So we’ve got ourselves one big Halifax tourney coming up this weekend… Catch ‘N’ Release! (There’s something relaxing about a tourney where you know you will get to sleep in your own bed at the end of the night.)

Playing on a team called Wham-O! Got ourselves some of the people going to Nationals with the “Masters” team, some old-timey Squids, and other assorted pickups. We’re heavy on the wily vets, a little lighter on the young speed demons. So of course, our goal is to slow down or stop everyone else’s speed demons for the weekend and then crush them with our wisdom and gray hairs.

(Which likely means pulling out an arsenal of ZONE.)

What we need to do is avoid what our league team Elephant is doing. Elephant is definitely playing unevenly. On the defensive side, we are getting stronger and stronger, making a lot of strong teams struggle — our zone variants have proven very effective at throwing off our opponents flow. And that’s really cool.

The problem comes after we get them to turn it over. Our offence just isn’t at the same level as our D. Too many times, all our cuts are coming all on the break-force side, or cutters are cutting each other off, which leads to the handlers getting stranded. When we do get flow going, it’s working pretty well for 3/4 of the field. It just happens to be that we are not consistent in getting the flow started.

But our worst offensive habit is trying to punch it in in the endzone when we get to that last quarter of the field. (Of course, this is a perennial problem with many teams.) We are getting within 20 yards of the endzone and, suddenly, that last 20 yards looks like a water hazard that we have to get the disc over, instead of being just more field that we have to work it through.

We have got to fix this phrase in our head: the redzone is just more field. We have worked it up well the first 50 yards. Let’s keep working it up the same way. The mindset that I want us all to work on is to just keep working it slowly up the field with patience and high-percentage throws and then just look down and realise, “Oh, I’m in the endzone. Cool.”

(All of the above goes double for me.)

In the end, I have no idea if this will be a problem with Wham-O! and won’t until Saturday.

But all in all, it’s good stuff to think about.

Other things are good to think about too.

Like cheese. And Legos.

Mmmmm… Lego-cheese…

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 4th, 2005 at 9:46 am and is filed under ultimate. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.