA rostering process and how it could be improved.

First off, I want to start by saying how the current rostering process is MUCH better than it was when I first started playing. Part of improving the process was establishing more firm deadlines. It is imperative to know how many teams can advance from a tournament before the tournament starts, which can only happen if college teams submit their final, registrar-certified rosters before the tournament. It is also imperative that every player's eligibility status be verified before they compete in a tournament, which can only happen if teams submit their final, registrar-certified rosters ahead of time. This is all justification for the UPA's hard and fast deadline of turning in all registrar-certified rosters by the Tuesday before Sectionals.

Unfortunately, the UPA's uniform adherence to its deadlines doesn't quite translate into uniform and timely communication about how to meet those deadlines. To be fair, every team has access to the information on the UPA's site ("Rostering 101") which specifically outlines the deadlines. However, there are a number of things that could make it easier for teams to follow these guidelines.

Here is my list for suggestions that would make the process smoother:

Re-write the "Rostering 101" instructions to improve their clarity and readability. Currently, the instructions are not easy to navigate and instantly understand--no diagrams outlining the major steps in brief, no calendars listing the various layers of deadlines, no pictures differentiating the various types of rosters. Instead, the dense wording and numerous hyperlinks are not consistently organized and often confusingly vague. For instance, there are numerous places where the directions are not explicit about whether the word "roster" is referring to an online-submitted roster or the registrar-certified roster. I think it would be helpful to use an entirely different term for the online roster (perhaps "team database") to reduce any confusion and prevent the situation where a team added players to its online roster/team database but didn't turn in an additional registrar-certified roster addendum.
Update Online Rostering Instructions and make more accessible. In addition to the Rostering 101 page there is an entirely different set of online rostering instructions on the website. This is a step-by-step guide on how to register a team online, but because the link to the page is so hidden (you can only get to it by clicking hyperlinks embedded in other pages' text), I don't know how many teams even found it. Even more troublesome is that some of the information on these pages pertains only to club or only to years past and has not been adequately updated (i.e. references to August deadlines and paper rosters). This needs to be updated and placed more prominently in the online rostering system.
Provide up-to-date information about the status of teams and players.The online rostering system is a step in the right direction towards better communication with teams about their rostering status. Currently, captains can check their online roster to see if players have been registrar-approved, turned in their waivers, and paid their dues. However, this information is not always updated in a timely fashion, sometimes even weeks after paperwork was received at the UPA headquarters. This lag limits the time teams have to address and fix any problems that may have come up with their roster. I know that UPA HQ is a busy place during the weeks leading up the College Series, but there should be a simple way for the UPA to communicate that it (a) received a paperwork packet from a team and (b) is processing a team's paperwork. Perhaps an additional "status" field on the rostering page that pertained to the registrar-certified roster would suffice.
Provide more information to SCs/RCs. The helpfulness of SCs and RCs is limited by the information for which they have access. The only piece of rostering information sent out to the coordinators that teams couldn't ascertain themselves online was a list of which teams turned in on-time rosters, but this list wasn't e-mailed out until a week and a half after the early registration deadline had passed. If a team didn't show up on this list, or had received an extension, the SCs and RCs would have no way of knowing the status of a team's rosters until it was updated online much later. SCs and RCs should have access to more information than that if they are to adequately encourage and support teams for turning in their rosters. Additionally, SCs and RCs often have to seek out and track down teams from their sections or regions at the beginning of the season without the help of the UPA, because all of the UPA's contact information is only relevant for the previous season. Many teams have list servs or general e-mail addresses that are consistent from year to year and the UPA could facilitate contact for the next year by collecting such "permanent" contact addresses and provide them to coordinators at the end of the fall. This would ensure that teams are contacted earlier in the season by their SCs or RCs, starting them on the rostering process earlier too.
Provide more support for dealing with school registrars. In all the instructional information on the UPA's website, there is only one paragraph on getting the roster signed and sealed by the registrar. Yet, obtaining approval from the registrar is usually the biggest hold-up for teams trying to get their roster on-time. Schools' registrar policies are likely to vary between schools, but the UPA could still provide helpful tips for getting the roster signed and approved. Useful tips could include:

Make an appointment with the school registrar in January or early February to determine what information the registrar will need to process the roster quickly (for instance, some schools require teams to provide Proof of Enrollment certificates along with the roster to aid the verification process)
Include student ID numbers on the roster to expedite the registrar's certification process
Set a specific date to come back and pick-up the certified roster (rather than just letting the registrar get to it on its own schedule)
Whenever possible, don't rely on the registrar to mail the registrar-certified roster to the UPA. If the timing is close, a team will want the flexibility of sending the roster through a faster means than regular mail
Making sure to have some sort of verification that the roster was delivered (i.e. certified mail with return receipt or UPS/FedEx/DHL delivery)

Provide options to help teams in a crunch. Often the unexpected happens at the last minute (someone gets injured, someone gets sick, someone has to take a make-up exam, etc.) and the UPA could be more flexible in helping teams add last minute additions based on extreme circumstances. Other uncontrollables include an indifferent or difficult registrar. With the early deadline extensions, the UPA already acknowledges that schools on the quarter system need a little help meeting the on-time roster deadline. I think that the UPA could have an additional extension option for teams that have difficulty meeting the Tuesday-before-Sectionals deadline. For instance, a team that received this proposed extra extension could be required to fax in a copy of its registrar-certified roster and then get an extra day grace period to overnight mail it in. The faxed copy could serve the planning purposes of the SC, and the UPA would still receive the original copy before Sectionals. If limited to teams in special circumstances, this could be a useful way of helping teams play that would otherwise miss the deadline. No one should have to hop on a plane to physically place the roster in the UPA's hands to meet the deadline...

I know that this post is quite lengthy, so thanks for making it this far. My goal is to be able to collect other suggestions for improvements so that I can provide the UPA with feedback as part of the yearly RC evaluation survey. Do people agree with my suggestions? What other changes should the UPA institute for the college rostering process?

A Plea to TDs Everywhere....

2007-03-07T16:39:00.000-08:00

Dear tournament directors-

(before i get started, i know cooke has already ranted on this. but, i think it is really important and I want to remind people again.)

Currently, I am an assistant coach, a regional coordinator and a member of the NUMP. It has become increasingly more and more frustrating to find results for tournaments this year thus making it difficult to vote on the NUMP, scout for my team, and eventually, seed for regionals/sectionals. I am begging Tournament Directors to at least have pool play brackets and championshp brackets up on the score reporter. There are only three, THREE!!!!, tournaments this spring that have both up with 90% of the scores (or just a W-L) filled in. Congrats to those who ran FWC (Florida) Presidents Day (UCSD), and Stanford Invite (missing chump bracket, but pretty damn good, Cultimate). I personally thank you.

Some tournaments have nothing (no pools or brackets) up on the score reporter: SB invite, mardi gras (eh, i kind of cut you guys some slack...24 teams is big), Chucktown Throwdown, Wooster (just happened, i understand)

Some tournaments have no scores at all reported but pools and brackets are there: Hellfish

Some tournaments have pools, but no brackets: QCTU (lots of missing pool play scores), Hendrix, UCLA Invite, Atlantis (just happened, i understand)

Deciphering Sunday results without a bracket is tough.

(In my mind, vegas is moderately off the hook because the 32 team pool play option/bracket on rodney is probably a mess. I am sure there was some ridiculous rant about it on RSD. )

The RRI is also a mess (not that anyone ever takes it that seriously), but it would be interesting to actually read if the records on there were even 50% accurate.

I almost want to offer my services. Maybe, for like 25-50$ (depending on the size of your tournament), I will spend some time to help put up your pools and brackets on the score reporter. I will try to figure out rodney for you. Then, you can hand the teams a nifty information sheet on how to report their scores on the score reporter (not to mention that as a TD you should probably collect scores as well). I understand the score reporter is not 100% user friendly, but can the nation have a little something after the tournament??? Please!?!?!?!?!?!?! So, budget that extra $50 into your tournament costs, shoot me an email, and I will see what I can do.

