My thoughts on Queen City

While my grades, post-graduation what-to-do search, and general non-ultimate sanity would have gone out the window had it happened, I really wish we could have gone to Queen City. Vegas was awesome, and the extra-Regional competition was great because it exposed us to some different playing styles and defensive looks that aren’t that common in the Atlantic Coast. On the other hand, though, teams like Georgia, UNC, UNC-Wilmington, and NC State are who we’ll be seeing in Charlotte, and with a field that also included Michigan and Notre Dame, it’s really too bad they fell on consecutive weekends.

Since I couldn't be there myself, my thoughts and speculations should be of much help.

-First, as far as Virginia Ultimate is concerned, our girls team went, going 2-2 in pool play and 1-2 in Championship and Championship Consolation on Sunday. From an ultimate growth perspective, Hydra is interesting to me because they have a giant roster of over 35 girls but do not have the infrastructure or willing coach/captain for a B team. This leaves a lot of the top talent kind of frustrated, a lot of the middle talent kind of frustrated, and a lot of the bottom talent kind of frustrated. Regardless, the acquisition of a coach has payed big dividends this year, and I'm hoping that they continue what seems to be a progressive re-vamp of the program.

-If there was much doubt from their CCC performance, Notre Dame is for real. They rolled through pool play, and watching score reporter yesterday, it looked like they were with Georgia until half, only giving up a few breaks later in the game.

-ECU? They went 3-1 in pool play and with a 12-13 loss in the quarters, were the only team not named Jojah to put up double digits on Notre Dame. We played them in the finals at Wolfpack in the Fall, but they’ve got to be pleasantly surprised by how well this weekend went for them.

-On the flip side, NC State can’t be happy. 1-3 in pool play and a 15-11 loss to Wilmington in pre-quarters makes me wonder what the deal was, and I’ll go ahead and make the obvious guess that they had some guys out with injury. Just a guess, though.

-Davidson went 4-0 on Saturday, and after being ousted by Wilmington in quarters, wound up beating UNC on consecutive days. I’ve heard a lot about the talent on this team due to Conger and Robert playing club with Guiller, and I hope to see them play in Texas.

-They missed the finals somewhat handily, but by the look of it, Wilmington was the third-best team at this tournament. Their pool play games weren’t all that close, and getting to semis doesn’t look like it was too hard either. This is one of those teams that I really hope we play before Regionals.

-Despite a tight first half with Rage in the finals, Georgia more or less skated through Queen City, as neither pool play nor the bracket had any team finishing fewer than three points behind. All-Region talent Greg Swanson and Peter Dempsey are likely to garner some Callahan talk, and from what I can tell, they didn’t graduate all that much last year. I’d pay to see them play Florida right now.

-UNC seems to be experiencing some real growing pains from the loss of Mat Thomas, Josh Torrell, and a number of other seniors from last year. Their two losses to Davidson, along with being blown out by Jojah in a rematch of last year’s backdoor final affirm what the suspicion that there’s really not a clear frontrunner for this third Atlantic Coast bid.
-In other news, I didn’t see Clemson or JMU beating William and Mary.

All of this said, I’ve yet to make the glaring note that it’s only February, so I'll save my more ambitions prognostications for practice tomorrow. As of now, Florida and Georgia look to be regionally dominant, with Wilmington, Davidson, Duke, and Virginia adding their names to the mix of possible challengers that already includes UNC and NC State. A few teams will be at Hellfish, Ultimax, and the Peter van de Burgt Classic, but I’m really looking toward Centex for any major shake-ups in the current outlook.


Funny quote: “Stay tuned as Brown is schooled in one of few universal truths of modern life: People don't like it when you beat up Rihanna.” If you’re from Seattle and don’t read Last Days in the Stranger, you’re missing out.

ACC

Shit's getting hectic and, as Brooks said today, The Man is looming. Still, I had hoped to get this up last week. Oh well. Vegas is this weekend, so read it while you're wishing you were there with me.

