Quick Recap

Here’s my quick little summary of what went right, what went wrong and why we finished were we did.

The fields were perfect. Along with the fields in Finland in 2004, these are the best fields I’ve ever played on. Anyone who complains about the fields having a negative affect on their game is looking for excuses, simple as that.

The weather was interesting. It was sunny almost all week, except for a 5 minute stretch of rain when we played Fakulti for the second time. From what everyone said about Australia, I thought that the sun would be a major factor but it wasn’t as overbearing as I expected. The tournament was very good about providing protection from the sun so I didn’t sunburn once while I was down there. The temperature was comfortable, varying between 25-32 degrees but there was very little humidity so it was very manageable. I expected the combination of the heat and the sun to be overbearing but it really wasn’t. The one consistent weather factor that affected play was the wind. I can’t say exactly how it compared to the wind in Hawaii but I think on average it was similar, if not stronger. This ended up being a factor for us when you consider that we aren’t the most skilled team out there.

The tournament was guaranteed to be weird from the get go because there were 21 teams. There is no simple way to do brackets with such an odd number of teams. I think the best solution would have been a ten team pool and an eleven team pool playing round robin games and then taking the top four teams from each pool and moving into quarters, semis and finals. The tournament chose four pools of four teams and one pool of five with the top two teams in each pool moving on and everyone else dropping down with no chance of crossing back up. I think it was a ridiculous format. Some of the pools had two clear cut dominant teams but some pools had three strong teams and one of those teams was going to get screwed; Deathstar had to deal with Fire of London and Buzz Bullets in their pool and Magon was pretty much eliminated after their first game when they lost to us.

The format also meant that one pool played four games in two days and everyone else only played three. Not a big deal you say, I beg to differ. We had to play Clapham and Tibets, two hard running games, the day before going into the power pools while Sub-Zero only had to play Too Bad. That gave 16 man Sub-Zero the chance to recuperate and get back into the tournament after having a tough first day and put us in a position where we went into the power pools more worn down than anyone else. What followed was our flattest day of the tournament as we were completely exhausted. We lost two games and it put us behind the eight-ball. Anyway, I thought it was a stupid format as it made the original seeding far too important.

We were held back by our lack of skill in the wind, lack of fitness and less than ideal team cohesion. Don’t get me wrong we have some super-skilled players on our team and that skill carried us past many teams in the tournament… but this is World’s and we play against some of the best players in the World and we weren’t as skilled as the top teams. Buzz Bullets had a ridiculous amount of skill and that carried them past us in the windy conditions… that and the way they cheat by pretending to not understand English. At the end of the week we finished behind a bunch of teams that were plain and simple more skilled than we were; overall they had crisper throws, better catching ability, more confidence in their throws, etc.. Our skill let us down in zone offense. Normally we do well against zones and this week we pretty much sucked. Everyone got too tight around the disc allowing the defense to clamp down tighter on us and it was just a bad scene, ‘nuff said. The fitness issue is tough because you never know that you aren’t in good enough shape until you bonk. And bonk we did after the Clapham game. I guess we can debate whether we should have thrown in the towel or whether it was worth it to come back and win but regardless, the following day we didn’t have the fitness to beat a Thong team that didn’t deserve to win and a Fakulti team that only won because we didn’t have the legs to stop their offense. We needed to be in better shape to go deeper in the tournament and we just weren’t. Of all the places to screw up that is probably the most frustrating. As for the team cohesion issue it wasn’t a huge issue but when you throw a bunch of new guys in the mix it just isn’t going to be as clean as with guys you’ve been playing with for multiple years. We did great and everyone got along and had a good time, which is important, but it’s tough to be a great team when you’re spending the week building your team. I think we did as well as could be expected with respect to this but the reality is that it isn’t good enough when you play against a bunch of guys who practice together every single day for the past few years.

Our athleticism, ignorance of reality and our enthusiasm carried us through the tournament. We had speed to burn and that helped us when we were turning the disc over to no end. Against Magon we kept getting D block after D block to keep us in the game while on offense we kept turning the disc back over. If it wasn’t for our sheer speed and athleticism we would have lost that game. Same for the Clapham game; we just out ran the Brits in the second half. Ignorance truly is bliss when you are down 9-5 to Clapham. We just kept playing and got back into a game that we had no business being in, let alone winning.

We dropped far too many discs and threw away far too many passes to finish any higher than we did. Regardless of strategy strengths or weaknesses, it ultimately comes down to catching and throwing and we failed to do that as well as we should have. I personally had a poor game against Thong. I had one stupid turnover that came as a result of a brain fart but they beat us by only one point. Had I not made that mistake we might have won. At least I don’t feel as bad a Frank who dropped an easy score because he tried to catch it with one hand instead of two. We just need to be able to bring a higher level of focus so that we don’t make mistakes like that anymore. (And don’t think that I’m blaming Frank for that loss either, it was just a memorable drop. Aside from that Frank played great).