I know how much hard work it is to run a tournament as I have run more than a few myself. I thank all of you for running one in the first place. I also realize that there are going to be a few tournaments out there that are impossible to put up on rodney because of formatting issues or tough to prepare the reporter beforehand because of last minute drops. But, let's step it up a level and let the whole nation see what became of all of your hard work.

The teams to beat

2006-11-22T12:52:00.000-08:00

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:

Stanford
UCLA
Wisconsin
Emory
Colorado
Carleton
Washington
Oregon
Texas
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

2006-11-20T00:47:00.000-08:00

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

2006-11-07T10:25:00.000-08:00

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?

The shape of a season

2006-10-15T21:55:00.000-07:00

As the club season is nearing its end and the college season just gearing up, I've been thinking about how a team shapes its season. A full season seems like a long time with plenty of opportunities to learn and practice a wide range of skills and strategies, but really there is never enough time to perfect everything. The leadership has to pick its battles and decide what to focus on for that season. What will your team excell at?

The reason I've been thinking about this idea in the context of the club season is that one way I've been mentally preparing myself for Nationals is by analyzing my team's strengths. This process involves three things for me: identifying my team's strengths, anticipating how other teams will view and try to minimize those strengths, and visualizing the appropriate adjustments we have also practiced. Especially for offensive strengths of a team, this involves a "punch" and "counter-punch" arsenal of weapons. To develop those weapons is a process that takes all season. So right now, on the eve of Nationals, the ground work has been laid and all you can do is hope that the right decisions were made back in April, June and August about what to focus on for the season. It can be easy to list all the things you didn't spend enough time on, or all the plays you never really fine tuned, or all the permutations of your various zone Ds that still need work. But, there's never enough time to do, let alone perfect, everything. It's a matter of choices.

Which brings me to the incipient college season. For a college team, nothing is set in stone yet and there are a myriad of different approaches to take to the season. Is this the year to try a new offensive structure? What about a new zone O attack? Are there any different defensive looks that you want to try? Often the fall is when teams take stock of their returners and try to maximize the potential they see in the personnel on their roster. There is a tendency to want to change certain things in order to improve on where the team ended up at the end of last year's college season. Change can be good, but you need to have a plan to go along with it.

I think the first question to ask at the beginning of the season is, "what is the team's identity?" Is this a defensive team that prides itself on playing pressure person D to get blocks? Is this a team that tries to let its athleticism shine? Is this a team that focuses on playing possession offense? Sometimes a team will have more than one thing that it really identifies with. Those touchstones are what you can build your entire season around. They can guide what skills to focus the most on. They can guide how you chose players for your team during try-outs. They help develop mental toughness and focus in your players from the start of the season. They are what players rally around and feel pride in.

Working towards a team identity is just one step of creating an effective season plan. Having goal-setting meetings at the beginning of the season is another part of creating a plan. So is outlining what specific skills and strategies the team hopes to have by the end of the season. Identifying what you need to learn from the start of the season will make things a whole lot easier by the end when you have to have faith your team had a good plan to start with.

Women's Ultimate and The Rules

2006-09-06T08:21:00.000-07:00

I began to write a lengthy response to Cooke's blog entry on the rules, when I realized I had enough to say to make my own blog entry.

My coach and I were discussing self officiating and rules knowledge on the way home from the Chesapeake Open a few weekends ago. He made a suggestion that I can only help but smile about and hope it becomes real some day. He suggested that every team that competes in an UPA championship series event should have at least two players on their roster who are certified observers. I think this would have a tremendous effect on the women's college level where ignorance of the rules runs rampant, it is an epidemic really. What probably surprises me the most, is the ignorance of the rules exhibited by many of the coaches at the college level. Young college players will live and die by how their coach makes a ruling on a play - even when they recite a rule that does not exist - and it absolutely blows my mind. And, this ignorane of the rules is not just evident with the smaller, younger programs, but programs who have been to the big dance, have almost won the big dance. I think it is time for players and coaches to take a little more personal responsibility and accountability for their knowledge and proper interpretation of the rules. Instituting a "Two Observers per Team" type of ruling would help a great deal and maintain the integrity of our sport.

This past regionals, we were in a game that mattered a great deal and errant calls were being called by the opposing team quite a bit. At one point, one of the younger players on the team - I believe she only had 1.5 years experience - made an errant call on me. I explained to her why it was inapporpriate and told her the rule she was reciting did not exist. I turned to her coach to tell her that the rule did not exist. The coach did not comment. Later, the coach commented to me that she does not like to intervene during a point, but will help her players learn the rules between points. I personally think that is ridiculous! I mean, if my team was blatantly violating the rules, out of pure ignorance (or otherwise, which I hope would never be the case) I owe it to this sport to speak up - especially if my opinion has been asked for. And, this "infraction" was a very black and white matter. It was not a question of whether I was fouled or not - which can be a very grey area. Needless to say, this was about the last straw for me, as many other bad calls were made during this game. At 6-11 I requested observers. We went on a 7-2 run with observers. Too little too late, but I wonder if it would have made a difference if the observers were there from the beginning. We played like shit too, do not get me wrong. But, maybe, just maybe.

At the women's club level, rules ignorance is really not as much of a problem. At least I do not have to throw discs out of frustration and whip out the trusty rules book every tournament. I believe this is probably because every team has a couple of people who are somewhat experts on the subject. We only have discussions about the very obscure rules that the basketall refs were challenging each other with in Cooke's blog. I personally do not claim to know the whole rule book, but it is rare if I am wrong twice about a rule.

If there is one interpretation of the rules that needs better clarification in women's club ultimate - it is fouls on the receiver. Women's club ultimate is no where near as physical or aggressive as men's club ultimate, but some teams are progressing to that style of play. As some teams progress to that style of play - which I like to think of as a more athletic style of play where people dominate who have been in the weight room, like basketball - teams who have not progressed to this style tend to call quite a bit of fouls when they are going up for a disc on the defender. Personally, and I have thought about this a lot, I think about half of the fouls called on my team this year in this situation were not fouls. They were simply the stronger person winning the matchup. Was there incidental contact? Sure. Was it a foul? No. Did the stronger athlete win? Yes. It is very similar to rebounding a basketball or going in for a layup. There is going to be contact. Can you rebound/make the layup despite the contact? There is always contact - contact does not equal foul. Now, if a defender hacks your arm or hand, definitely a foul, basketball or ultimate. But, really, that is my only real beef with women's club ultimate and the rules.

College ultimate? That is a whole other can of worms. This year, we are going to try and do something for women's college programs on the southeast coast - a camp of sorts. And, I can promise you that among the skills, drills, and administrative talks that will occurr at this camp, there will be a rules session.

