East Ultimate

It's been about a week since JEM camp ended, and I wanted to take a second to share some congratulations publicly. Last year at about this time, I was not happy with the level of colorado juniors ultimate in general. JEM camp, which Sasha, Neal, Batsford, and Hessler from our team attended -- along with several other CO high school kids from around the metro area -- had pretty much laid bare the comparatively low level of our jrs ultimate. Tote was perfectly ordinary, as was Hessler. Batsford (along with Hylka) was really the only CO player able to hang with the best from other regions. All other CO kids ended up quickly shuffling to the losers bracket in every elimination drill we did.

But this year, with CO being represented by our own Neal, Chris, and Ned (along with Kyle and Nick from CA, Corey from Jeffco, and Dave Barnes and some other dudes from Fairview) was markedly different. The CO kids were good, and were often franchised and/or picked by another team, which is a huge mark of respect. But that's enough about CO in general. Neal, ladies and gentlemen, took home the coveted Black Jersey, which goes to the annual Best Overall Defender at camp. He got 9 Ds over the course of a few days, including an atrocious number of handblocks -- I'd always thought of him as an O player, but going into next year, all of you now know differently. Chris and Neal both made the throwing competition finals. Ned would have been up in there, too, but developed the kind of medical problem that you like to have checked out to make sure it's not a heart attack. As it was, Ned found himself franchised and picked a number of times over the course of the week.

I'm telling you all of this for two reasons: First, you should know about the fantastic achievements of your teammates so that you can celebrate with them; secondly, you should take a little of the credit for them -- it was, after all, everyone else on the team who was pushing these players to excel and to improve their games constantly. Colorado Youth Ultimate, thanks to all of you, is improving at a faster rate, it would unscientifically appear, than any other region in the country. And it's just going to keep getting better.

Finally, as you may or may not know, the 2nd annual Youth Club Championship tournament is being held outside Minneapolis this weekend. On the boys' side, we're represented by esteemed alumnus Jimbo, but we're pretty much running the girls side of things from what I can tell. Elise, Nicole, Brenna, AD, and Hayley have been teaching girls from other schools how to play all summer, and I hear they have good lesson plans for the rest of the country, as well. Represent.

Finally, in case you haven't heard, here's the real measure of how far CO jrs ultimate has come in relation to other regions. Last wednesday, the YCC team scrimmaged players from JEM. The result of that scrimmage? 15-3, Colorado.

Damn.

summer's ending soon. Quick, have some fun.
Derek

It's Thursday, I've heard from almost everyone, and the consensus is pretty strong. Although the order changed from ballot to ballot, these three names made up almost every vote:

Sasha, Tote, Brenna.

The junta -- the team's overall leadership council -- will be slighly larger this year, and will include, in addition to the captains, other team members who received captain votes: Chris, David, Elise, and Neal.

This is exactly the strong leadership I expected the team to have next year, and now I have some team representatives to meet with potential coaches as their names come up. Congrats, all.

Derek

Here are the details of the weekend:

We depart from East at 7:30; we want to have our cleats on and be warming up and throwing at 8:00. Game time is 9:00.

We will play 5 rounds on Saturday, all of them important games. The winner of our pool gets a first-round bye on Sunday. That is huge.

Drink water today and tonight; hydrate in advance. It'll be hot tomorrow.

As with all tourneys, you need:
1. Your uniforms, light and dark
2. Black shorts
3. Cleats
4. Sunscreen
5. rain gear
6. Cash -- the tourney shirts came in yesterday, and they're sweet.

Remember, when you load into the cars tomorrow: It is all fun on the trip over, it can even be laughing and joking as we warm up, but the closer we get to game time, the more we need to remember what we're after.

End of season tourneys are an interesting paradox in that with every point we score, with every second of joyful play that ticks by, everything that we've done and everything that we are as a group inches closer to its inevitable end. In that sense, the result of the tourney doesn't matter -- but the way we finish our season does. Those two are not the same things. We can win without finding our transcendent game. But the transcendent game is the only thing that will make it feel okay for everything to be over. It's the matrix. You don't force it. It just happens. Must stop firing myself up before class.

