Poultry Days Write-up - Gobies an International Phenomenon

You may have come to expect long blog posts by me. This one will be the same, if not longer than most. Simply, a lot happened this weekend, and since it was my first Poultry Days, it was a little more special than most other typical tournaments.

Poultry Days is a big deal. There were 48 teams at this tournament, mostly coed, and in addition to the usual mix of teams from across the US, the national teams from Taiwan, Great Britain, Canada, and US were also present as they prepared for the World Games this year. It was an exciting atmosphere. I'll try and keep most of the talk about what happened limited to my team "Pollo en mis Pantalones", but there are other relevant topics regarding the Road to Regionals that I'll bring up.

I'll get right into Saturday morning. We were seeded 4th in our pool, and we all thought we were better than that, and that we had the possibility of winning the pool. We really did. Our schedule wasnt completely favorable however, as we played the 1 seed, 2 seed, 3 seed first, the the 6 seed and the 5 seed. We would have had to come out playing our best from the beginning, which is never an easy task. We also had 28 people this weekend on our roster playing for us. This meant a few things - less playing time overall for everyone, tighter rotation on the roles (O line players stay on O line, D line stays D line), the abililty to withstand injuries with our depth, but also that it's more difficult to get a flow of the game and develop some on field chemistry. I think our numbers may have hurt us a little early in the day by manifesting itself in the form of many miscues, bad throws, drops, loss of offensive flow (especially off the pull...). Those turnovers really killed us. We played pretty solid defense overall I would say, the other teams we played gave us chances to break them - we had a hard time converting. One of the biggest issues was endzone offense. Sometimes we'd still be in horizonal in the red zone, other times we made bad, rushed decisions, sometimes our handlers wouldn't be spread out properly and we would force bad throws. All those factors really killed us on Saturday, and we ended up going 2-3 - holding seed.

If you ask me, we all severely underperformed, almost everyone from 1-28 on the roster. We're so much better than we played...

I was on the O line all weekend, and so part of the responsibility falls on my shoulders. I had a couple of miscues. I put up one huck all weekend, and my target couldnt quit get to it (even though the throw was prety nice, and not forced). I did not have any assists on Saturday (or Sunday for that matter). I was not the playmaker; instead I fell into more of a reset handler responsible for keeping possesion - letting other players make plays. I was fine with that, and there were some bright spots on offense when I worked with some of the more experienced players.

In terms of D, I would say I was solid. Truth is, if you play good offense, you shouldn't have to play much D - and the offensive line was marginally successful in getting scores, i.e, there are less opportunities to showcase defense on the offensive line. In terms of people that only played O line, I would say I was pretty big on D. Most of it was just putting on solid marks, not letting my guy get the disc, and making the dumps difficult. My marks were pressured enough that I got a couple D's from my guy making a difficult throw. I was able to recover on a huck well enough to not get skied in the endzone, and probably the one that sticks in my head the best was a full layout D on a hard in cut in the middle of the field. The throw was a little high, so I was even surprised I got a hand on it. I was really pumped, and wanted to yell back at the sideline for someone that was telling me to hustle more on D, but I held back. That was pretty much the story of my defense that day. I tried for a couple of layouts on dumps, but they were out of reach, and I think I looked stupid trying. Sometimes you feel you are just inches away from those throws though, especially high stall ones. In retrospect, laying out for those wasnt the best idea because I didnt get good form on them; I bruised my knee and it affected my play the rest of the day, into the next.

Even still, as I said, the team didn't play to its potential on Saturday, and after a full day's work, we fell into the B bracket.

Sunday was single eliminaion. We came out firing against the first team. I was a little more timid with my playing time on Sunday, however, because of my injured knee. I took a lot of extra time stretching on the sideline. The truth is, I didn't feel I played great on Saturday, and I wanted to really play better on Sunday. Unfortunately, that didn't happen.

I didn't play horrible the first game; I was solid, but I didn't make any super plays. The one that I'm upset about is a strike cut I made up the line for the score that I needed to layout for to catch. I got airborne, clinched the disc in my hand, and then it popped out as my body hit the ground. I was furious with myself. I had also landed on my right shoulder, and I bruised my ribs. I called an injury timeout to take myself out of the game. Talking to someone who saw the play said that my left foot caught the huge traffic cone (2ft tall...) that took me off my flight path, which screwed me up bad. If that stupid cone wasn't there, I would have had a better chance at it. In general though, I have a harder time catching discs on O when I lay out. I can think of 3 times right off the top of my head where I got to a disc while airborne, had it in my hand, and it pops out. In principle it makes sense - on D, you just need to get a finger on it. On O you have to catch it. I really need to work on that. My ribs still really hurt today, I'm gonna take a few days to rest up.

On a quick side note, this was one of the first weekends that I really felt the improvements of Air Alert (15 week vertical leap enhancing program, completed with Mark, Andy and Ed). I didn't notice it so much in my vertical, but I feel so much more explosive, especially when I go horizontal.

In the second game I only played 2 miserable points. I was clearly ineffective. I had 2 really bad turnovers, and got beat deep once because I held my head down for a second right after I gave the disc up. I did however force 2 D's on the mark, which was solid. All was not lost. I did get the feeling that my captains were losing faith in me, and that did not help. I felt a lot of pressure to perform this weekend, and sometimes I let that get to me.

So what did I take away from the weekend? I'll break it down to two things that I need to focus on:
- On defense, one of the big focuses of the team was getting back to your man ASAP even when they are on the opposite side of the field or clearing after you shut them down. Reason for this: even if they appear to not be a threat, in a few seconds, they may be as soon as a big huck goes up or the disc is swung over. Catch up to them, then rest with them in the stack with you still at their hips. The good thing is this is just a mental thing to focus on (partially conditioning). I can overcome this with practice.
- On offense, I didn't think I would say this, but my throws. Not my backhand, forehand, break or w/e but a different kind of throw. I want to work on getting lots of spin on my flicks and backhands with minimal windup for immediate swings and short passes, for give and go situations. This was something I saw executed well by the World's teams, especially by their handlers. The idea is to just put out space pass swings for my guy to get to and run out towards instead of always trying to hit a target.

This weekend was more about Ultimate though, and I had a great time off the fields as well. On Saturday night I spent some time with Team Taiwan. I got to know a few players on their team, and at the end, I traded two of my Gobies jerseys for Taiwanese Club Team jerseys. Gobies are officially international. Who knows, one day you might be playing in Taiwan and you see the fish out there. That's my jersey. On Sunday, I met up with a few Team USA players, my former coach Gwen Ambler, and Dylan Tunnel. The interesting thing about Dylan is that he wears the same number as I do - 78. You dont see that too often, so at the end of the day we swapped hats. The way I look at is that these were all steps taken towards our goal of Regionals. Gobies are global now.

So yeah, I had a great time this weekend. Some things even happened that I'm not going to blog about here. But in regards to Ultimate, I still have a lot of work to do. I talked to Jeff Meyers, one of the captains for the team and asked him for an assessment of my play. His response, I played solid this weekend. He said my defense was pretty good, just to work on the point I outlined above, and that I could be more of a stud on defense if I got some more conditioning in. On offense, also said I was solid, but to hit my first look a few times. Sometimes he felt like I hesitated a little.

I would say I took about 8-9 steps towards Regionals this weekend.

- Q