A Callahan vs. a Championship

2006-06-08T09:06:00.001-07:00

I've noticed a recent trend in college ultimate - men's Callahan winners winning championships in the same year. Five out of the last seven men's Callahan winners have also won the championship that same year, including this year with Tim Gehret and Florida. However, the women's Callahan winners have come up short every year since 1998 when Stanford was in the midst of their threepeat and also had a Callahan winner.
Why is this? If the Callahan really does represent the most spirited, most valuable player in each division, what is it about these recent men's Callahan winners that pushes their teams the distance? Why are Callahan women unable to carry their teams through til the end?
I have some thoughts. Perhaps it is that in women's college ultimate, superstars stand out even more against the backdrop of a team lacking in talent, experience, or big playmaking. Sometimes this is a self-perpetuating situation in which one player is better, makes all the big plays, her team depends on her for big plays, she has to make more big plays...she gets recognition. For example, I have no doubt that Alex Snyder was the best college ultimate player in the country this year - if I could had votes, they all would have gone to her - but would she have stood out as much had she played for Stanford? If she had played 5 years with the likes of Gwen Ambler, Jenny Burney, Jamie Nuwer, Enessa Janes and Lauren Casey, would she have gained as much recognition as she did? Alex has been the best player and a clear leader on Colorado for a long time and that is partially because Kali is just gaining steam as a true ultimate powerhouse and she is a huge part of it becoming that way. On Stanford she would have still been a great player, but nonetheless a part of the Superfly faceless army.
In my opinion, it is less about the Callahan winners dropping the ball than it is about the presence of some really excellent womens college ultimate programs. Of course, Stanford has great players every year, but they are typically go to players for 2 or 3 years rather than the 4 or 5 that people at lesser programs have. If you plucked Stanford's best 2 players and put them on other teams, they would probably win the Callahan too.
But lucky Superfly girls get to learn from the best coaches and team players and be part of the best program that college womens' ultimate has every known. Props to Dom and AJ for standing out that much more to win the Callahan from this program - it must have been ridiculous to watch.
This is a challenge to other players and coaches out there to take a lesson from Superfly and try to build a program (UCLA, CU, Wisconsin, Davis - you're clearly on your way) - because cool as it is to win the Callahan, all of us would gladly turn it in for a college championship. Let alone the three team golds that the Superfly graduates this year have for their trophy case.

Nationals predictions...

2006-05-21T15:01:00.000-07:00

With Nationals less than a week away, I can't believe there haven't been more predictions thrown around yet. I can only assume that means everyone thinks its a forgone conclusion that Stanford will win... ;-)

This is the second year in a row that Stanford enters Nationals as the number one seed, and we all remember the surprise Washington had in store for them last year in pool play. Which team will be the UW of 2006?

I think the most likely upset of a pool's top seed will be of Wisconsin in Pool D. Not only will the team have a tough match-up every single round of the day on Friday (playing UC-Davis, Michigan, and Tufts), but Davis is the strongest second seed at the tournament. Davis has steadily improved all season long, planning its year to peak at Nationals. At many pre-Series tournaments like Vegas and DUI, Davis' younger players got to see a lot of playing time against tough competition. By the time Regionals rolled around, the team played with solid fundamentals from top to bottom and ran its offense efficiently and effectively. Plus, four of the team's leaders were also key players in the 2004 championship team--experience that can't hurt their chances. Granted, I haven't watched Wisconsin play this season, but after early February their results show a lot of easy games against lesser opponents with a loss to Michigan thrown into the mix. Will they be mentally prepared for three tough games on Day One?

Florida is the other two seed in its pool with a shot at swooping the number one spot. Florida has had a storied season this year: champions at CCC and QCTU, finalist at Southerns, semis at Centex, and the second seed from the AC. The team has a veteran group of players who are savvy enough to play a number of different junk Ds and are experienced enough to run an efficient offense. The question will be whether they can match UCLA's athleticism and whether they can shut down the devastating throws of Anna "Maddog" Nazarov and Lisa Vampoola. UCLA played flawlessly at SW Regionals and will have to play that way again to hold off FUEL.

The other upset I'm going to call will be Texas over British Columbia. I'm going a bit out on a limb here, as UBC has had a much more impressive season this year. However, UBC seems to have faltered slightly during the Series so far, losing to UW in a surprise game at Sectionals and losing by wide margins to Davis and Stanford at Regionals. Additionally, with a tight travel schedule, UBC is not getting in to Columbus early enough to practice the day before. All the other top women's teams have made this a priority, and Texas will be at the field site Thursday afternoon getting a feel for the conditions and getting over any jet lag. In 2001, travel plans affected UBC's play in pool play and it could happen again to this squad that has no Nationals experience of its own.

While Georgia seems to have been improving throughout the season, avenging losses to AC teams Florida and Emory, it won't have enough to really challenge Colorado for the one seed in Pool C. Earlier in the season, these two teams met at Centex with Colorado taking the game easily 15-6. Georgia's improvements should make the game closer this time around, but the Kali women will be in control throughout. In fact, Georgia will have to worry about just holding onto its second seed as both Emory and Dartmouth will provide some challenges.

Dartmouth and Tufts are tough fourth seeds in the C and D pools. While they might not eke out an upset, the tougher competition they provide could affect the endurance of the teams in those pools later on in the tournament. Swarthmore and Delaware got a slight boost in their rankings over the New England teams, but neither is likely to earn a win in pool play. Swarthmore's unblemished record won't last too much longer...

Out of the five west coast teams at the tournament, I think that four of them will make the semifinals: Stanford v. UC-Davis and UCLA v. Colorado in re-matches of games at NW and SW Regionals. Sure, I'm biased towards the west coast and the teams I've seen more of this year, but this seems like a pretty safe bet to me. In the finals, I'm going to call Stanford over UCLA. Yep, Colorado won't be able to break its semifinals curse yet again and the finals crowd will see Lauren Casey lead her team to a repeat championship.

Anyone care to disagree? :-)

Great schedule vs. great record

2006-05-09T13:30:00.000-07:00

I've been stirring the pot on RSD regarding seedings for Nationals. It seems there's a bit of a fuss on what matters more: a good record versus mediocre competition or a mediocre record versus good competition. I come down squarely on the side of good competition. I want to reward teams for taking on harder challenges and I think those that have been exposed to Nationals-level competition will do better at Nationals.

Which is more important? Should seedings be a reward for the season so far or a decent guess at the final finishes of the teams?

For those who don't read RSD

2006-05-08T13:31:00.000-07:00

There's a blog up at Sports Illustrated about ultimate and the NCAA. It would be great to get some current college perspective.
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/si_blogs/sioncampus/vent/

And the upsets begin...

2006-04-16T21:49:00.000-07:00

It's always amazing to me what surprises the college series has in store for us. Most of the sectional tournaments are now over (the only exceptions are the 3 NE sections), and already two of the top teams have been upset. That's what's so exciting about the college season, I guess. Teams seem to come out of nowhere and perform at their peak when it starts to matter.

For instance, I was shocked to hear that UCLA (ranked 3rd in the nation for much of the year) lost to UC-Santa Barbara in pool play this weekend. UCSB is a solid team that has played well the few times I've seen them this season, but even after watching them play just last weekend at DUI, I wouldn't have picked them to upset UCLA. UCLA went on to lose to UC-San Diego in semis and ended up 3rd in the section. I was less surprised about UCSD's win (I'm understandably quite loyal to my little sister's team...) and I don't know if UCLA was missing more key players than Emily Gauthier (who tore her ACL at Centex). I still think that the results speak to an up and coming team like UCSB's ability to believe in itself enough to take down a top team. It also is a culmination of improvements during the season for UCSB.

A similar thing happened up north in the WA/BC sectionals where Washington beat British Columbia in the finals 15-9. Just a few weeks ago, UBC simply crushed UW at Centex (15-3) and has been consistently ranked in the top 5 for much of the season. Meanwhile, UW didn't make the championship bracket of either the Stanford Invite or Centex. Yet, once the Series starts, that special fire gets lit under teams that have been underperforming all season long. In a wet and windy game, UW played the best zone offense it has all year and capitalized on UBC mistakes to take an early lead and win the game.

Teams practice hard all season long, improving along a trajectory that has them peaking during the Series. I love how in college the improvements along that trajectory are so dramatic. It's thrilling to see newer players completing upfield passes by the end of the season, faking with confidence to break the mark, and being heads-up enough to switch on defense. Even more exciting is the energy that playing in the Series brings to so many games. It's essentially the play-offs and for every senior out there, this is the last time they have a shot at meeting their goals and realizing their ultimate dreams. The teams that are successful during the Series are the ones that are able to convert that energy and excitement into inspired performances on the field. If UW and UCSB had upsets up their sleeves at Sectionals, I simply can't wait to see how Regionals unfold across the country.

