YCC Practice #1

At the tryouts for the NJ YCC team, I pledged my alleigance to the devil. Wait, no, that was this past Friday...ah, I volunteered to be an assistant coach for Dirty Jerz (Garden State). After discussion at length with Jon Lin, one of my mentors from freshman year of Watchung who also acts as assistant coach to CHS (during the season) and, now, YCC, I emailed my thoughts about each of the tryouts to the two head coaches. We had pretty much nailed the picks for the team, and it will be interesting now to see how each of the players steps up to fill different roles on the field. Jon Lin was at the Philly Invite with me on Saturday, but opted to stay and play on Sunday rather than come and coach with me--I understand, the dude has been out of Ultimate for far too long, and wants to play the game. So after not quite enough sleep, I woke up around 8am, had a nice big breakfast (1/3 cup oats, blueberry yogurt, fresh blueberries, crushed walnuts, and 1/2 scoop of unflavored whey protein) and met up with the Watchung kids to head down. We were late, and I was happy to know that I would not be chastised or punished for tardiness--this is called "times I am not so disappointed to not be on the team."

I strolled over to coaches Nunez and Mio and saw that Jackson had also made it out, which was cool. We shot the shit, set up the field, and watched kids warm up in the growing heat. Immediately, the HCs launched into describing the offense that GS will follow for their tournaments, and set up several drills to teach the key concepts. The first drill was a simple cutter-defender, thrower-marker drill: force directional, cutter gets open, thrower gets him the disc, rotate through the positions. I had to cover one of the quickest players on the team, and my thrower was pretty much a dedicated deep, so it was pretty interesting. I got some D's, gave up a couple easy cuts just by not being ready for that kind of speed, and completed almost everything on offense. The next drill brought that into a slightly more gamelike situation, which was the basic progression throughout the practice. Finally we worked on handler motion, and I coached a team of three on some of the finer points of moving the disc. We took the same groups and pitted them against each other for a competitive game: 3v3, completing the dump-swing equals a point, game to 3, score on offense only. It was somewhat ugly, and during this time Jackson and I mostly watched from the sideline and talked about what we thought about the handler motion.

After a longer break, we split into teams for scrimmage. Jackson and I played and often matched up against each other, which was cool. I mostly played as a handler, moved the disc well short and threw the gamut of hucks--one long forehand that slipped and shot out of bounds, one nice forehand that the receiver would have caught were he not fouled, etc. I broke the mark when I wanted to, often to assist goals. My D was decent (got one interception on Jackson), but I got skied in the endzone by a kid with much more ups than I have. I also got skied on O in the endzone--I had inside position to go up with my left hand, but I had wrapped my left hand because it was bothering me. So I went up with my right, almost like a hook shot, and the Stanford-A player knocked it down. Damn. We lost the game 3-5, I threw too many turnovers.

Afterwards, the kids who had been late did 40yd down-and-backs. Again, times I am not so disappointed to not be on the team--it was damn hot. Jackson and I went to Tijuana Burrito with Mio to meet up with Pete and Greg for our officers' meeting for Machine. We talked about scheduling, tryouts, and more, all very generally. Nunez had tagged along and he gave his input as well. I am seriously sore at this point, though.