Everything's Bigger in Texas - Centex Saturday

This past weekend 24 teams descended on Austin, Texas for the nation's most grueling elite tournament and the crowning event of the 2008 National Collegiate Ultimate Series. Wisconsin had already locked up the title and $5000 check on the mens side, but the womens prize was still very much up for grabs. With rugby kicking Cultimate off of one set of fields, mens fields were shrunk and we played with 12 fields where there should have been 9 already small fields. Stanford came in seeded second, and we were ready to defend our seeding and beat Florida in the last round to prove that we could go farther than semis this year. Unfortunately, the day did not go as we'd planned.

We started with our sectional rivals UC-Santa Cruz, but we were missing Sherwood, whose flight hadn't gotten in until 3:30, and he was sleeping at the hotel. That was probably our first mistake - coming into the Santa Cruz game extremely over-confident. And for an over-confident team, we played terribly. Our defense couldn't stop Chapman, and Karlinsky broke the mark easily. And we made it easy for them because our offense coughed up the disc a lot. We attempted a spirited comeback at the end of the game, and Sherwood played two or three points, but we squandered our chance when Sherwood threw a goalline scoober to Ben Kenigsberg, who laid out for the disc and landed out of bounds. We fell, disheartened, 10-13 to the Banana Slugs.

We found out that Illinois had taken Florida to double game point, and I already knew that they had an extremely solid offense that didn't give up breaks. But I was confident that we could run our own offense well and get a few breaks. However, we got broken on our second offensive point, and while our offense played well for the rest of the first half, our defense was being run ragged by Illinois cutters. We were trailing instead of dictating, and they had their way with us, launching big OI forehands for goals. Illinois has a ton of solid receivers, with a couple shifty handlers, and athletic players willing to lay out on defense. Halftime was at 7-6, and we had to get a break at some point. Instead Illinois reeled off five straight goals. Our offense was dropping discs at our own goalline and getting layout D'ed instead of going to the disc. It was horrible to watch, and if we play like that at Sectionals or Regionals, a lot of teams are going to beat us. We lost 7-13, but we threw that game away. We matched up poorly - Sherwood shouldn't be covering Joel Koehneman - and didn't correct our mistakes. Hopefully with our coaches back, we'll recover.

But we were still without coaches for the weekend, and our slide continued against Minnesota. From halftime against Illinois to the first 5 points of the Minnesota game, we were outscored 11-1. Down 5-0 with an abysmal offense, we had to reevaluate ourselves. We were generating turns against Minnesota, but we couldn't score for the life of us. Our offense was stagnant, and it wasn't their defense, it was our players afraid to cut. Michael Arenson played well for Minnesota, but he was an interesting choice for freshman of the year over Sam Kanner. We tried hard to claw our way back in this game, but we had too many turnovers and more lazy defense. We fell to 0-3 on the day with our 9-13 loss.

Our low point came in our next game against Georgia Tech. After starting strong and coming out with a 3-0 lead, we started playing horrible defense again. Russell Snow took advantage of poor matchups again, and we turned the disc over on offense like it was our job. Georgia Tech is not a deep team, and we were too disheartened and mentally absent to take advantage of that. This loss hurt the most - we finished at 8-13 and had a long team meeting after the game where we decided to turn things around against Florida.

So, after hoping to be 4-0 and facing a 4-0 Florida team to see who would take the top spot out of the pool, we found ourselves 0-4 facing a 4-0 Florida team that featured probable Callahan winner Kurt Gibson. But with a pep talk behind us and more motivation than we'd had all day, we matched them for the first 9 points, holding serve as Alex Hill, Brodie, and Kurt all went deep to score on us. We managed to force turns on defense but couldn't convert - Ezra threw away a break around backhand just outside their endzone in one of our best chances. I matched up on Cyle, and after my layout D attempt, he accidentally savagely cleated my chest and balls - Matt Lane has a great picture. After that, Florida came down zone and we struggled with their tall cup. Our handlers worked the disc well, but the downfield players turned the disc over a few times, although Angus Pacala made a great hammer catch in front of a charging Kurt Gibson, who is an amazing deep deep.

In the second half, we struggled a little more but kept fighting, and Florida pulled away. Brodie made some great catches, and the observer made a terrible call on a Chris Gibson catch where he leapt from out of bounds to make the play. Florida was not an unreasonable team to play with observers, despite Windham's two awful (and overturned) calls and the two TMF's they got. My ranking of teams I don't like to play against (in terms of their attitude and calls) now goes Santa Barbara is better than Florida is better than Wisconsin is better than Carleton is better than terrible French Canadien teams. We lost 8-13 but played better ultimate than we had all day. There was still plenty to work on, but we'd started to turn it around.