March 20 - What Being On A Team Is About
This is what ultimate is about. This is what being on a team is about. Therefore, this is what East Ultimate is about. Getting your teammates back is getting them the D when they throw the turn. It's running for them when they're late. It's being accountable to your teammates. It's feeling the need to play your best because you owe it to your teammates. You spend it for them because you know that they would spend it for you. It's not cheating on the mark because you know your teammates are holding the force. It's laying out into traffic because you know everyone else wants it as bad as you do.
It's not just for yourself and your own desire to win, it's for your teammates. It's because you love your team. I know that it may be hard to believe right now, but sometime between now and States, we will come together and become that kind of team. It just takes time, and hard work. That's my bit.
Hector Valdivia, Bravo player and Fairview coach, posted an entry on his blog that pretty much sums up all of this. (It is set at Club Nationals in '04):
The time out was called because we were panicked. Having lost our final pool play game to Furious, we knew our first game on Friday against Pike was a must-win to stave off a pre-quarters match-up. Pike had arrived as an upstart, much improved from the prior year, and had beaten Sockeye in the first round of the tourney. Losing to Pike would force a victory over Sockeye to escape the extra game, a win would give us breathing room in case of a three-way tie.
But here we were, after a night of psyching ourselves up and a morning warming up the body and brain, playing our flatest game of the tourney and down deep into the second half 11-7. Even the last score had been hurried, a gurgitation of random cuts that had somehow become our seventh point. We now faced pulling to a team we'd not broken yet and down by four with only a few points left. In some eyes confidence wavered and a defeated complacency took hold, resigning to prequarters. This is what I felt and what I saw in the eyes of my teammates as we placed our arms around each other in a circle and waited for Forrest to speak.
He began. There was confusion at first. Something about visualizing himself writing an email post-nationals. About a come-from-behind win against Jam he had envisioned in his head. Hypothetical sick plays by Jolian. And his realization now that there was no Jam game, there was no hypothetical - this was the game he'd portended, the game we were meant to come back from and win. This was the moment that would define our tournament.
In truth, I remember everything he said almost verbatim. But why reproduce a speech? Heard, or worst yet - read, outside of its context it feels empty and trivial. Besides, it's not the words I remember best.
I looked up as Forrest's voice cracked and wavered through his words - he was losing it, he was on the verge of crying. Our captain was so emotional in that moment that he wasn't sure he'd be able to hold back his tears. This was our friend, teammate, and leader asking that we try to feel the desire as deeply as he did. A man exposing his feelings in a place where he knew he would meet no ridicule - we wanted everything he wanted as bad as he did, and until then had been in a torpor unable to express it.
Maybe a tear or two fell. It was enough. We awoke.
I remember walking to the line that point, after Forrest exhorted that the seven players that wanted it most step to the line. A casual statement that the Alamo's William Travis would have smiled at. My heart was pounding, I was shaking some. My head was spinning remembering how only moments ago Forrest had pulled me in. I would not forgive myself were I to let him down. And, as we chose match-ups and called our defense, I knew everyone was as shocked and intense as I was.
By the time the pull went up the game's outcome had already been decided by everyone wearing the Rocketship. We scored the next five straight to take the lead before Pike had a chance to catch a collective breath, and went on to win 16-14, a 9-3 run.
Perhaps, sometimes you just have to show them, your teammates or players, that you care about the outcome more than anyone.