It occurs to me as I sit at my neighborhood coffee shop grading papers that our season will end approximately two weeks from this moment. Actually, that's a lie. I was thinking about this last night as I lay on my couch avoiding these very papers and watching Gladiator. And had I managed to pick myself up off the couch at that moment to write this, it would have been awesome. As it is, I'll save the awesomeness for our practices.

But I want to bring your attention to a single fact, and then leave it at that. We've been working all season long for a State title, and it is well within our grasp. At about this point in the season, it's necessary to shift focus a little, though. If that's all we're interested in winning (which I use in the sense of "attaining" or "achieving"), we will miss out on the main reason to play ultimate. As my brother, recent UPA college champion and 2-time runner up said once (his talent for perspective and articulateness is enough to make a brother proud) as Johnny Bravo was gearing up for a title run, "Consider what we're doing out here, and why we do it. Because I'll tell you: that trophy cup doesn't hold what you think it does."

I've won the big end-of-season tourney, and I've lost it, too. And strangely enough, the feelings at the end of it all are pretty similar. The great and inescapable fact is that the team for which you sweat, and cried, and sustained stress fractures, and reopened the wound on your hip time and again has ceased, in the moment of that final goal, to exist. The only thing that EVERY ONE of you shares with EVERYONE else on the team IS this team, its history, and its accomplishments.

Following the tourney in two weeks, this team, as all others, will cease to exist. Nicole and Mary and Hayley and Max and Jeff and Josh and Leah and Kit and Spencer and KJ will go on to other things, and will never wear our uniform on the field of play again. The juniors will become seniors, the freshmen will become, well, something else; we'll field a team next year with more rookies, more tension, more games to play, more history behind us; and our eyes will again be starry with the possibilities of each new player, the development of each old player, the new hope for success and a winning record in Madison. But it will not be this team. It will be East Ultimate, but it will not be this team. Ask Jimbo, next time you see him at practice, how many chances a team gets to do what it's promised to do.

And this is what I want to say, finally: From the time we opened chapter 3 of our season last Saturday in Madison, we've been putting it all together, and have FINALLY begun to see what we all knew we could be from the first practice of the season. Our growth, though, gets cut off two weeks from this moment, and we have more growing to do.

We don't have to play the best ultimate of which we are capable in order to win the tournament. But it turns out that winning isn't what feels good -- it's the perfect game. That's what we're after. The ONLY cure for those end-of-season blues is the knowledge that it couldn't have been any better. And winning, by the way, is already assumed; this isn't a substitute. The other team will always fall away. And it will be as though it is only you and your teammates on the field. And if you're lucky, you'll be struck by the full knowledge sometime in the second half of exactly what you're accomplishing on the field. It's not a subistute for winning, because winning is the necessary result of that transcendent play; it is, however, the only goal worth playing for.

6 practices to transcendence. Bring it.

Fire up, East

The small portion of my brain that's functioning this morning has been hard at work pulling out and reviewing highlights from the trip that's only behind us by about 4 hours. We worked this weekend on developing into our roles on the team, on fitting those into place; and from what I saw, we came a long way in that regard over the weekend.

When I think about the first game we played -- and our zone offense in particular -- and then I think about the Raging Safari game (and I still don't know where that name came from), we were two different teams. The first game was clumsy all around: we commited a ton of unforced turns, our D was a step behind (they had great cut timing and continuous movement), and we were trying to adjust to playing within these roles and trusting each other to get them done. By the last couple of games, I felt that I could confidently throw in a given set of players -- the Nicole/Brenna zone O line; the Hayley/Elise zone O line -- and have an excellent and equal chance of scoring with those 14 players.

I saw people develop not only individually, but also in relation to other teammates. The popping/wing combo of Jeff, Spencer, Nicole, Jacob Zax, and Rhys(?) was just killing teams, and every time we worked the disc up the field, we got better. Woe to the team that plays zone against us at states. In addition, I saw a lot of improvement from individuals -- junior veterans played solidly, for example. Tote, Ned, Chris, Brenna, Elise, Sasha, and Neal (to name just a few) played relatively consistent ultimate by avoiding errors, making space for teammates, following the play to come down with garbage when we needed it, getting Ds at key times...

