LeeMobile

This weekend has been a little overkill for Ultimate. I can probably say the same for the entire Fall season for that matter. Playing three times a week, with games on Saturday and Sunday, is really starting to wear me down.

Playing with a higher tier team, on Rainbow Trout, doesn’t help much either, as they have pushed me to play harder and stronger. I’m learning a ton, as I’m now easily the weakest member on their team, so it’s well worth the pain. Believe it or not, my soft and mushy legs are starting to take a bit more shape from all the running I do on the field.

Anyways, for some reason Trout, which is in the middle of the ladder for our tier, was pitted against the 3rd ranked team in the tier. A huge mismatch in terms of games scheduling. Everyone from both teams were perplexed as to how this could possibly happen. We knew a few of their team-members, and they were generally all athletic and competitive 20-somethings that have years of experience. Excluding me, Rainbow Trout is composed of 30 and 40-somethings that are out to have a good time.

Leaguerunner, the Google software that manages the ladders gave us 1:4 odds of winning the game.

Worse yet, when we showed up on the field, we had only 1 spare for women and men. Meaning the guys would have to triple shift and the women would have to play two shifts before subbing off. “Less Talk More Rock” showed up with two full lines of young, chiseled, and athletic bodies ready to rip us to shreds. There guys were tall (which does help in Ultimate), all ripped, and played on competitive upper tier leagues. Their ladies were no slouches either. Not only did they outclass us physically and in experience, but we had to play twice the amount they did due to our lack of spares.

David vs. Goliath, Ivan Drago vs. Rocky Balboa, Canada vs. Russia in an 8 game super-series. An upset here would be epic, but very unlikely.

Oh well, we knew it was a huge mismatch, but we’d all thought to just give it our best and try to have a good time out of it. It was a windy day, so at least that might give us a fighting chance with the elements making the disc a little less predictable.

So we pulled the disc to them for the first point. We ran down the field to quickly force a turn-over near their endzone, which we converted to a goal. We all kinda looked at each other and went “huzzah!?”. I thought we were just lucky on that one.

So we pulled the disc to them again. They were able to get a few good passes to make it up the field, but we played strong defense and turned it over. Now normally on a windy day you play something called Zone Defense. As the name implies, the defense sets up players in zones in the field to maximize the area of defense to try and shut down short passes. On a calm day it’s not a strong strategy, as it’s easily broken, but with a touch of wind it’s very effective.

Call it hubris, or being arrogant, or over-confidence, but they decided to play man-on-man defense. I guess they thought they could out run and use their athletic advantage to crush our offense. To their surprise we were able to beat them down with our fast striking and smart positional play. We quickly converted for another point.

Point after point, we were able to shut them down with our tight zone defense and capitalize on offense.

Near the end of the game, out of their frustration possibly, they started to get really nasty. Calling fouls that didn’t belong, and just generally being overly aggressive. I guess being beaten down by a lower tier team was too much for them.

The 12-8 victory was the sweetest game in a long while.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 24th, 2007 at 8:20 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.