Roll Call

The past week or so has been a blur, so please excuse me if not everything makes sense here.

We got to the fields on Saturday morning in Bumblefu..excuse me, Poolesville, Maryland. They certainly looked like nice fields, soft with green grass, but the ground was neither flat nor even in most places. It was also cold as shit, so we did our best to warm up. Our first game was against Syracuse, a team we lost to last year in the spring and this year at Vegas, so we all knew we had business to take care of. The rotation was very tight for this game, with the offense scoring most of its posessions and the D struggling to get a break. I think we were down 5-7 at half, but put together a run to win 11-9 in soft cap. It felt good to win, but things were less than pretty throughout the game. Our next round was a bye, so I snagged some thick-as-mud hot cocoa and rolled over to watch the women's team play Boston College. Somewhere during the second half, I went back to warm up before our next game--Lehigh. We've gone back and forth with this team, playing them in tight games last year and losing on DGP in the fall (as a half team). We played them tight again, but couldn't get many breaks and gave up a few turnovers that allowed them to beat us 10-12. Mio had arrived during the second half and opened up the rotation a bit, but I doubt we could have kept going for the whole tournament the way we were during the Syracuse game. Either way, we weren't able to put together the breaks we needed at the end of the game.

It was a similar story against Georgetown, who has crushed us twice already this season--at Vegas, and at Ultimax. This game, we wanted bad. We traded points, went down a break before half, and then broke back a few times to go up 9-7 before the soft cap went on. A few dumb mistakes and it becomes 10-10, DGP and it turns into the point from hell. It lasted at least 15 minutes, with numberous turnovers on each side, several great defensive plays and not a few infuriating flubs. We put up at least a couple decent hucks to open guys, completed even one or two that couldn't make it into the endzone, but just could not get it done. Ariel tried to get off a forehand huck that was handblocked by the sign-post holding up the score card on the sideline, and the other team just snickered and called it a turnover. We ended up losing, 10-11, and it felt awful...it was frustrating to play these guys, because they made several bad calls and contests, fouled more than I think was reasonable, and were sort of jerks in general. Depressed after the loss, and starting the game 10 minutes after the round was slated to start because the last round lasted forever, we played a lackluster game against Messiah, who beat us 5-11 to win the pool.

Sunday morning we woke up to find our van had been broken into and Pete's GPS navigation system stolen by unknown persons in the night. Apparently, the thief or thieves also left condoms around the crime scene, which boggles the mind. A portion of the team, including both captains and a couple injured players, stayed behind to deal with the police and clean up the van while the rest of us went to the fields. I was not in a good mood, not feeling well, thought my UnderArmour leggings had been stolen, felt unreasonably cold, and didn't want to run because my feet hurt. To overcome these, I trudged to the tournament HQ and poured myself a cup of coffee with lots of sugar and non-dairy creamer, listening to my iPod as I walked there and back to our fields on the other side of the world. I warmed up apart from the rest of the team, took a whiz in the grass along the far edge of the field site, pet a horse that had ambled up to the fence of his enclosure in curiosity, and then borrowed a left-hand glove from the lefty on the team. Wearing my winter shell, I got into the team drill and started feeling better. The game against VCU went well, even without some of the team leaders. Lines of only freshmen were able to score on D points, albeit with some difficulty once they got the turn. We rolled to an 11-2 win.

Because some of the teams in our bracket had bagged Sunday, we were faced with a bye before our next opponent, SUNY-Oneonta, who also had a bye. They refused to play the game early, though, because they wanted to warm up against VCU before playing us. We couldn't persuade them to not be bitches about the whole situation, so instead we went to cheer on the girls against Wellesly and watch CHS play Swarthmore. After the round ended, we geared up to play Oneonta and immediately went up by a few breaks with crisp offense and some solid D. Our zone O was flowing nicely, and although we had a few more problems with man O we still got the job done, for the most part. The SUNY guys were a little hotheaded, and had one or two real asshats on their team, so pretty soon we ran into some conflicts. Bad calls from them, drunken heckling from our injured sideline guys (one of whom later puked in the car ride home), fouling on both sides and we let them back in the game. We pulled it out for a 13-9 win, but it got a little ugly by the end. Next up was NYU in the game for the bracket. I remember feeling almost uncoverable as a handler early in this game. We basically traded points, went up a break early, gave up a few more before the soft cap went on, and ended up facing 6-5 in a game to 8. We let them score, let them score again after a bad drop or something, then put our goal in with more work than it should have required. DGP for the bracket, we pull and get another hell-point. Not as bad as the one against Georgetown, but still kind of fugly. I got a nice half-layout D on a huck, it went back and forth a few times, I threw the winning goal. There, that felt better.

More to come?