Will Stanford, Colorado, Florida, or Wisconsin follow the fate of UCLA and UBC as top teams that get upset by a surprise upstart team? Will UCLA and UBC bounce back to secure bids to Nationals despite their sectional set-backs? What teams will earn bids from Regionals that may have already been written-off?

I can't wait to find out.

early season thoughts on the NE region

2006-03-30T08:38:00.000-08:00

With veterans Lakshmi Narayan, Liz Middleton, and Sarah Markus as well as top freshman Rohre Titcomb, all the talk is about Dartmouth as the pre-season favorite from the New England region, however, i wouldn't so quickly overlook other regional programs, including Tufts, Brown, and MIT.

Tufts did not look challenged by any of the competition they faced at ultimax this past weekend and had a solid showing at Vegas. they have a core of juniors and seniors who have been building a team together for a few years. led by the throws of Bernie Diaz and downfield motion of Meghan Cain, they are fundamentally sound, play an efficient offense, and run hard on both sides of the disc. a heartbreaking loss to Brown at regionals last year sent them out of the tournament early, but i suspect that will be different this year.

even after graduating a slew of players last year, Brown has refueled for the 2005 season. it is early in the season and their offense is still coming together, but they are coached by the collective brainpower of Ted Munter, Mo McCamley, and Mike Kafka, and are capable of throwing a number of defensive sets at you to get the disc back.

after being hit hard by some early season injuries, MIT lost in the semifinals of Ultimax. experience is not in question, as their top players this year have been playing significant roles at Nationals the past few years. however, depth has been a trademark weakness of MIT, and this year may be no different.

after a relatively mild winter, the northeast is starting to thaw, and teams are kicking off their seasons. in preparing for the UPA series, regional teams will get chances to face off at UMassacre (if it isn't rained out for the 4th year in a row) and Yale Cup, and it will be exciting to see which teams emerge as the favorites entering into Regionals.

some other teams in the mix that i cannot write about because i haven't seen them play this season yet: Wellesley, Northeastern, and Yale.

Is it a two horse race?

2006-03-29T13:47:00.000-08:00

Not only are Stanford and Colorado the two top women's teams out there this season, but Lauren Casey and Alex Snyder are two of the best women's players this year too. When was the last time that happened? Now, I'm not going to go into which one I think will win Nationals or who should win the Callahan this year, because I'm rather biased. It's not that hard to guess who I'd pick, just like it's not that hard to guess who Hector will tell you is going to win.

But, does anyone else stand a chance?

UCLA is the next team I'd put money on, if I were betting on another team to make the finals of Nationals. UCLA came close to upsetting Stanford in the windy semis of Centex, going up 10-7 before eventually losing 10-12. UCLA also came close to beating Colorado in the semis of the Stanford Invite, where the game was decided on double game point. UCLA will get another shot at Colorado at SW Regionals, which could make things interesting. UCLA and Colorado seem like very similar teams in terms of a couple dominant handlers with a number of solid receivers. I would put UCLA's top receivers as slightly more athletic than Colorado's, but losing the height of Emily Gauthier could hurt UCLA. If Regionals is not windy, UCLA's chances of an upset against Colorado rise.

Florida is making a strong push this year and the phrase "real deal" keeps popping up in reference to the team, but FUEL still could have a hard time making it out of its region. With only four losses for the season (to Georgia in the finals of Southerns, to UCLA in pool play and in the 3/4 game at Centex, and to Colorado in the semis of Centex), this team looks good on paper and has bested some quality teams. Probably its biggest win of the season so far was against highly-ranked British Columbia in the semis of Centex. Florida has beaten top teams from other regions too: Michigan, Purdue, and Northwestern from the Great Lakes; Cornell and State College from the Metro East; Dartmouth from New England; and Texas from the South. Interestingly enough, Florida hasn't won as many big games against its own regional competition. It has yet to play Emory or UNC-Chapel Hill and has lost to Georgia. The team utilizes various clam/switching defenses that many teams take awhile to adjust to, which could be a bonus at Nationals against new opponents. The team will have to make it there first. Also, the jury is still out on whether Florida will turn into another team from the AC that has lots of pre-season hype but doesn't hold seed at Nationals.

British Columbia has also been one of the front runners of the season. The only team from within its region that it has lost to thus far is Stanford, while it has beat all the other major contenders from the NW. The team also had early season wins against UCLA and Carleton (at Trouble in Vegas) and more recent victories over San Diego, Emory, Dartmouth, and UNC-Chapel Hill. UBC runs a very efficient offense that isolates players in its horizontal stack. As it is all but impossible to prevent a reset dump pass from getting to the squirrelly handler Kira Frew, UBC is able to pick apart a team's defense with patience and precision. Megan O'Brien's athleticism and field sense are also remarkable and she makes a huge impact, even playing with her left arm in a cast. The team only had 12 players at Centex, although presumably the team's complete roster has more depth.

Wisconsin is another team to keep an eye on. The team traded games with UBC at Trouble in Vegas, eventually coming in third among a competitive field. Wisconsin went on to win Mardi Gras, Terminus, and Huck Finn, albeit against less competitive teams. This team has bounced back from a disappointing end to its season at Regionals, and the tight-knit squad benefits from the experience of its many veterans and juniors-playing freshmen. Team leaders Holly Greunke and Dana Gerrits are especially dynamic players. All the winning experience of this season will come in handy when the team finds itself battling an improving Carleton squad at Regionals, because everyone knows that Carleton shows up to play once the Series starts.

There are also a number of other solid teams out there. San Diego performed well at Centex, although it will have to perform brilliantly at Regionals to get past UCLA and Colorado for one of the two bids. UNC-Chapel Hill has played close games with top teams this year, but it too hasn't won enough of the right games to show that it is a lock for either qualifying out of the AC or advancing far into the bracket play of Nationals. The same goes for UC-Davis, UC-Berkeley, Michigan, and State College, to name a few.

Given that the college season is known for last minute upsets and teams peaking at Nationals, there could be some surprises in store for Superfly and Kali if they expect to rest on their laurels and coast into the championship game. But that's what makes things interesting, right?

Punting to play zone

2006-03-08T15:22:00.000-08:00

This past weekend at the Stanford Invite, the strong winds on Sunday meant that a lot of teams hucked going downwind and then played zone to try and force the upwind turnover. This is quite effective strategy in the college game, although it made for a number of ugly points to watch. Of course, there were exceptions to the high-turnover rule of thumb. For instance, in the finals a third of the points were scored with no turnovers (including the very first point when Stanford worked the disc upwind, taking almost 25 passes to get through Colorado's zone). Still, there were some horrific points during the day with over 20 turnovers before someone scored.

In high winds, more turnovers are bound to happen than in perfect weather conditions. However, punting to play zone just doesn't quite feel right as a team strategy when you think about trying to improve players skills and teach them good fundamentals. It makes a great deal of sense to avoid turning the disc over near the upwind goal, but is there any other way to do this besides exclusively looking to huck? It doesn't exude a ton of confidence in your own team's offensive abilities if the only strategy is to huck right off the pull. As someone on rsd pointed out, it's also not an offensive strategy that teams practice outside of a tournament setting. It's not exactly good ultimate.

The other thing is, even if a team wants to try and work it down (perhaps focusing on hitting in-cuts that would be wide-open since the defense is afraid of the huck), if its opponent is bent on punting when it goes downwind, the risk of turning it over and giving up an upwinder becomes greater for the team that would like to play more of a possession-based downwind O. Thus, upwind-downwind games become prime examples of the "Turnover Compact" (see the 08/14/06 post by Zaz) where teams often don't care about how many times they turn it going downwind (just as long as they do score the downwind in the end), but instead focus on trying to get those upwind breaks. Scoring upwind is how teams win windy games, but the constant turnovers make for very ugly ultimate that's not all that exciting.

