Summer League

I was going to go to bed and not blog, but then I remembered we had to do the tooth whitening tape - so here I am (won't it make the wedding pictures nicer?). I also almost had a guest blogger, but Marisa is still smarting from her last appearance and so she renegged.

Summer League started last weekend, but I played for the first time today. If you want to follow the teams progress you can check it out on the CPU web page. Our team is Long Haired Hippy Freaks.

I played pretty well for someone who hadn't thrown a disc since last August. Took me a little while to get dialed in, but the throws were there by the end of the day. We split our two games today, winning like 15-8 in game one and losing like 15-8 in game two. I think we were tired by the middle of the second game. In game one we went up quickly and stayed up. In game two we went down quickly, traded goals through the middle, but couldn't get the momentum reversed and finally lost. But a good day overall I think - mostly because a couple of our best players were out of town at another tournament.

Myself, its tough to evaluate my contribution sometimes. I think in the game we won I actually was a negative contributor - more turnovers than goals. I don't know if that's a good index, but its the one that I've been using since I started playing here where so many of the players are MUCH younger than I am. I had some nice middle throws, but I was shying away from my flick because I hadn't warmed up at all. The first couple I did throw I left a little short. By the end of that game I did deliver on nice 60 yard backhand. It was just too bad that it wasn't 61 yards as that would have been a goal, but we scored anyway.

I benefited a lot in that game from the defensive approach too. Both teams played a lot of zone even though it was a sky blue still day. Sometimes teams play zone in good circumstances to try to keep from getting tired too quickly. like it because I am old, fat, and slow by comparison. It was a nice way for me to break the ice and let me come into the game when we were on defense, which I don't do if we're playing man to man.

In the second game I made a positive contribution, more goals than turns, although there was much less zone here so I was exposed a little on defense. Mostly though those passes were in the middle of the field. I only really got beat once for a goal all day and it was a good pass. I had a shot at it, but it would have been a phenomenal play.

Actually that was one of the more surreal moments of the day for me. When I played summer league in Chicago - for the ONE DAY I played - on the first point I laid out for a block, broke my wrist, and put myself in a cast for the nest 12 weeks. Today, while in mid air going for the block, I had this thought: "Marisa is going to kill me if I break my wrist."

Do you think playing next week would be tempting fate too much?

The last throw I made in the second game was a sweet 50 yard flat flick for a goal. I let it go and thought "see, THAT'S what that should look like." Nice to know its still there.

Two nice things today:

This one girl, 21-22, sitting next to me on the sideline was looking at a player on the opposing team who was about my age and says to me "I'm glad we don't have any old guys on our team."

Then later, the captian of the team says to me "You're not slow, you're like [this other guy] I've played with. He never seems to be running hard, and then you turn around and he's open, or right there on D." To which I responded that no, I am actually slow. Although he described the "wiley old man" ultimate player perfectly, and he was sort of correctly labeling my game - knowing when to exert and when not, and where to be with the database of 20 years of play behind me (uphill, both ways, in the snow - you kids don't know how good you've got it!).

Now, where's that ice pack?