Boston Invite 2009

(oops, forgot that I hadn't finished posting this yet. sorry for the delay!)

After several weeks of practices and cuts, tryout season in the NE traditionally culminates at the Boston Invite, where the new players can demonstrate their abilities in a tournament setting.

This year, Hatch brought 25ish to the Invite, with 3 people not able to attend, and a couple who could only come for 1 day or play a few points. We were a little low on handlers, which was particularly problematic during the last game of the tournament when people were starting to drop.

Overall, I was pleased with how we performed. We had difficulty initially just getting into a groove, and I think we were struggling to move from practice-mode into tournament-mode. However, after some regrouping before the start of our second game, we went out and executed our game plan, with much improvement both on offense and defense.

The biggest areas that we need to work on are endzone offense, vertical offense, and dumping. Pretty understandable - in the 3 weeks of practices, we did a little review of those, but not enough to really change the way people play. And overall, we certainly spent more practice time on defense than offense and it showed - our D-line would get 5-6 turns each point (go D!) but that's a lot of times to turn it over again. Oy.

I do think we have a ways to go on defense, too, though - both man-ish and zone. We have been trying to work together on defense, which needs time playing together in order to build our trust and communication skills, and that sense of what our teammate is going to do. I also did notice a lot more help D being played at the Invite, which I think is the natural evolution of ultimate defense, as teams adapt to try to constrain horizontal offenses.

We made final cuts at the end of the tournament, and we've got 24 players - 9 handlers and 15 cutters. I am thrilled at the quality of our players - I look at the lines that we can put out and there is a lot of firepower. The hard part now is just to get them to work well together, but unlike last year, we'll have a full 3 months of practices to gel.