The idea to put on an ACC tournament came about over a year ago, and after no one stepped up and put it together in 2008, UNC and their broken-footed president made it happen. We were pretty hyped on this from its inception, as news came over break that the effort to make this tournament a cutting edge and user-friendly event would include a couple of unique features, the most compelling being experimental rules. Sure, some of it seemed like fanfair for the sake of fanfair (we never did get programs, and the stats were kept in a pretty inconsistent manner), but overall this the changes gave the whole thing a cool feel. Also, after watching this type of thing at Solstice, I was really excited to get a chance to play in that environment myself.

New stuff aside, it turned out we were still there to play the same old game of Ultimate. The biggest impact that I noticed the modified rules having was the speeding up of the game, as quicker pulls and very little time to argue calls had things moving smoothly. A lot of people wondered about travels in particular, but there really weren't many calls at all (sorry, Frank), and when there were any, play resumed almost instantaneously. Overall, I give the whole active calls/refzervers thing pretty high marks.

Alright, onto the games. This was only a ten team tournament (Boston College didn't come because Greg creeped out the entire school, and Miami... well I got nothing) with three fields, so there were just three games to play on Saturday.

Saturday

Wake Forest (13-7)
Wake is kind of in a weird spot of having two or three really talented guys and then a lot of other people who seem to be young and losing. That, and young Dagley quit. Offensively, I don't remember all that much from this game other than the fact that things were flowing effortlessly and I didn't turn the disc over. Our defense wasn't firing at its best, but we brought enough pressure to induce drops-a-plenty, and were cruising by half time. I think we got broken once after half and wound up trading a couple times, but this game was never really a concern.

Clemson (13-4)
Clemson took NC State to 11-13 and they looked really tall and athletic, so I figured we might be in for more of a game than most people were thinking. I turned out to be wrong. They have Ben Slade, who posts a lot on rsd and is good at skying people, getting Ds, and throwing break throws. Other than that, though, we didn't have many problems. They were cool guys though, and one of them said to me during the game (jokingly, of course) that he didn't like us because we were too fast. I thought that was pretty cool because I guess I've just never really stopped to compare our speed as a whole with that of another team; speed is usually something that I only think about relative to individual match-ups and, more specifically, how other teams' fast players can be neutralized with positioning and the like. Not that I don't think about speed in a game that centers around running and running fast, but you get the point: hearing it from an opposing player was cool.

NC State (5-13)
Nothing to see here.

Move it along.

We won't be talking about it.

Ok, ok. So this game... it was a nightmare. I played really shitty, somehow deciding that it would be a good idea to force the issue against their zone rather than work it patiently. They ran a standard four-man, but were pretty physical on our crashers, making us hesitant to stick to the cycling that we know works. Aside from my own throws, us getting static lead to coughing up the disc a lot near our own goal line, meaning quick scores were pretty easy for their D line. Before we knew it, we were down 0-3. Then 4, then 5. It was like a flashback to the old days (I'm thinking second year) when the breaks just kept coming and coming with everyone feeling pretty helpless about it. Finally, I put a huck to Conger and he hit Justin for the score to stop the bleeding. For the time being. Things stayed crappy, and yeah. We lost. I don't want to dwell on it, but all things concerned, I think that NCStateonSaturdayofACCs will go down as a very, very important teaching moment that sparked some important thinking about our offense for the rest of the season. I'm just glad it happened on Saturday.


Sunday

Virginia Tech (8-13)
Shit was COLD. Real cold. Our first game was against Virginia Tech, who none of us really like since they put us out of Sectionals two years ago. We came in thinking that the game wouldn't be so bad and that we had put the shitshow that was yesterday's loss to NC State behind us. Unfortunately, we were wrong. We traded for a few points and broke first, but our zone woes soon caught up to us and they took half 7-5. They held coming out, and I think we got broken thereafter to put them at 9. I personally felt a lot better than I did against Wolfpack (understatement much?), but I still threw a few turnovers that were far from necessary. I don't know. We lost, something like 9-13. It sucked, plain and simple. Nevertheless, because Clemson's only victory was against Wake, we knew we'd take third in the pool and play the two from the other, which was...

