Tough calls

I’m dropping Ultimate to one night a week.

Four years ago I was living with one of my roommates and playing Ultimate with my core group of friends. Now obviously, I live with my wife and my friends have stopped playing game. And, for whatever reason, I haven’t been able to duplicate the camaraderie of the group I first started playing with on another team. I think it may be that the original Ulti team started out as a rec squad before moving to the intermediate level.

Now days all I play is intermediate and the personalities involved are more competitive, less social.

And frankly I miss my friends.

Fall start up

So,

Back in school again for another semester. This time out the course is Reputation Management aka Crisis Communications and since its my fifth course in my PR certificate it officially puts me over the halfway mark in post secondary education: round 2.

My first assignment is supposed to be talking about my personal brand. What makes me, me?

6’4, blond hair, blue eyes, devastatingly handsome and recently started snoring in his sleep. Bam. Done. What more do you need to know? That’s my brand.

I also started the fall Frisbee season on Tuesday. I signed up as an individual and got thrown into a team that just made the switch from rec to intermediate. So I found myself handling again as some people were a little disc shy. Its not big a deal. Maybe I’ll take the opportunity to get my flick down. Stranger things have happened.* My only beef with the team is that we play at a venue that’s notorious for injuring people. The floor isn’t turf or wood, its some kind of rubberized concrete that becomes extremely slippery when the outdoor temp starts to drop. S tore her Achilles tendon there, I’ve seen break their wrist and more wipe outs then I can count. Last year I even wrote the sports league to complain about their continued use of the venue.

But with the loss of their domed turf field, the league can’t afford to be picky at where they schedule games. And since I signed up to play in it, apparently, neither can I.

*Stranger things have in fact NOT happened.

Da Flick

I love this picture. It looks like I’ve got tremendous amounts of air.

So apparently I can flick now, just not in a game.

It started a couple weeks ago, I was horsing around in the backyard with my brother-in-law, just tossing a disc and for shits and giggles I decided to try flicking to him. After a few wayward throws I settled down into a nice rhythm. No one was more shocked than I was. This may seem like a rather minor victory to you, but in the four years I’ve been playing Ultimate I have yet to throw a flick with anything approaching distance, accuracy and success.

It’s become a standing joke. I can chuck a hammer, which is a more difficult throw that utilizes the same principles as the flick, but I can’t throw a flick itself.

A couple days later I tried to throw a flick during a game and it was the same old story.

So after the game a bunch of us were tossing the disc and once again I started trying to flick and it worked. Near as I can figure, I’m over thinking the throw during the game, trying to hard to force it work.

So my game plan is to warm up with flick almost exclusively and create some muscle memory. That way when I make the throw during the game it’ll happen automatically.

Well, that’s the plan anyway.

Boo-friggity-hoo

I’ve been re-examining my relationship with Ultimate Frisbee, that fickle bitch, for the last couple weeks or so.

It hasn’t been fun times for me on the Frisbee circuit lately.

Back in April I was complaining about how most of the people I started out playing the game with have had to retire or move on to other things. As I continue to play without them I realize how lucky I was to fall in with the group in first place. I might never have stuck with the game through those gawd-awful first months, where I was fat, out of shape and coughing up the remnants of my lungs after a decade of huffing the smokes, without the camaraderie and spirit the originals brought to the sport.

We were never, EVER, powerhouses but we won enough games to keep us happy and we were always competitive enough to at least challenge the other teams.

I play twice a week in the warmer months. This summer I joined a Tuesday team that’s a little more competitive than most. But in order to inflate some of our numbers a little, and mitigate our playing costs, we picked up some players who can’t at the same level as the bulk of the team. That means the handlers on the team avoid passing to them if they can avoid it. This, rightly so, leads to hurt feelings, bruised egos and team friction. So instead of tipping a pint or two after the game we all sullenly slink back to our cars and repeat the whole process again next week.

I captain Thursday’s team which is a sort of Longshot’s lite. Over the last four years we’ve been adding a new player here and a new player there and now I’m the only one left from the original group. This new group lacks the cohesion of the original bunch. They come or go as they please and quite often the team is very different from season to the next. We’re barely one step up from a bunch of individuals who’ve just gotten together to form a team. And right now we’re losing, a lot…and badly to boot.

