DUI Tournament Summary

 Davis = WIND!

 We certainly got our chance to work on our zone O & D this weekend.

 We went 2-4 overall, and finished the weekend on an up note. We had
the Gurglers (another DH derivative), Humboldt and Thirst'n'Howl in our 
pool (B). There were 6 pools. Top two teams in each pool advanced to the
round of 16; remaining teams played off for the last 8 spots.

 We sucked against both Gurglers and Humboldt, again beating ourselves mostly.
We got into a mental disease where drops became contagious.

 We thrashed Thirst'n'Howl to hold seed in our pool and enter the playoff
round against UofO. We turned things around against them and played hard
and well (we also stole Rich back for that game) and beat them 13-10.

 We came out Sunday morning to a frigid wind storm. Windbreakers, gloves,
leggings were apparel-du-jour. We drew the #3 tournament seed, Apollo Creed,
and played very well indeed, losing 13-10 (or 9). One of the most amazing
plays I've seen happened: they pulled to us into the cross wind; the disc
travelled to within 10-15 yards of our goal and then got caught in an 
up-draft and blew all the way back to land on their own goal-line! Never
seen that before! After a couple of swings, Xen threw a hammer (downwind)
to Erik who laid out full length and caught it in his fingertips at full
extension.

 We did most things right in that game.

 We played Stanford in the consolation round. Again, more zone. We ran out
of gas and they passed us 13-10. But it was also a really good fun game.
  There were lots of good things that happened over the weekend. MikeP made 
some amaaaaazing  catches on hucks into the wind. EJ played monster deep 
against Stanford's big guy (Jim?). Erik made this wild swooping catch near the 
end of the Stanford game... someone threw a pass near the corner of their 
endzone that caught up in the wind; Tom went up to get it and then Erik 
swooped in with a tomahawk catch out of nowhere for the score. Zow!

 Not so good was Tom taking an elbow in the eye-socket in the Humboldt game. 
He was OK, but had an ugly sac of blood hanging over his eye which then spread 
into quite a shiner the next morning. He also developed a Cro-Magnon forehead 
to boot. Not a pretty sight!

 We had a lot of trouble with the trap zone O. We'll really need to work on 
that. We'll also need to work on tighter D & marking in practice to better 
simulate the conditions we'll see against the better teams. It was like night 
and day playing Humboldt and Thirst'n'Howl: Thirst'n'Howl were loose on D and 
marking and we had our way with them. We had a devil of a time with Humboldt. 

 During the Humboldt and Gurglers games, Drew had been spreading out PT more 
uniformly. During the pre UofO break we talked about playing the best players 
most and subbing others in one or two at a time when the core got tired. The 
UofO game was well played with continuity and good focus.

 By Sunday we were down to 12 (which is why we were tired puppies by the end of 
the Stanford game!) and again people's heads were in the games the whole way.

 There were 27 teams in the Open. The competition level seems to have soared 
this year. The B sides would have been decent tournies last year. If we're to 
be competitive, I think we will need rosters of 15-16 max at tournaments and 
the 'last 4' would see 1/2 to 1/3 the PT of the 'top 12'. I put this out as my 
opinion and a topic of discussion for the team.

 Lotsa people still owe me the $8 tourney fee.

 I don't know how the A bracket went at all after we went out.

 All in all, I came away with a good feeling this weekend, much better
than last. We turned a disastrous start around and played the last 4
games near peak.

--

You forgot to mention Joe's great pulls into the strong 
wind on Sunday.  How did he do that?

Drew