Florida State (13-3)
They had a good Saturday, upsetting Duke and playing UNC close, but by Sunday they were down to 12 guys, two of which got hurt during our game (more on this in a sec). They were really reliant on just two guys, Rook and David, both of whom were impressive but unable to pull the rest of the team up to their level. Most of their cutters just had a hard time knowing what to do with the disc once they got it, and since they were so low on numbers, they tried coming zone but to no avail. While this usually wouldn't even be a victory really worth commenting on, it wound up playing a big part in getting us fired back up. We restored some confidence and were ready to bring some swagger into the semis. Good thing, because it was a rematch of the previous day's debacle.

NC State (13-9)
Pretty sure I covered this, but I really can't overemphasize how demoralizing Saturday's loss was. Sure, the Tech game meant more with regard to pool play finish, but for some reason I was able to make excuses for that one. NC State, on the other hand, had dismantled us so handily that it was embarrassing. So on Sunday, we weren't even talking about revenge. We were talking about redemption.
Each O held for the first two points, but we broke to go to 3-2. Intensity was high for us as it was, but I really don't think we were losing from that point on. I think they held once more but after that we broke two or three times in a row, eventually going to half at 7-4. They certainly weren't happy with themselves, and we knew that they would look to come back in early in the second half. Their O line ran a few zones off of a turn, but to no avail. Their D started coming man, and when teams go man, we have no problem. They broke us to get as close as 9-7 (I think), but from there we kept things rolling. The game got chippy once we were at 11, but that's really to be expected, and is something we need to get used to. The game ended on an IO huck from me to Conger, a connection we've been improving on ever since the 3 turns, one point incident at Philly this summer.

UNC (13-9)
A finals match-up with UNC was what we had both hoped for and expected before the tournament. After a long couple of games, I felt great during the warm-up, and more focused than I had since Clemson. We started the game on O, and while I expected them to come with the poach-heavy handler defense we've seen from them in the past, they stuck our guys pretty close. Robert put a backhand huck to Justin, and we were on the board. Our O remained crisper than it had been all weekend, and our D was playing with more intensity than ever. Layouts were coming from all over the place, and once their cutters got the disc, they had few options outside of a dump. Ryan, typically an O-line guy, was given the assignment of guarding Lucas because of his speed, and he did a great job of simply sticking with him and not letting him be responsible for any big gains. As a team, UNC doesn't have too many holes, but they really don't have all that much firepower outside of Lucas, Noah, and Weeks and some really strong role-playing seniors. One thing I'll say about this game is that it progressed incredibly quickly. There were very few calls, little down time between pulls, and not even that many turns from either team. Probably a result of Mike G observing.
I was really impressed that as the game got closer to finishing, the O line cleaned up and the D line ran even harder. All we had to do was sit on our lead to close things out, and we did just that. Their final O point took a couple of possessions for them to convert, as I recall us forcing at least two turns. Receiving 12-9, we marched it up pretty easily, with Robert hitting Greg up the line for the game and tournament win.


ACC was UVA's first spring tournament win since Queen City 2005 (spring break my first year aside). Given how low the weekend got, getting that trophy and celebrating was a tremendous high. We all came away with a since of just how badly we could beat ourselves, but more importantly of just how well we can play when team-wide focus is all there. Sure, it was only January, but it felt good.

That's all for now. I wanted to get this up before Vegas, and at 7:30am PST Friday morning, Feb. 6, here it is. I'm gonna try something different for this tournament: daily updates so I avoid letting them pile up. We'll see.

Vegas, baby. Vegas.