Senior rookies came a HUGE distance. Max is going to be a legitimate, if very physical, defensive presence; Jeff and Spencer emerged as consistently good offensive players.

Other rookies also came a great distance -- Canyon and Scott had their heads in the game from the sidelines, knew who they were going to cover, and ran themselves foolish when they got in. Rhys and David emerged into very solid overall players in their respective roles, making a TINY number of rookie mistakes for rookies, and then learning immediately from them. Rhys gets handblocked throwing through the cup once, and never does it again; David leads someone upline too far with an OI backhand, and never does it again. That's fantastic.

We're not practicing tomorrow, but we'll be back and ready to go on Wednesday. I want to build off of our zone O success by incorporating that same fast-moving philosophy into our split stack offense. That's what we'll be working on.

As the letter home has already told you, we're leaving on a cross-country beat-down tour this Friday morning. I wanted to make sure we were all on the same page with regards to time frames and packing lists. This is by no means all-inclusive, but I thought I'd give you a heads-up.

As of right now, weather.com predicts constant 60s for Madison throughout the 10-day forecast. Don't trust it, though. It's supposed to rain thursday and friday and be clear by saturday. But we're a little far away for that to be valid, and it could well be raining on saturday.

Things to add to the Madison packing list:

Warm stuff -- sweatshirts, tights, long-sleeves, winter hats, gloves (again, for the fields)
RAIN GEAR
Good movies (for the bus)
Black shorts

That's a preliminary list. We are meeting at East at 4:30am on Friday, and leaving as soon as possible. We'll be back in Denver in the middle of the night or early, early morning on Monday. I'm going to try and teach that day.

If you need to pay for uniforms, still, I'm accepting money in whatever form at practices this week. Do pay.

Max and Neal, take care of that UPA dues confusion soon. As of this email, you're the only ones I KNOW to have problems -- but that could change.

Girls -- Lakewood wants to scrimmage you on Thursday of this week; I think it would be good prep/practice for Madison, and it would be returning a favor for them coming to us last time. Want to do it?

I-70 west to I-25 to 36 west. Get off at Broomfield exit (287). At exit turn RIGHT, merge into righthand turning lane. Turn RIGHT at Midway. Turn LEFT at Daphane. Go through stop sign, go past school to second parking lot (North of school), park. Practice football field will be in front of you once you park!

This week we play Broomfield AT Broomfield on Friday; we'll meet in front of East immediately after school and carpool up there; directions are forthcoming.

On Saturday, the girls have a scrimmage against lakewood, the return-favor for their trip to City Park -- it's at 10:30 at Lakewood. I need to know RIGHT NOW if any of our ladies can't make it; I already know Brenna can't.

Good practice yesterday; more practice today and tomorrow.

Details for this weekend:

1. arrival at CA -- meet at East at 7:30; Leave no later than 7:45. I will be at CA setting up, and will therefore not be driving. I think the same pertains to Mark; drivers, we need you to drive. See our website for directions to CA -- or just pull them off the email I sent you last week; we're going to the same place.

2. Bring the following items to the tournament:
--raingear
--long clothing
--your jersey (they're coming in -- if you can't get together friday, we'll just get them before game time)
--BLACK SHORTS
--sunscreen
--water bottles
--cleats
--extra socks

3. Game schedule: the girls team will play 3 games on Saturday; the open team will play 4. The combination will play 4 games on Sunday, including the elimination rounds. Our only bye during the tourney is the second round (10:30-12:00) on Sunday. There will be a full schedule on the website soon. (i'm sending you the final schedule shortly, Mark)

4. Important notes -- this tourney functions primarily as a fundraiser for us, and it has brought in a lot of money. Since it's the early season, the tournament is built to allow the maximum number of teams to play the maximum number of OTHER teams -- there are 7 rounds of pool play, and then semis and finals based on where we place. Winning the tourney is nice, but this is more of a mid-year check-up; we'll keep working on what we do, and work on doing it better; when we win, great; when we lose, oh well. The one tourney that matters to us is a month away.

Time to fire up, east.
Derek