After a great winter finish we had our traditional turnover and we lost a couple of out better players. This means that we can’t compete like we used to. So people are less interested in coming out or sticking around and it’s getting hard to keep anyone with any skill around. Add to the fact that the Thursday fields are as hard as hell to get to and people just don’t want to bother with having to struggle to get to a game they’re destined to get their ass kicked at anyway. It wears them down mentally.

I don’t have to win. I just want to be competitive.

We’re a rec team in an intermediate division.

So what can I do? Right now I’m speaking to people well in advance about putting together a fall team. I’m not writing off this season, but if I want to avoid another stinker I need to start lining things up now.

And on Thursday I’m going to call in every ringer I can. If I can get some serious handlers and players to come out then maybe we can start being competitive again and turn people’s spirits around. I’m also going to try to switch divisions so that we can play on fields that are a little more accessible.

It may not work, it may fail horribly and I could find myself in an even worse situation when the fall comes around. If that’s the case I’m going to need to blow up the team and see if I’m lucky enough to strike gold as an individual (avec S of course) a second time out.

We shall see.

More time than I know what to do with.

Invites for wedding were finished on Sunday, mailed Monday and the replies started coming back to us yesterday.

Oh it’s on like the wrath of Kahn!

Just because we didn’t have enough on our plates already, the return of the wedding invitations marks another milestone in the planning of this little shin-diggity. Before we were planning for a wedding that we could reasonably be sure was going to be attended by people we knew. Now, with each little return card that shows up in our mailbox that’s one more person to have to look out for.

(Isn’t so-and-so deathly allergic to water? You can’t sit Uncle Jimmy next to Cousin Ted, don’t you remember what happened the last time? Keep Samantha away from the punch, I’m pretty sure she’ll try to spike it. Your ex-boyfriend is sitting WHERE?)

A short list of things yet to be done.

Suit rentals.
Ring buying.
Cake design confirmation.
Gifts for the bridal party to be purchased.
Meet with DJ.
Meet with florist (again)
Buy centerpieces wholesale.
Decide conclusively on which centerpiece to buy (wholesale)
Seating chart.
Bachelor and bachelorette parties.
Wedding shower.
Engagement photo.
Hook drain directly to bank account.

In other news, the new team jerseys arrived today, a day late for last night’s game. The blue is darker than I hoped for. The logo seems too small and the sizes are always a little hinky.

But now we can go out there and lose as a team. Like we did last night. But goddammit, at least next week we’ll all look the same when losing.

Spring Tune-up Tourney

So,

We had our annual ultimate spring speed point tournament this weekend. I'm hoping the team name change to Shuffle Monkeys was a fortuitous omen as we did phenomenally well, especially in comparison to some of our previous Longshot showings. We played four round robin games, came in first in the pool, then we had two playoff games. Unfortunately we lost our pool's Championship game to a team that we had just eked out a win against in regular play.

The last game could honestly have gone either way, but the other team's captain made a smart call when choosing which end of the field he wanted to start the game from. He put the wind behind him and we had a really tough completing passes as the wind started to pick up. We battled back from an early deficit, but weren't able to close the gap. It happens.

And this is the first time I've played in one of these tournaments and haven't been completely exhausted at the end of it. I know it's not because of my fitness level, which is somewhat of a joke right now.

One of the crappy things that keeps coming up with this tourney is that there are always teams playing out of their division. Nobody wants to be the Intermediate team getting the snot wailed out of them by a Competitive team, but somehow one always sneaks in. Or, conversely a Recreational team signs up, because they just really want to play, and then they get upset because they're used as a punching bag by all the other teams. This is a recurring problem, and our group has been on the receiving end of it once or twice. No one likes paying money to get humiliated on the field.

Here's my suggestion on how to fix that.

When you create an electronic profile with our league, which is mandatory already, you have to put down what you think your skill level is for whatever sport you’re playing. That way if you sign up for a tournament the league can look at your individual skill levels and surmise what kind of team you think you are and attempt to schedule your games against teams with similar skill sets. It’s not a perfect solution. Some teams and players will have skill levels on the cusp between levels and you’re relying on people to be honest about their abilities. But when you’ve got a whole sport based around self refereeing I think you can rely on the majority of people to be truthful. They want to play against teams in their division.

That’s my two cents and I don’t think it’s that hard to implement.