Yale Cup 2009

Our second tournament of the spring! 6+ years up here and I still can't get used to how late the season starts up north.

So briefly, on Saturday we had 7 players, and the format was pool play for 3 rounds, then the 2s and 3s crossover. Therefore, we decided to win all 3 games and thus avoid playing the 4th. Results: 11-7 vs Yale, 11-4 vs NYU (were down 0-3 to start), and 10-9 vs Tufts (we were up 8-4? at half... stopped playing man D).

Sunday we had 2 more show up, and played Brown in the quarterfinals, with a come from behind win of 4 straight points to make it 9-8 and get into semis, which then let us avoid playing 4 games on Sunday. Semis was vs Vermont - they were doing a better job of breaking our zone, and I think our fatigue also started showing a little more because we kept getting beat to the open side in man. Final score 13-7; we didn't score after half.

Things that got better: trap zone D, playing against a zone (trap, 4 man cup), reading, catching. The cup in particular started understanding how to press as a solid wall, and to sprint only when sealing the break. The short deep and wings also learned to take away the easy options and force hard throws to break the zone.

Catching was actually a strong suit compared to other teams. I think both in the NYU and Brown games, our opponents were dropping the disc much more frequently than us. Reading improved as well; I remember maybe one instance only where a player poorly read the disc.

Our offense on a transition also worked a lot better when our cutters would attack deep and then come back under for the big gainers. We had been walking to the disc and allowing the defense to set, but when we started pressing on a turnover, it opened up much more on defense and cleared out poaches.

Things to improve: Endzone when we are trapped, maintaining spacing on offense, man defense.

Endzone in a trap situation had many turns, which I think were due to poor options upfield and looking too late at the dump. We worked on it at practice today, and I think it is dramatically improved. Looks chaotic, but it's pretty effective.

Creating space on offense is a higher level skill which is difficult to teach. We had been doing double cuts, and not clearing properly, or spacing our cutters out to maintain 1-on-1 matchups. Today we worked on it, and I think they did better when cued to face sideways so they could see both the thrower and the other cutters, and also to clear away from the direction of the dump throw.

Man defense... oy. So I have a beef with man defense in general, which I will write about shortly, but at the very least we need to be able to remember the force and to protect the force side as downfield defenders. Too many people were biting on fakes to the break side, or not setting up/maintaining the buffer to the force side.

I also learned this weekend that sMITe does not do well with getting yelled at. Haven't tried it before with this team, but they respond much better to positive feedback. Not a huge surprise, but good thing to know before actually being in an important game.

Overall, I am impressed by how well we played, and how much we were able to learn and improve. I have also determined that it's impossible to figure out how we stand vs other teams this early in the season. Sectionals is going to be interesting since we wouldn't have seen many of the teams in our section.