Cal States 95 Tournament Summary

We had a very tough pool ( all three pools would have been tough, mostly
because there were just three pools in which to place -- Double Happiness,
Seattle, Rhino, San Diego, El Camino, JO, US/Tampico Masters, and oh yeah...
New York), I'm guessing we had the toughest pool.

The wind and rain on Saturday gave us a lot of trouble. Fortunately that kind
of weather tends to equalize teams rather than amplify differences, so we got
some scores on very tough teams. We really should look at what happened to our
7-0 lead over Salt Lake City, and consider what strategies we should have
kept. Xen pointed out that we left our zone D and went to man. I personally
didn't even realize that we had done this, so that kind of inattentiveness is
bad. We should also consider that with a 7-0 lead and a real possibility of
games getting capped we should slow our offense down and stretch out play.
This is not bad sportsmanship, most people would admit that if you scored 7-0
over another team than whatever you do to keep the lead till the end is fair
(assuming you don't delay the game outright).

New York and Seattle beat us about as well as they should have.
Salt Lake City (see above).
As for the Potheads or whatever they were called, that game left a bitter
taste in my mouth due to what I feel was cheating by bad calls. In two
instances they got the disk back on bad hucks that involved incidental contact
that they called fouls on.

Our one game on Sunday was against the Santa Cruz masters. Virtually every one
of those guys has won a Nationals title at one time or other -- College, Open,
or Masters. Although understandably they weren't taking us too seriously, I
think we gave them a good game. Particularly Alex. It seemed like every time I
turned around  Alex was getting a turnover on them on their goal line. In
starting the stopped disk he continually put through nice inside-out
mark-braking forehands to get the disk in play. Also, his throw selection was
excellent (certainly better than mine).

If you noticed, they didn't work us with long throws. I know they have some of
the better throwers and deeps in the area, and with the wind not too strong I
expected more trouble from their deep game but it didn't happen.

I apologize if I turned a bit frantic in that game -- I've played against all
those guys since I started playing and probably felt I had something to prove
and so tried to do too much myself...


Other notes:

Our stopped disk play was very effective. Many times I remember not getting
the break-the-mark off and looking up to see the shredder for a relatively
easy 20 yard gain (EJ and Michael caught a lot of them). We have a useful play
and should continue to refine it, getting the secondary cuts in line as well.

Drops -- I think if we had fewer drops we could have done about 30% better
overall. I say this because in general we didn't have that many more
throwaways than the other teams, but we had way more drops. We all need to
work on over-catching every disk. One aspect of this is to time your catch so
that, rather than planning to get to a spot and stop to make the catch, you
need to plan to run through that intersection point, kind of like the way
sprinters have to run through the finish line to get the best time. With tough
defense like we were facing, you just can't afford to slow down for the catch.
This is a little more than going to the disk, its going through the disk.
Another aspect of catching is to do what is necessary to make a solid catch. I
saw one play in a Seattle game where six passes in a row were all about 1 foot
off the ground and instead of simply bending over and putting one hand down
for the disk, every guy slid on the ground making a two-handed grab.
More on this next practice.

rich