Maybe the only real solution for most college teams is to try and maximize the completion percentages of their downwind looks. Oftentimes, throwers seemed to be hucking into oblivion without a target in sight or were so bent on jacking the disc that it would sail out the back of the endzone. If teams are going to utilize a huck-and-zone strategy to win games at tournaments, maybe they should be practicing the necessary skills in practice: putting touch on those downwind hucks, reading the wind to place hucks where a receiver has a chance at the disc, reading the disc to be able to track it in high winds, and catching passes in a pack of people. Also, I wonder if teams should significantly change their offensive set-up when going downwind to try and overload receivers in the endzone or isolate players in various spots on the field. Maybe other teams already do that... What other alternatives are there to catching the pull, jacking it, and then setting a zone to get the turnover?

Trouble in Vegas

2006-02-08T10:36:00.000-08:00

Last weekend, Miranda and I played in the club version of the Trouble in Vegas tournament. Based on our experiences, I thought it would be nice to give college teams a heads up as to what to expect when they return this coming weekend for the college tournament. So, this post will be a recap of our weekend with some tips thrown in that could be applicable for next weekend.

Mir and I had created a team of players from around the country that we'd played with or against in college. The team name was Lawless Guile Committee, which was an anagram for "we miss college ultimate." Awwww, so cute. We only had 13 players on the final roster, but they were from 7 different schools, including some major rivalries: Texas, UC-San Diego, Stanford, Washington, Purdue, Wisconsin, and Carleton represent.

Many of the players had never met before, but some quality team bonding on Friday night and some rounds of the "box drill" at the field helped us all get acquainted. We also had to rally together in the first game to overcome our 0-3 deficit after being assessed points for being half an hour late to the fields.

Speaking of the fields, the rumors are true. They are very dry, very scratchy, and I wish I'd remembered to pack my turf shoes along with my cleats. While club players might have self-preservation in their mind when considering laying-out, I predict that the college kids playing next weekend are going to be ruined unless they wear tights and long sleeves. Watch out for broken glass in the endzone too.

We ended up winning our pool and the cross-over game, although we were down at half to both the Berkeley reunion team and the Canadians. Losing to Berkeley once in my life is enough for me (Regionals finals 2003), so I'm especially glad we pulled that one out. To celebrate, we had a team dinner at the Gold Coast's buffet. The food was good for $12 total, and coupons for free wine helped us get over the fact that we had to peel the shrimp ourselves. It was time to hit up the tournament pre-party for our free drink before hitting the Strip.

I don't really know what to say about Saturday night on the Strip as it all seems a bit of a blur. It was really fun to run into people from the tournament at different bars, clubs, and casinos, all amidst the over-the-top extravagance that is Vegas. However, unless you enjoy paying $8-12 for a drink, I don't recommend trying to buy drinks at some of the classier joints--although definitely check them out at least (for instance, the Conservatory at the Bellagio was pretty sweet, even if the big dog was rather creepy). A couple more words of advice: if you want to go dancing in the Bellagio, leave the boys at home. It was easy to get in free of charge and without waiting in line if you were missing the Y chromosome. Sorry 'bout it, guys. Also, if you're staying at the Gold Coast, keep track of your keys or make new friends with other people who kept track of their keys. You can't actually get into the hotel portion of the building without one...

Sunday morning's games started out late and hungover as well, although the Viva women were less into the whole assessing points thing than Rogue was the day before. Sunday was marked by pretty strong winds. Half the fields were oriented one direction (upwind-downwind), while the other half had more of a cross-wind. If either day is that windy next weekend, be ready for teams to punt and zone and the games to be capped. Playing lots of zone and 1-3-3, we made it to the finals after beating the team from Atlanta. I think they only had 8 women at the tournament, which must have been rough. Sidenote: Katherine Wooten's forehand is ridiculous--I think she even pulled flick.

We rematched the Canadian team, Felions, in the finals. At this point the Superbowl was about to start and all the other games were over. It's a good thing we didn't have many spectators since the game was a turnover fest. I believe the final score was 21-18 for the LGC. After not winning a single cent in Vegas, I guess winning the tournament wasn't too bad. Although, I still wish I'd found out about the penny slots at O'Shay's earlier...

All in all, this was one of my most fun tournament experiences, so I hope that the college version goes as well for teams. Hopefully Vegas will be just as fun for those under 21!

NUMP talk

2006-02-02T16:33:00.000-08:00

There have been some questions about the rationale behind the latest women's NUMP poll results. In addition to starting more of a discussion about what should play into changes in the rankings from week to week, I'd also like to discuss what the qualifications should be of being on the NUMP.

Some of the major changes between the pre-season poll and this week's poll were the direct result of last weekend's Santa Barbara Invite. UCLA and UC-Davis made it into the poll (after previously being unranked) based on their finals and semifinals appearances, respectively. After coming in second in its pool to UC-San Diego and then losing to UCLA in quarters, UC-Berkeley went down a couple notches in the poll, and UCSD moved up a spot.

As AJ pointed out in his previous comment, it is interesting that UC-Davis remains below both UC-Berkeley and UCLA, despite the fact that the team finished higher at the tournament than UC-Berkeley and actually beat UCLA by one in pool play. I can't speak to the Davis-Berkeley order, because it does't make sense to me either, but perhaps I can offer a little insight into the UCLA-Davis order as I saw both teams play during the weekend in their games against Stanford.

Of note is that both games against Stanford had a score of 11-6, Stanford, at some point in time. The semis were then capped at this score, while the finals had no cap and UCLA was able to mount two runs to bring the final score to 15-13. While it's impossible to say whether Davis would have been able to have the same type of comeback given the time, I give a lot of credit to the fact that UCLA did outscore Stanford in the second half. I think it speaks to the depth of the team that UCLA was still able to run hard, play tough D, and convert on offense late in a game that was late in the tournament. Personally, I also thought UCLA's offense was slightly more polished than Davis', but maybe that's just the bias that comes from seeing them score more points. Perhaps other voters who weren't in Santa Barbara simply based their rankings on the tournament finishes of the two teams and their scores against their common opponent.

Other major changes to the poll's rankings involved the demotion of Cornell, Iowa, and MIT. Iowa and MIT in particular lost a lot of ground, but my conjecture is that those two teams were ranked too highly to begin with in the pre-season poll. I don't know how much information all the voters had on all the teams before the pre-season poll, but it could very well be the case that people didn't know all that much about roster changes and simply based much of their voting on finishes at last year's nationals. As more information about teams was unearthed, the panelists adjusted their picks accordingly.

Of course, most of the teams on the poll haven't even played a game this season, so the rankings have to be taken with a major grain of salt. I imagine that as more tournaments happen, the panelists will have a more accurate sense of how teams stack up against each other and the poll's rankings will be more valid as a result.

The poll's accuracy could also be enhanced by having more than 7 people voting!

I think that many people are hesitant to join the NUMP because they haven't seen all that many teams and would have a hard time ranking teams from across the nation. However, no one has seen every team or teams from every region yet. I think that especially coaches who accurately know the intra-region competition and are expecting to travel to a couple tournaments with inter-region play should consider voting on the panel. It's up to the panelists from different geographic areas to share information about teams and tournaments and for people to make their best informed guesses.

Wow, this was meant to be a quick post as a study break. Procrastination let me get carried away again...

Player Profile Nominations

2006-01-31T14:18:00.000-08:00

In considering which women's college ultimate player to feature for February, I decided that I wanted more input from people on who should be highlighted. I've gotten a few e-mails this season suggesting some players that deserve the recognition, but I really want more nominations to chose from so that I don't end up featuring only players I know personally or that Stanford has played against. For instance, January's player profile was from an e-mail suggestion, and I am really glad that I got to know a little bit about Michelle's story.

