PT for my knee. Side-lying leg lift, straight leg raise, resisted terminal knee extension.
PT for my knee. Side-lying leg lift, straight leg raise, resisted terminal knee extension.
Dinner: crepes and walk home with Butter.
2.5 hours of ultisquash. Good turnout, got a bunch of haverfordians and some amp ppl. Butter even played. Allysha and StaceyZ came too. It was Allysha’s first time but she played really well.
Desi village for lunch.
Ran 6 150m shuttles with Butter and Sara. First 3 were a 50m course, last 3 were 25m course. I ran the 50m ones in about 24-25s each. The 25m ones were 27-28s each. We also warmed up by jogging the circumference of the field twice. We did long strides for the long edges and slow jog for the short edges.
Afterwards, Sara and I joined the Penn pickup crew and played ultimate for a while. She left early, I stuck around till the end. There were a few new girls there. Two were high schoolers and one just moved to the area. One of the high schoolers had a cannon flick for her age, and the other was a good deep cutter and receiver. Pretty sure Butter’s recruiting them for his indoor team.
Two hours of climbing with Matt. Sent the yellow traverse on the right side, got a lot closer on the red V5, and did most of the pink on the left side. Definitely sending the red next time I’m there.
2 hours of Ultisquash. A great high level game with amp ppl and wheels. Owen’s first time playing, and he played really well. Everyone was a bit hung over from last night’s power hour and houseleaving party, but it was great to get out and run around some.
Climbed for an hour at PRG East Falls. Also did some muscle ups, abs and static hold work.
Had an excellent time playing with the Molar Bears at Mosh this weekend. For a first-year team, we set the bar pretty high for level of play, level of fun, and finish in the tourney (lost in the finals). The wind was rough and the cold was somewhat annoying, but I had a lot of fun.
Bicuspids bite, molars crush
Bears love cold. Let’s win Mosh
Sara got a few AMPers to come to Haverford and help coach the Sneetches. We worked on upline dump defense and then pulling. I brought Diana’s iPad and the Ubersense app, which was really helpful in showing the girls where they were missing out on extra torque on their pulls.
We play better when we eat our Cheddar.
We never miss when we eat our Swiss.
We get the D when we eat our Brie.
We win the party when we eat Havarti.
After practice, we went over to the squash courts and played over an hour of ultisquash. It was good to get back into the game. We had a wide range of talent, from people who’ve played a lot to people who’ve only played once or twice. The games were pretty fun, but with lots of turns. I need to figure out how to minimize my turns and throw more effectively.
Came out to Haverford to help coach the Sneetches for a day. We did the Gauntlet drill in slow motion, focusing on body positioning and footwork. Then we ran it faster to simulate more game-realistic moves. After that we did the hunger drill with no jumping, focusing once more on body positioning, as well as reading the disc and catching with the opposite hand. Finally, we played 4-on-4 winter-league style until it got dark.
When I say we, I really mean the women’s team. I mostly coached, watched and gave feedback. I did get some throws in during the hunger drill, and also at the end with Stu.
Nationals this year was good and bad in a lot of ways. We played very well during most of our games, we won more games than any previous year, and we beat one of our arch-rivals (Polar Bears) in a strong win on Friday. But we also finished worse than last year and lost our last game on Sat to a team we should have beaten.
On Thursday, we started off strong with a close game against CLX. We had the opportunity to win it, but some late-game turnovers (two by me) gave them the lead back and we lost 13-11. We rebounded and fought hard to win 11-9 against 7 Figures, then crushed Cosa 15-4 in the last game. On Friday, we lost our pre-quarters game 15-10 to Slow White, beat D’oh 15-11, then took down Polar Bears 14-8. The Polar Bears win was extra satisfying because we clearly saw our defense working well. For the first half of the game, we shut down their deep cuts with strong physical defense. In the second half, they started to bring all their cuts under and across, and we took advantage by playing tighter and getting a bunch of Ds. I think we scored 3 or 4 breaks in a row in the second half. For our last game Sat morning, we were up a few breaks on Santa Maria but they came back to win on universe (13-12).
My takeaways:
I’d taken the whole week off before last practice, and took Monday off as well to make sure my knee was 100%. But I couldn’t keep doing nothing, so I came out for the last workout to do some shuttles, shuffles and throwing. We took forever finding a place to run because most fields were busy with intramurals or other team practice. Eventually we ran 4 shuttles and 4 shuffles, then threw till the IM ultimate game kicked us off.
Practice was supposed to be Saturday, but it got rained out and moved to Sunday. We split the practice up into 4 sections: one for each of our Thursday opponents plus one for us. During our section, we ran through all the plays in our playbook to make sure we have everything down pat. Then we played mini to work on handler movement and stopping it (Cosa Nostra), worked on physical defense and poachy zone (7 Figures), and then scrimmaged with the endzone being closed for the first 40 seconds (CLX). Overall the practice went pretty well. The O line especially played well during the scrimmages, coming back to win the zone scrimmage after being down, and not giving up a single turn in the endzone-closed scrimmage.
Combo double practice and beach weekend. There wasn’t much actual beach going on because it was cold and rainy, but I did jump in the ocean after practice on Saturday. We repeated a few drills from the past (gauntlet, marking), then moved on to scrimmage. We got some good reps with zone because it was rainy and a great chance to practice. O even played some zone to give the D some practice, but mostly O played O. The weekend was somewhat streaky, with O and D taking turns going on runs. Our numbers were kinda low, so we all got to play a lot and get quality reps in.
After practicing all day Saturday (with a break for lunch, Spikeball and full-team Spikejam), we went to Papa’s house for dinner, 7 Wonders and Fishbowl.
On Sunday, we went back to work. It was even colder, but not terrible. After warmups and some triangle cutting drills, my knee felt painful so I stopped playing and switched to filming. Everyone else finished out the drill and moved on to scrimmage. The level remained high throughout the day, though there were a bit more miscues and botched Ds than the day before.
We cruised through regionals, winning all our games by a good margin. No team made it to double digits against us. Our O line didn’t get broken once all weekend, and we had very few unforced turns all around. The intensity was good, even when we were winning by a lot.
We spent an hour or so on Saturday talking about spirit. Amp often gets low spirit scores, though we don’t think we have poor spirit. So there must be something we’re missing, something we need to pay attention to and improve so we’re not seen as jerks. Some good points were that we want the teams we beat to cheer for us and be proud when we represent the region. We don’t have to make friendly banter on the sidelines or smile at everyone, but we do need to respect our opponents as worthy adversaries and recognize when they are doing something well. Some teams we mentioned as examples of good spirit are Polar Bears, Slow White, Fury, Riot, the men on CLX.
For me personally, I played well on the weekend, though I didn’t play much (esp on Saturday). I did have one drop and one rushed semi-throwaway that I should not have had, but besides that I think I was very effective all around. I did notice myself rushing during our last game. I’ll try to remember that feeling so I can notice it in myself in the future. Brayden (the AG coach) also gave me some good feedback during the game.