I had high hopes of giving detailed re-caps of each Spring tournament that I attended with the Femmes. Sadly, and unsurprisingly, pesky law school got in the way. So, in an attempt to rectify the situation, I'm going to give smaller recaps here that really just go over some of the highlights. So far this Spring, we've attended Hellfish Bonanza, SMUT Love, and High Tide. (Yale Cup and Keystone Classic still ahead, before the Series!)
Hellfish Bonanza:
Forgive me for the terrible recap about this tournament, but it was awhile ago and it was my first East coast college tournament so I had no idea what to expect, who to look for, etc. Plus, I was mostly focusing on my team, trying to figure out how to work well with the individuals on my new team and to show them that I was indeed a good player.
Highlights were playing Delaware and Maryland.
We played Maryland and beat them for the first time in years. It was a good game because they had a few big huckers and we really needed to focus on shutting down their hucks and their deep cuts. That was definitely something we had been struggling with, so it was great to be challenged and meet that challenge head on.
We lost to Delaware in the finals. The Femmes obviously let Delaware get into their heads at some point over the last couple years. The team's demeanor changed before the game. When we were tied, girls on the team would make comments about "getting back in the game." I just couldn't figure it out. I'd ask, "aren't we on serve right now?!" We had some ups and downs, some good learning experiences and some moments of "how are we making these ridiculous mistakes?" Delaware did some particular things well: they threw a junk defense that they used just often enough to keep us on our toes, but not often enough to really let us get into a rhythm with it, and they played hard start to finish without any lulls. I think the game left us feeling like we're dying to play them again and show them how much better we were than in that game.
SMUT Love:
This was a good tournament to get a lot of our younger players in the game, playing a lot more than usual, and getting to really implement some of the things they had been learning in practice. Our first real challenge came against Towson, in pool play, in a REALLY windy game in which they threw a good zone and we just couldn't handle it. I think we had more drops in the one game than in all of our other games this semester combined...times 2. No joke. So, we lost by 4.
We met Towson again in the finals and really stepped up. I believe that the most important part of this game was our mental strength. We felt like we had been destroyed by them the day before, but we came out firing and only let them score 2 points against us for the whole game. It was a big step for us to be able to bounce back so quickly and with so much confidence that we could play the way we knew we could.
On a side note about Towson, I love that team. Towson up by 8 and down by 8 is the same team. They know the rules. They are spirited. They work hard. They care about each other. Their coach really seems to care about the team - not to mention that he was hilarious. He also knew the rules (perfectly, as far as I could tell), and he made sure to enforce those rules with his own team whether it helped or hurt them. And if there was a discussion on the field, he stayed out of it. These things seem like basics, but it is amazing to me how very few times I really witness this in a team (post coming soon about Rules!!).
High Tide:
It was great to get to see some teams that we wouldn't ordinarily get to see, even if it was at a Spring Break tourney. The highlights of the week were playing Smith College, Iowa, and CSU.
Smith College is worth mentioning mainly because they had 1 really great player who just tried to dominate their offense. I don't know who she was, but she was wearing a Brutesquad t-shirt and her skills only re-enforced the fear one can instill with a shirt like that. We haven't seen a lot of teams where 1 player can really make the difference and our success turns on shutting her down. She played well, and we worked hard to limit the impact she could make. Ultimately, we were successful, but it took a lot out of our best defensive players and was a great learning experience about high level women's ultimate players.
I don't know very much about Iowa, but glancing at their RRI, their past tournaments, and their undefeated record, I was surprised I hadn't heard more specifics about them. The first time we played them at High Tide, we lost. In the championship bracket, we beat them. We didn't play well in the first game, but we played very well in the second. They weren't quite playing up to the expectations I had for them, so maybe they were missing some key players? Still, a good team that it was a great morale boost to beat.
We lost to CSU in power pool play, and then again in the finals. I was STOKED to play CSU and I think that they provided the Femmes with an eye-opening experience. I remember them always being strong opponents, even though they were always in a VERY difficult region where they were often over-shadowed by UCSB, Colorado, UCLA, and USC. I constantly get questions about what it's like to play on the West Coast, and I generally stick to the same themes in describing what it's like: it's much faster paced, there's more team defense, everyone lays out more, players constantly bait on defense, they mix things up more, among other things. We go into the first game and what happens? CSU was playing hard. They came out sprinting, laying out on defense, playing hard dump defense. In the championship game, they threw a straight up mark with poachers in the lane, moved all of the downfield defensemen under, and trusted the mark to stop the big hucks. When the disc was swung, they played harder dump defense than I had seen yet this year. We were left in the huddle with fundamental questions about our playing: why aren't our dump cuts working? How do the cutters need to adjust? How do we motivate each other to run harder? While I wasn't happy to be losing, I'm glad that CSU exposed so many fundamental issues with our offense and showed the Femmes what level we need to work towards to really compete with these teams. We were able to re-adjust in the second half and ended up losing by one after being hard capped. Bummer. But CSU outplayed us and deserved to win that game. Thankfully, they better prepared us for all of our future games. And I have to admit, they represented the West Coast in a way that made me proud to say that's where I was "raised" (in ultimate, of course), and in a way that makes me hope they continue to do well throughout the rest of the season.
Looking forward to Keystone Classic especially so that we can finally see our Regional rival, Cornell!
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