So, who else should be considered?

Some things that I've thought about in the picks so far are:

Leadership. Players that are featured should be major forces on their teams and leaders either on or off the field.
Timeliness. If a team is doing really well and wins a big tournament, a player from that team will be more likely to be recognized the following month.
Lack of previous recognition. Often teams have a single player that gets her praises sung a lot even though there are other players who make just as big an impact for the team. It's nice to feature those other players too.
Diversity. At first the profiles only featured players from the NW and SW since that was the focus of the website. I've since expanded the coverage to include the whole country, so it's important to have profiles from different areas and different teams.
Personal Interest. Players with an interesting story to tell (ultimate or otherwise) are always good choices to highlight.

Please consider this a standing thread where you can post comments even long after the initial post. Thanks!

Strategery - ho stack

2006-01-26T10:24:00.000-08:00

This was posted at the bottom of the conditioning post, thought I'd move it to its own thread:

Mike Droske said...: i had mentioned in an earlier post about putting some footage up from the michigan indoor tournament from a few weekends ago. i've found a much faster video upload site and have started putting links to clips up on my blog.

heres the url for the test clip... purdue women running the ho stack

http://www.youtube.com/?v=kYkoPrkSRvw

So, this ho stack seems a bit inefficient to me. When a cutter gets the disc, the three handlers stay, so you have a situation with 3 handlers near the disc and 3 cutters downfield. The downfield cutters also didn't seem to move much off of the in cut, so it looked quite stagnant. The person with the disc zeroed in on the handler dump that she wanted to get it to and barely got it off (though she turned early, which was good).

Thoughts? Ideas on a better version of the ho stack (esp. in the women's game, where most cannot huck full field)?

Conditioning for Ultimate

2006-01-23T18:26:00.000-08:00

I've received a request to bring up how to condition and train for ultimate. I think that ultimate is especially difficult to train for because of how it requires players to have the speed and explosiveness to play defense and get open when cutting, but also the endurance to last through four games, two days in a row.

I searched rsd a little bit to see if there were any good threads on the topic, and found a couple that had some interesting information. This thread has some links to other resources and some tips, although sadly most of the links were now dead. Another post has a month long work-out regimen detailed that is geared towards building a base.

In my opinion, the most important things to consider when planning a conditioning regimen for yourself or your team are:

Include variety to work multiple muscle groups and both anaerobic and aerobic systems
Design the regimen keeping in mind when you want to peak during the season
Commit to doing the work-out program consistently

Beyond that, the specifics are up to you. I know that UW has focused on core strength as a way to help prevent injuries and increase sprinting speed. Some people also swear by yoga and flexibility as a way to prevent injuries. Fury divides its season into three themes: endurance, strength, and speed to help focus its work-outs. Stanford does weight lifting and longer runs during winter quarter and then moves towards more sprint work-outs and agility come spring. The team has an off-day running assignment each week that everyone has to complete outside of practice time and in addition to lifting/doing plyo work. Some examples of the team's winter running assignments include:

Out-and-back run: run in one direction for a given time and then turn around and push yourself to get back to your starting point in less time (14 minutes out and 12 minutes back, for instance)
Farleks: alternate between running at a faster, pressed pace and a more moderate pace for timed intervals (i.e. 30 seconds "on," a minute "off")
Hill runs: 3 to 4 mile run through hilly terain. If people keep track of their time, they can work to improve on it throughout the season
Stadiums/stairs: multiple sets of running the stadium bleachers (~80 steps). Can alternate doing single step or double step sets to work different muscles.

Plyo circuits are also a great way to build a strong base and can help work on jumping skills too. There's also a ridiculous number of work-outs that can be done at the track. Running 400's can be a great way to get your endurance up before moving to shorter distances.

What do other people recommend? Any tips or guidelines that college programs should keep in mind when planning out their work-out plans? What's your favorite work-out?

Then again, perhaps teams have a bigger problem with getting everyone to do the work-outs as opposed to designing the perfect regimen.

Where have all the stars gone?

2006-01-17T17:10:00.000-08:00

Is it just me, or does it seem that the college women's graduating class of 2005 was especially talented? In compiling information for the regional preview articles for IC Ultimate, I realized that there are very few current players on top teams who have been the main leaders or big names for their teams for multiple seasons.

Don't get me wrong, there are definitely lots of great players at lots of different schools spread out across the country. But the question is: how many people have heard of them? I would think that most followers of the women's college ultimate scene would have heard of players like Nancy Sun, Rebecca Simon, Chelsea Dengler, Miranda Roth, Jenny Burney, Cara Crouch, and Molly Doyle (to name a few) BEFORE last season when they got lots of hype. Each of them earned a name for themselves by being major leaders for multiple years on teams that traveled across the country and played at the highest levels. It's hard to tell who the equivalent players are right now.

There are exceptions, of course: Alex Snyder and Caroline Matthews (Colorado) and Lauren Casey, Hannah Griego, and Enessa Janes (Stanford) are all still playing college ultimate and have been major names associated with top programs for at least a season now (i.e. most would have heard of them BEFORE 2005 nationals). There are also top players whose teams haven't made nationals recently, but still have name recognition: Lindsey Hack (UNC) and Katherine Wooten (Georgia). But, off of the top of my head, that's pretty much it.

Everyone else that I can think of as a top college player has only emerged as such either during nationals last year or during the following club season. Plus, many of the traditionally powerhouse teams graduated a ton of players. Of teams at nationals, Iowa, Texas, UW, Brown, and NC State graduated nearly all of their top players.

What this mass graduation means to me is two-fold: (a) it makes pre-season rankings especially difficult and not all that reliable and (b) it is an exciting time for newer programs and younger players to fill the voids left behind.

Especially with more and more skilled juniors players coming into the college circuit, I have a feeling that in future years there will be lots of players with increased name recognition. But in the relative drought of big names for this year, it will be especially interesting to see who emerges as the top players.

Ultimate heritage & history

2006-01-11T17:02:00.000-08:00

A friend just interviewed me today for a school project on traditions and oral history. So, of course I spoke about the stories and traditions that have been passed down year to year on Stanford Superfly. In telling her about some of what I consider the team's heritage, I realized that the new history book, Ultimate: The First Four Decades, has the ability to help create a collective sense of heritage in the ultimate community.

When I was first starting the game, I fell in love with stories my teammates and coach would tell about players, teams, and big games of the past. Hearing about come-from-behind wins and dominant play inspired me to want to be able to do the same. I feel pretty lucky that my first coach, JD, was especially prone to telling stories and making them as real and exciting as possible.

I'm sure that other teams have their own oral history with stories that get told from one year to the next. However, I wonder how many people know about some of the pioneer players and teams that truly shaped the way the game is played today. Although I agree with Kenny Dobyns' assertion on rec.sport.disc that the ultimate history book doesn't do enough justice to the women's division and some of the most dominant forces of the game, I also think that the book is a great start for creating more collective knowledge about our ultimate heritage.

In reading and skimming through the book so far, I've thoroughly enjoyed reading stories about the start of the women's divisions; features on various teams including the MSU Fisheads, the Lady Condors, UCSB Burning Skirts, the Maine-iacs, Ozone, Lady Godiva, UNCW Seeweed, and Stanford Superfly; game recaps from various club and college Nationals; and other miscellaneous trivia. There are quotes from big-name players across the country and pictures that I haven't seen before. There are still a number of games and rivalries that weren't covered in the book, but it's absolutely wonderful to have so much information in one place as a start.

Some of the information is also insightful in terms of determining what was so successful for teams of the past. In talking about the Maine-iacs, JD is quoted as saying, "they created a pressure-cooker arena at practice. They created people who do not choke...Tournaments were a different thing. There was all this anxiety and everyone who was suually screaming at you in practice was now screaming for you." Additionally, Lady Godiva players discuss the philosophy behind its team defense and how the team ran practices to always be on the same page with offensive fundamentals.

