2008 Labor Day Championships

Ozone

from Peri Kurshan:

Ozone is a team with a lot of great players, but until now it's seemed like they weren't quite capitalizing on people's strengths. This season the team seems to have figured out how to best utilize Deb Cussen, by keeping her around the disc more (although she's still a deep threat if you start to snooze).

Katherine Wooten opens up the field with her throws and is very effective playing a roving poaching defense in the backfield.

Ozone moves the disc very quickly on offense, especially when they're being forced flick. Force them backhand, however, and you're at risk of being broken with long around forehands. Ozone has a very quick transition offense, and capitalizes well on other teams' mistakes, and their deep game, which often includes looks from Wooten, Cussen and Angela Lin to Shanye "Shuggie" Crawford in the endzone, is very effective.

from Kath Ratcliff:

Zeitgeist came into the weekend fresh off a recent weekend together at ECC while Ozone apparently hasn't played a tournament since the Boston Invite (according to the Score Reporter). Back in Devens, Ozone beat Zeitgeist 12-9. In the 8AM round in Santa Cruz this past weekend, Zeitgeist started off with a couple of breaks in a row to take the early lead, and never looked back, winning 15-6.

Ozone runs their offense through some great throwers—Kat Wooten, Angela Lin, and Deb Cussen are all pretty unstoppable. They also have a very talented receiving group headed up by Kirsten Unfried and Shanye Crawford.

Ozone tends to run a vertical stack, looking from a stopped disc to break the mark to the first in the stack, and then run up the break side, frequently with a quick huck. They are also nearly always looking from those throwers to the deep space, and with some of the fastest cutters, it's been pretty effective for them to throw deep and let the receivers do the work.

This first game, however, started off pretty sloppily—the fog was in, and we often had to yell to the other team to find out if their hand was raised (especially with Ozone in white, we really couldn't tell who was across from us). The general strategy on D was to zone for a few throws because there's no way we'd be able to see or follow our matchups across the field. The fog led to a very, very slippery disc, and there were more than a few drops. It seemed like the difference in the game was how challenging it was to throw & complete long throws with the slippery disc, which certainly hindered Ozone's offense quite a bit.