Monday, January 5, 2009

Winter League!

Last night was the opening night for my winter league team. My team, for like the 4th year in a row, consists of a core of TC, Wayne, Brandon Luzar (former Swat and Rage, current father and out of shape), Liz Thompson from Wicked, two Delaware girls, and another mid level woman. We love this league and we click really, really well on the indoor field. And it plays significantly to our strengths, mainly being tall and fairly chilly with the disc.

Tonight we played a team that's more ridiculously stacked than ours (sorry Fink, it is). Main players consisted of Sean Murray from Amp, Brian Felt formally of Amp, The Finks, Beth Pfeiffer, and others.

We got down early as they took the first quarter 8-4. TC, Wayne and I then played almost the whole second quarter (we only had 5 people we're not completely terrible people) and put on a defensive clinic causing many turnovers on dumps and forcing them to work very hard to move the disc up the field. At half it was 14-11 in our favor (I think?). The main reason we were able to pull off the turn around was due to minimizing our dumb turnovers (mostly hucks to not completely open people) and improving our conversion rate when we got turnovers.

We pushed to a relative draw through most of the next two quarters. Then with 2-3 minutes left they put on a run that included a bad turnover by one of our players when they didn't turn to commit to the dump and an iffy throw came off. And capping off the tie was one of our players rushing to the disc with 45 seconds left, up by 1 (iffy decision #1) as no one on our team was really rushing to get in position. Followed by a laser cross field dump (iffy decision #2) that I bid for and just missed, but caused a turnover on our own goaline. They converted to tie it up and then proceeded to win the sudden death flip, receive the disc, and march it in to score.

Bleh!

Overall though I was very pleased, both with our team and our two stellar pick ups who came last night and also with my own ability to pretty much play a savage game (again only 5 guys were there) and still be able to be effective for most of the game. My knee was sore afterwards but considering the speed of the indoor game and quick cutting involved in Winter League plus the fact that I was chasing Jon Fink or Sean Murray around for significant portions of the game I'm very pleased with my current level of fitness. I am looking forward to not losing anymore in Winter League though. And pushing myself to make the switch from chasing too much to directing my offensive cutter when playing defense. This was where I was prior to getting hurt last year and getting back to it in time for Kaimana and Paganello is really important to me. I have the rest of Winter League to continue working on it and all my time away to work on my speed and quickness to help with it.

(215)

4 comments:

tc said...

How do you talk about our winter league game and leave out this:

With about 5 seconds on the first half clock, Tim put up a hammer to me just short of the end zone. I skied Murray and ...Fink?... landed and immediately threw a push pass to Wayne for a goal as time expired.

I would LOVE to find a place/time for an all-Pike indoor game...any way we can get the Conshy facility for a reasonable price some night???

Tim said...

$100-$125 an hour and who knows what the schedule would be like. Probably at some very bizarre hour like 10pm on a Saturday night.

Josh Mullen said...

Luzar is alive?

Wow. Does he still do the effortless flick hucks?

-josh

dusty.rhodes said...

"blah blah blah" [namedrop] "my team's good" [namedrop] "i'm so damn good" [namedrop] "Bleh!"

If you play your cards right, we'll carry your sorry ass to a Kaimana title and you can namedrop your way to the top of the blogcharts.

Chewy's winter league team will crush you. Unless we don't want to.