One of my main complaints is that the number and quality of pictures of the women's divisions are lacking compared to the men's. I know it must have been a complicated process to get top-notch pictures from decades ago, and props to the authors for including some sweet shots of older players from the Maine-iacs and Godiva eras. I just wish there were more dynamic pictures of women playing in college (of which there are two, by my count) as well. I also wish that the included DVD had any women's coverage. I've been trying to get a hold of as much footage of the women's game as I can, so I was disappointed that there wasn't much archived stuff for the women's side of things. Clearly I need to get myself to the UPA headquarters at somepoint and see if I can make copies of some of their archived material.

Moral of the story: check out the ultimate history book and keep passing down great ultimate stories to those incoming freshman. They could get hooked just like I did.

Random trivia from the book:

In 1973 Sharon Appling was "the first women in history to score in an interstate Ultimate game" during a match beween Staples high school and Columbia HS.
The first all-women game was played in 1977 in Irvine, CA, between Los Angeles and Santa Barbara players
1982 was the year of the first women's club Nationals, won by Boston Ladies Ultimate (BLU)
The women's college division was started in 1987, and the first Nationals were won by the University of Kansas Bettys.

Incentives vs Instruction

2006-01-08T22:44:00.000-08:00

Whether you're a coach or a returning player, there comes a time in every college season when you ask yourself, "How do I get these promising rookies to keep coming back?" Now, every program has gone through this stage. If you're lucky enough to have a B team, they probably struggle with this question even more, but if you're a blossoming new program without a lot of publicity and the star of the high school soccer team shows up to a practice, what do you do?
A few things always run through my head:
Angel Miranda: Tell her she's god's gift to frisbee (or she will be with a few practices) and tell her we'll bring her a cupcake if she comes back.
Demon Miranda: Tell her nice work, maybe we'll see her around. She's played sports and she doesn't want to be coddled, she wants to know she's gonna have to earn her spot on this team, too.
Yikes. I've been in both kinds of programs, and it's always a little weird. Maybe because there is always a not-so-great rookie who is at every practice ten minutes early and asks you to throw with her on sundays after her shift at the old folks' home. Maybe because there have been many incredible athletes that have slipped through our sport's fingers.
At the moment, I'm of the mindset that you encourage everyone equally and judge how they respond to comments and suggestions and even some criticisms. This of course is all before you have a roster established, etc. begging the questions, "when do you need tryouts?" and "what do you look for in tryouts?"
In the end I guess every person that comes out to an ultimate practice has a different reason for being there and we as coaches and leaders have to figure out what that reason is and try to reinforce it. It will be nice when every girl dreams of making her school's varsity frisbee team and we have some consistency to motivation. But until then, do we offer them incentives or instruction?

Defense wins games...

2006-01-05T16:38:00.000-08:00

Maybe on paper a good offense should win every game, especially in college where a team will often get the disc back even without generating blocks. However, it seems to me that it is much easier to rally a team around defense, defensive fire, and defensive strategy.

As background, a couple other ultimate blogs (specifically, Jim Parinella's and The PuPs' sites) have been recently discussing the relative value of offense and defense. Most of the comments have been coming from the perspective of the open club division where teams have specialized offense and defensive lines and players.

The O and D team splits don't really apply to college ultimate where there are few teams with deep enough and talented enough rosters to play with strictly O and D lines. If a team only has four handlers period, three out of those four are likely to be in on every point, regardless of whether the team starts out pulling or receiving. That means that every player is expected to play both good offense and defense, and no one is off the hook after a turnover. So teamwide, there can be a unified focus on defense with everyone buying into the idea that they have to contribute to the team D.

Additionally, in college there is such a huge range in skill level that there are often rookies without confident disc skills. Learning to throw an effortless forehand takes time and practice, and it can be incredibly frustrating to not have a solid flick all through winter quarter. However, from the first day of practice in the fall, new players can work on their defense and instantly see improvements and results. As a result, rookies often get playing time based on how hard they are working on defense.

College ultimate is also a game of energy and emotion. Younger players don't calculate scoring percentages or efficiency ratings, they get fired up to play well after big plays and sideline noise. Relying on emotion like this can be a double-edged sword because with the big upswings also follows downswings and a team can struggle to perform consistently when it depends on a huge sky or lay-out goal to generate its energy. Nonetheless, each individual is alway in control of the amount of defensive energy she puts out. Playing defense is hard work and a team can create its own intensity simply by playing hard D. Think about it, which scenario has a team feeling more excited about playing ultimate: (1) when the offense scores with no turnovers after catching the pull or (2) when the defense gets a block and then scores with no turnovers? It seems way more effective to rallying behind number (2).

Plus, there's always the bonus of having good defense give a struggling offense extra chances to score...

State College and QCTU

2005-12-22T10:17:00.000-08:00

So, I see that our tournament director has denied the open program admission to the tournament because of their suspension. Calls have been made and Jen Waldrup (the women's director of QCTU) has received word that she should think about denying the women's program bid. Naturally, she came to talk to me about the matter, and I am extremely against denying them access for two reasons:

A) Their suspension is, for lack of a more profressional word, crap.
B) Since A exists, denying a team like this access to a tournament only hurts women's college ultimate from two view points: 1. Other teams do not get the chance to play against a strong college program - which there are still so few of and 2. It will ultimately really hurt, if not kill, the State College women's team. I personally do not want any hand in this part and would feel horrible about it.

So, given reasons A and B, I think State College should be given the green light to compete in any and all tournaments this year up until the series. What do others think about this matter?

Utilizing Winter Break

2005-12-19T13:31:00.000-08:00

School's gotten out and for the next three weeks everyone on your college team could easily be sitting at home in her parent's house eating Christmas cookies. Not exactly the best strategy for getting in shape to start off the 2006 season...

I'm sure most teams have their own specific guidelines for workouts to do over the break, but I figured I'd elaborate a little on what I think individuals can do with their time away from school. Stanford divides its winter break suggestions into four categories:

aerobic activity to build endurance
strength training to create a stronger core
flexibility work to prevent injuries
throwing practice

In this post, I'm going to focus on drills for throwing practice that you can do by yourself, inside, or with a friend who's never really thrown before. The more you can mess around with a disc during the break, the better your disc skills will be next quarter.

Couch Throw: Use a couch with a high back or pillows set up on your bed against the wall to play catch with you. Work on your throwing motion and a smooth release. The disc should be spinning well and flying flat as it hits the pillows each time
Bed Throw: Lie on your back on your bed with your throwing shoulder blade slightly off the edge of the bed. Practice throwing forehand blades straight up in the air and catching them again. This helps work on your wrist snap and release, so try to get the discs to fly as smoothly as possible without much wobble.
One-handed Faking: Practice switching grips between forehand and backhand without the help of your other hand. Snapping your wrist as you fake one throw will help roll the disc into the grip of the next throw. Your goal should be to be comfortable with the disc in your hand and feel confident in changing your grips. This will help make your fakes faster and more realistic.
Pivoting with Fakes: Combine your practice of switching grips with full fakes. Step out and fake a backhand then push off of your right leg as you step into a forehand. Fake your forehand then push off your right leg and step into a backhand. The more comfortable you feel doing this the more you should challenge yourself to step out further and further for each throw. If you are really stepping into each throw you will feel it in your quad and butt muscle. Try doing this infront of a mirror to see how believable your fakes look (poor-man's video tape).
Disc Golf: Go to a park with a friend (you’ll need two discs for this) and make up a disc golf course with various landmarks such as trees, benches, or bushes as holes. Practice using different throws (don’t just throw your backhand for every shot) and make sure that there is variety in the distances you are shooting for.
Hucking Solo: Gather up 5 or 6 discs and head out to a big open space. Throw all your discs, trying to get them to land in the same spot. Pace out the distance between where you threw the discs and where they landed so you can get a good idea of how far your throws will travel on the ultimate field.
Breaking the Mark: To practice stepping out around a mark when you throw, find a pole where you can set yourself up in front of it and force yourself to step out to one side of the pole to throw. To practice throwing low below a marker's arms, use an old wire coathanger to create a "L" shaped obstacle to release the disc under. This drill works best when you have a partner to throw with, but if you can’t find anyone to help you out, get multiple discs to throw and round them up after you’ve thrown them all.

