As Joaq and I both stated when we started Inside Breaks, much of the information gap in ultimate is due to the fact that people who actually attend events typically don’t share what they see with those outside of their immediate network. If we can get more eye witness accounts of tournaments and games, we’ll know more. It definitely isn’t anybody’s responsibility to give them, but it’s always nice when they come along.
On that note, Colorado College’s Nicky Spiva shot me a little ditty about his team’s experience at President’s Day. Big thanks to Nicky.
President’s Day Classic
On Saturday’s success…
There was a medium upwind/downwind nature to several of Saturday’s games, and our ability to pressure teams into making inside throws and deep throws that they weren’t comfortable with helped us generate turnovers. Specifically, hard man D lead to UCSD making tough throws that didn’t connect. Against Chico State we just had to play tight on their few good players. Against Texas, they run out of a very strict vertical stack, and we got a little bit creative with our defenses, but the big thing was breaking down the vert stack dump set and picking up their blonde guy deep (which Josh Anderson did very well).
On Colorado College’s strategy and its loss to Oregon…
On offense we ran out of a mixture of vertical and horizontal stack; we looked to not turn the disc over and just be efficient (our dumps, which began pretty poorly, improved a lot over the weekend). Our zone offense was really strong and did not have much trouble against almost all the zones we ran into (thanks in large part to freshman handlers Gavin Nachbar and Conor Crowley) with the exception of Oregon’s zone, (round with rougher wind and hard rain) which featured a 3man cup with mark playing off several feet. We figured it out, but they generated several turns against us with it. We also had 4 games in a row no bye and were playing a somewhat smaller rotation (total of 16 players, and tight even then) and were a bit gassed by the time we ran in to Oregon.
On tournament winner British Columbia…
UBC was a blast to play against. I went to McGill University with Joel Bluman and Jeff Leung (we were all freshman together on the McGill A team and transferred out) so it was great to see them for the game. UBC has a very quick team with strong disc skills that plays very smart defense. They got some early Ds on us because we thought we could throw lazily over their short defenders, but they have some serious hops and ripped them down! They ran out of a spread ho-stack on offense and had strong break throws and deep throws. They also tried a bit of sidestack but had trouble when we adjusted to their floods.
On defense they will flash into lanes off handlers and play some interesting quick poaches on inactive players, as well as switch up the mark mid point. We had a fair amount of success going to our cutters deep against them. My favorite point of the game was being down 12-14 on D and getting the D on the deep throw and working it for a while and then scoring in the (slight) upwind to keep the game alive to 13-14. Wish we could have gotten another break after that one. Joel Bluman and number 33 on UBC handled really well, and a guy named BoBo (one of their big guys) was really fast with sick pulls and great lay out D’s. He also had the pull in the semi’s against SDSU that got them their callahan quickly after half and led to their run.
Summing up…
In terms of team strength I’d say that UBC and Oregon were beyond the other teams at the tourney – that would have been a great finals. SDSU is probably 3rd best, then the next 4 or so teams, who knows. Texas made semis but against a super sloppy UCSB in quarters. Also, I was surprised – almost all the teams we played had coaches – they are becoming more integral to the sport/teams.
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