Dream Cup 2008

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.