Even if you are already pretty confident with the disc, pushing yourself to find throws and release points that you are uncomfortable with will improve your throws and help add to your repertoire.

And of course, winter break is always great for joining local pick-up games and playing in hat tournaments where you get to go run around and impress people with how in-shape you are...

teaching

2005-12-11T21:38:00.000-08:00

by the time people enter college, they have usually been exposed to a lot of different sports (maybe because they played the sport, or they have seen it on TV, etc), but ultimate is not usually one of them. one of the ways i try to teach ultimate is to draw analogies between ultimate and these other sports because it can help beginners visualize what i'm trying to explain.

some of the ones that i have used:
- pivoting (basketball)
- throwing a backhand huck (swinging a baseball bat - stepping and driving hips, shoulders, elbows, and finally wrists)
- the "get low, chop your feet, and explode" cut that Tiina Booth teaches at NUTC (football wide receiver cuts)
- leading with the elbow when throwing a forehand (baseball pitchers - you always see head on pictures of them as they are coming forward with the ball where their elbow is leading their wrist)
- hammer windup (tennis serve - particularly the rocking back on the rear foot)

what other ones have people out there used? was it effective?

Women's video footage...

2005-12-11T17:08:00.000-08:00

...where is it?

There was recently a bit of a stir over on rec.sport.disc because of the unequal DVD coverage of the different divisions from the UPA Club Championships. In thinking about the market for video footage of women's ultimate, I started to try and figure out what game film was currently out there. Amazingly, I wasn't able to come up with a single online clip of a women's game when I searched video.google.com. So currently the only videos available over the internet (that I know about) are at the CSTV website, where there is streaming video of the semis and finals from the College Championships.

It's hard to overstate the value of game footage. I know multiple teams have used various DVDs of ultimate to study different strategies and to help recruit new players who may not have seen what a "real" game looks like. In my mind, having more women's games on video can only be good for the game. As a result, whenever there's a DVD that comes up that has women's coverage I'm the first to get in line for it. However, I'm sure there's more footage out there of women playing ultimate that I just haven't stumbled across yet. So this is a request for anyone reading this blog to spread the word if you know of any site anywhere that has video of women playing ultimate.

If there really isn't any women's ultimate video out there, then that's another issue that also should be talked about...

February = fun

2005-12-09T11:53:00.000-08:00

In general, tournaments are fun. That's why most of us play this sport: because we have fun at tournaments. For some people its the thrill of competition, for others its the laughter with teammates in the hotel, and for others its meeting new people at the fields or the tournament party. Sometimes it is easy to lose sight of that simple fact when planning which tournaments to go to for the season.

For teams aspiring to compete at the highest level, it's obviously important to try and play at the most competitive tournaments possible. It's important to see teams from outside the region and it's important to know what to work on to be able to play with the best. These are the tournaments that teams preferentially allocate their resources towards and are how the Stanford Invite, Centex, Easterns, and Presidents' Day have attracted teams from across the country over the years. Usually at tournaments like this the goal is to gain as much as possible in terms of the team's development on the ultimate field.

Especially given how important team morale-building is, I think it's also equally important to have a tournament, retreat, or trip planned for the team where fun is the primary goal, and the ultimate is secondary. Often teams utilize their spring breaks for some such trip, combining a tournament one weekend with a week of partying in a house somewhere. The team bonding and memories created during such a trip bring everyone closer together and help inhance people's personal investment in the team and their teammates. However, if you think about it, the timing of such a spring break trip is flawed because it occurs AFTER the winter months when such fun team bonding is most important.

January through March is the toughest period to get through in the college season. The weather is miserable, forcing many teams to practice inside or in suboptimal condidions. The team's goals of Regionals or Nationals are far away and its easy to want to justify skipping a practice or work-out here and there because there is another demand on a player's time. Often teams struggle with low numbers or low productivity at winter practices.

Once the spring comes around, the weather gets better and so the team starts playing in more tournaments, practicing on grass, and fine tuning its skills and strategy in anticipation of the UPA Series. During the spring it is easy to love ultimate and so the team bonding that occurs over spring breaks is just a reinforcement of the trend towards team love that is already happening because of the sun. Instead, what if that team bonding trip happened in the dead of the winter doldrums as a way to revitalize the waning energy levels and remind people of why they are playing the sport?

Tournaments like Trouble in Vegas and Mardi Gras offer the perfect solution. Both happen in February in places that don't suffer from the ice, snow, and rain of much of the country, offering a necessary glimpse of sun and grass for many teams. Additionally, both are HUGE tournaments with enough room for almost all the teams interested in going, so it doesn't matter if your team is one of the top in the country. Both tournaments also offer locations with a huge emphasis on fun. It just doesn't get much crazier than partying at Mardi Gras or Vegas.

Having a tournament like this to look forward to during January and the beginning of February is key in terms of getting through some of the tough parts about practicing in the winter. Then after the tournament, the enormous amount of team bonding that has just gone on allows people to know their teammates better, earlier in the season. This then carries on during the rest of the winter months and into the spring. Of course, full disclosure would make me acknowledge that one of my housemates is the TD for Trouble in Vegas, but I would be advocating the benefits of a February team trip even if I didn't know Skip. If your team has been trying to decide its tournament schedule for the coming season, just remember that February=fun.

When is it too much?

2005-12-07T13:07:00.000-08:00

I am the captain of my college team, and we are currently trying to set a spring schedule - both tournaments and practices. Setting a schedule with a college team is such a delicate matter. One has to recognize that all these girls are not absolutely, 100% in love with this sport and are unwilling to put a lot of things second to achieve goals within the sport. So, every college season, I find myself wondering, when is it too much? Is twice a week practices at 2.75 hours each too much? Is a mandatory, once a week track workout too much? Is flying to two tournaments in one season too much? (Recognize that my college team will not have to fly to nationals this year). How much money of their own is too much?

On one hand, my team wants to have no regrets. We want to be as competitive as realistically possible. We want nationals, we want to win regionals - at least that is what we say. On the other hand, I feel like it is hard to convey to these women that to be the best, you need to practice like the best, play with the best - basically conduct yourself in a manner that would only perpetuate excellence. From my experiences, if you want to be the best, you are going to have to train harder and longer than the best. I have always been willing to do that, and sometimes I feel like my team is with me on that one, but other times I feel like some of them will walk away and lose heart if you ask for 15 more minutes out of them. College is such a different animal from club, for a number of reasons, but especially this one. I feel like if I can get a college team to work towards one goal together, the most difficult goal still possible, that would be a miracle.

So, I guess the point of this blog is this - when is it too much? What can I realistically expect out of a group of college women, some who will never play the sport again once they graduate? What do other schools expect? How do you keep motivation levels high despite the demanding schedules? Any information would be appreciated and interesting.

Joining the blogworld

2005-12-06T18:25:00.000-08:00

This blog will be an addition to the website I maintain on women's college ultimate, Inside College Ultimate. Similarly to that website, the goal of this blog will be to increase the general dialogue about the women's game. Hopefully there will be a number of contributing authors from around the country submitting posts here, and I hope that people feel free to comment with questions, additions, and other thoughts.

~Gwen