Saturday, October 4th, 2008
Northwest Open Regionals, Day One
The elements ruled the day, occassionally letting us get a glimpse of traditional Ultimate between long periods of field-position battles.
The biggest effects were in Rounds 3 and 4. The gale blew in during the first 5 minutes of Round 3, gusting about 35 mph and causing misthrown 2-footers to blast all the way to the far downwind endzone. Hilarious, but also pretty devastating for teams that lost the flip (or, worse, winning the flip and failing to have predicted that the weather would be so much more important than the first possession).
Teams that were able to make forced throws were the most successful. In those conditions, players that are limited to “good” throws, flat and calm and with long pivots are going to be relatively useful. You need to be able to get a quick huck off, sometimes throwing a backhand bomb against a force flick (something that Tim Gehret is very good at). Zones need to keep the disc in front of them, occassionally allowing some yardage on a swing as long as it didn’t lead to a second, yardage-gaining, throw back through the middle of the field.
Round 4 brought the Jam/Sockeye and Revolver/Furious matchups while the wind was still howling. There were no real upwind threats in either game very early, and then the wind started to die down. All four teams had to adjust to the new conditions: defenses had to stop allowing large underneath cuts (playing for the punt) and offenses had to regain confidence in their ‘across’ throws (short breaks and dump-swing combinations).
That team meeting that your team had 4 months ago when you decided who was going to decide strategy? All of the sudden, that meeting is really important. Did you decide to have meetings during time-outs between strategists, or did you decide to ‘just figure it out, we’re all pretty smart’. Did you empower the rest of your players to voice opinions (’Hey, the wind isn’t that bad anymore, we can just work it in’) or have you been stomping the voice out of them in favor of iron-clad discipline? Has your strategist group been imagining these weather possibilities and practicing different subcalling, or have you been working on an O and D that only work in 15 mph of wind or less? These decisions probably started months ago…and if you made mistakes then, or were forced into certain decisions (by team experience, competing personalities, etc) then you are hurting now, and the top 4 teams in the NW have an advantage over you.
That isn’t the most important point; my real thought here is more that early-season decisions can come back to sink you, and early planning is going to have a direct effect on Regionals.
Sockeye defeated Jam 14-8, and Revolver won over Furious 10-5.
We’ll see how that works out tomorrow.