What is this? Why am I here?

Well, it all started with an innocent little nickname. "The Pulse" (insert heartbeat noises here). Basically, I know a lot about the ultimate world. I pore over the score reporter, have been on RSD since my junior year in high school, live for UltimateTalk, and cherish every source of ultimate information around. And to my friends on other ultimate teams around the country - thank you for those little tidbits of information that you give me, like the ones that let me answer questions such as "Who is Beau hooking up with right now?" and "Did Will Neff really run off with his Child Studies teacher?"

And so how could "The Pulse" (more heartbeat noises) not have an ultimate blog?

But what will be here? I'm hoping for more than a random collection of ultimate knowledge (but for all of you guys from the Bay Area section and Northwest region, yes Robot has been playing in the series for more than 5 years), and I don't want to post a boring workout log or summary of how Team Green crushed Team Black at summer league. So instead I'm looking at series analysis, tournament recaps, broad conjecture about other teams (I hear Florida juices), and a wide assortment of my opinions on ultimate - from whether or not high school nationals is a good idea to the Metro East to how Revolver can get 5th at club nationals with an average height of 5'6".

For starters, I plan on playing a lot of ultimate this summer, and it will be my first real club experience (Kaimana, as fun as it was, isn't quite the real thing). I will also be playing a lot with high school kids, and part of my goal is to get them to take some college and club level strategies back to their high school teams, to make New Jersey high school ultimate (and by proxy, Rutgers) more competitive on a national scale. At Stanford, we get the benefit of Revolver's playbook from the fall, we adjust it and adapt it for the spring, tweak it, and then Revolver benefits by getting to take away some new things that Stanford picked up. I think the same thing can happen between college and high school teams if it works out right.

And that's something else I plan to take a more vested interest in - coaching, teaching ultimate, and helping people get better. I don't mean teaching people how to throw a forehand, but the actual exciting feeling of teaching your team the clam, or a trap zone, or a new handler set, watching them learn it, and then execute it well in scrimmages and games. If I get the opportunity, I want that to happen with the New Jersey youth club team I'm playing with, but if not, I'll have that opportunity in the fall when high school practice starts but Stanford hasn't. High school ultimate is not at the point where teams can really be selfish about strategies - I'm not concerned about teaching Watchung's captain the clam and having them turn around and beat Columbia with it - Columbia will learn it too, adapt, and then both teams will be able to throw it against out-of-state teams and dominate them until they can learn it.