Great Weather -> Great Week of Ultimate

"Do, or do not. There is no 'try'."
-Yoda

It's starting to get nice in Ottawa, with less humidity, and the wind turned down a notch. This has led to a great week of ultimate, recapped below.

- Poached Motel's game this week was disappointing. We were evenly matched with our opponents "Mean People", but all of us were exhausted from CHEO. Personally, I got broken twice by a very experienced handler, and oddly, couldn't flick more than 10 meters without blading. On the bright side, I scored five of our nine points, including a couple off of continuation cuts (something I'm secretly working on *shh*). We couldn't overcome the 8-3 half-time deficit, and ended up losing 15-9.
- Wore my new 'You're the only 10 I see' shirt on Monday which yielded this quote from a team-mate "It's like you're trying to pick up the person who's reading the shirt".
- Got offered a chance to play the Mixed Up tournament in August with my CHEO team. Interestingly, Mehmet was also offered a spot on the team. After kinda overcoming the Mehmet curse this weekend (he watched a bunch of our games), I could kill the thing entirely in August.
- Due to some heavy rain on Tuesday, the BF captains cancelled practice. Since most of us were already out at UPI, Gavin mentioned that those who wanted to could practice with BFC (the coed A team). I jumped on that opportunity.
- High-light #1 of practice was Tron leading me with a pass out the back of the endzone, and into a bush during a slant-to-huck drill. The guy has a monstrous huck as the cuts on my legs and broken tree branches can prove. On the plus side, I held onto the disc!
- Low-light of practice was f-ing up the breakforce drill a couple of times. I twice forgot which side to cut to after breaking force, which was stupid.
- High-light #2 of the practice was catching the last point of the scrimmage on a continuation cut (ze work pays off!).
- There were some roster changes on BF announced Tuesday. Jamieson got promoted to the A team (well deserved, he's ridiculously fast and a great all around player), and Glen can't play with the team at Regionals since he'll be kicking ass in Masters. Luckily, Glen will still be practicing with us.
- I'll speculate here on what I think the roster changes might mean, just cause it won't cost me $20 in the "buy captains beer fund" to do so :P For my money, the two open spots should go to Tron (if he wants to play with BF, and is ready to play) and Ahmad (for his handling skills, and experience with the BF offense). Having said that, I'm glad I'm not a captain, as it's gotta be a tough decision....Peter and Jordan are also very deserving.
- High-light of Thursday practice was the short-arm / long-arm game at the end to celebrate Deirdre's b-day. Having played as a long-arm the first time I tried this game, I was happy to get a chance to try short-arm this time around. My conclusion is that long-arms have the advantage, since it's impossible to throw far short-armed.
- Tom put us through a really cool fitness circuit on Thursday's practice, and the weather was perfect for it. I get the feeling I'm one of the few who enjoys the fitness components of practice, but that's cool. On a related note, I'm going to try to build myself an agililty ladder.
- Friday's game was disappointing. Urban Sprawl got blown away by the first place team in the league 15-3. To be honest, I'm finding league more and more frusterating after having everything so organized at BF practices. I have to dial it down a notch, and make sure to spread the disc around better as a handler.
- A tad embarassing, but bruise inducing flick girl has a running group that I'm considering joining. The only downside, is it's a marathon group, and this Sunday's run would be 13km....hmmm...
- Steve's superior ulty blog has an interesting post about speed in ultimate. For my money, the fastest co-ed player in Ottawa in Lamo, and the fastest open guy is Bryce.

I thought I'd end these weekly wrap-ups with the main ulty lesson that I learned this week. This one was brought home to me at Thursday's practice, and it's probably obvious to most, but always go hard and keep playing. I ran back and broke up a 3-on-1 this week in practice, instead of letting the other team rack up a behind the back play. Last summer, I would have said fuck it, and resigned myself to the fact that the other team was going to score. I'm going to credit IID coach Stu for this, since he made this incredible layout catch in our last game this winter, that made me realize that if the disc is in the air, it's alive....so go for it! Until next time, happy hucking!