Where The Hell Did I go?
I am back, by popular demand. You wanted it you got it. This Blogs for you.
I wish I had a good story to tell justifying my absence, a tale where I emerged from an abyss only to reveal to the world the true meaning of existence. Instead I can only offer this explanation.
I was tired and lazy.
As many of you knew, I went to Nationals for Ultimate Frisbee. I hyped it up as one of the greatest moments of my life. It turned out to be a pretty monumental failure.
Going into the tournament my team was seeded third. 3rd out of 16 teams that qualified from a pool of roughly 250. We were one of the favored teams to win the whole thing. Prior to the tournament I was totally stoked and ready. Unfortunately, my team wasn't.
The whole year my team's main goal was competing in the World Championship. The World Ultimate Club Championships are similar to the Olympics or the World Cup, in the regard that they are held every four years and invite the best teams from around the world based on a qualifying system. Last year my team qualified by placing third at nationals. They were of course stoked to do this and in turn their entire focus was competing at worlds. Which really downplayed the whole idea of a national championship. (I could not go to Nationals as I did not have any vacation accumulated from work, nor did I have the money to go overseas. Had I really thought about it I might have made more of an effort to go in hindsight. Perth would have been sweet, especially with the opportunity to hang out with a bunch of people from around the world who do the same unique activity as myself. It would have been an amazing experience, unfortunately for me, the timing was completely wrong.)
So when the choice between Nationals and Worlds came for many of my teammates who did not have enough time or money to do both, many of my teammates chose worlds instead. To be exact 5. You can never exactly determine the impact of what a player does for your team. Its not like a formula, where players are worth certain amounts of points per game. The truth is we definitely were not as strong without those five key players and it affected us with talent and chemistry. I played out of position for the entire first day, and I could not find a rhythm on the field. Even though we were seeded 3rd we lost all three of our game on the first day, to the 6th 11th and 14th seeds. Not only did we lose but we lost by large margins, we were hardly even competitive.
At the end of my first day at Nationals, I had not played particularly well. My team was essentially knocked out of the competition, and we were all mentally devastated. Keep in mind that this season I had not experienced two consecutive losses with this team. In fact I had not even lost twice in the same day. Now we were in a situation where we lost 3 games in a row, we were eliminated from the championship round, and we were still playing the 9-16 best teams in the country. How do you turn that mentality around?
We didn't we lost the next two games.
Ont the third day I had enough, it was the two year anniversary of my Grandfathers death and I was not going to let his blood run through my veins as a quitter. I did not care how hard I had to run or work, I was going to win a game that day. So seeing as nothing else had worked for me the entire weekend, and there were 30 mph winds that were making Frisbee close to unplayable I decided that the only thing I could do was run harder than anyone else on the field. I didn't care if I was playing for 15th place. I was going to win 15th place and not lose to 15th place. My brutal strategy worked. We won, I scored four of our 10 points and assisted two others. Fuck my stats, it was the 15th place game, but we got a victory and that was better than going home with nothing.
We sucked. Now I wrote about it... My bad. No more Ultimate posts this year.
I wish I had a good story to tell justifying my absence, a tale where I emerged from an abyss only to reveal to the world the true meaning of existence. Instead I can only offer this explanation.
I was tired and lazy.
As many of you knew, I went to Nationals for Ultimate Frisbee. I hyped it up as one of the greatest moments of my life. It turned out to be a pretty monumental failure.
Going into the tournament my team was seeded third. 3rd out of 16 teams that qualified from a pool of roughly 250. We were one of the favored teams to win the whole thing. Prior to the tournament I was totally stoked and ready. Unfortunately, my team wasn't.
The whole year my team's main goal was competing in the World Championship. The World Ultimate Club Championships are similar to the Olympics or the World Cup, in the regard that they are held every four years and invite the best teams from around the world based on a qualifying system. Last year my team qualified by placing third at nationals. They were of course stoked to do this and in turn their entire focus was competing at worlds. Which really downplayed the whole idea of a national championship. (I could not go to Nationals as I did not have any vacation accumulated from work, nor did I have the money to go overseas. Had I really thought about it I might have made more of an effort to go in hindsight. Perth would have been sweet, especially with the opportunity to hang out with a bunch of people from around the world who do the same unique activity as myself. It would have been an amazing experience, unfortunately for me, the timing was completely wrong.)
So when the choice between Nationals and Worlds came for many of my teammates who did not have enough time or money to do both, many of my teammates chose worlds instead. To be exact 5. You can never exactly determine the impact of what a player does for your team. Its not like a formula, where players are worth certain amounts of points per game. The truth is we definitely were not as strong without those five key players and it affected us with talent and chemistry. I played out of position for the entire first day, and I could not find a rhythm on the field. Even though we were seeded 3rd we lost all three of our game on the first day, to the 6th 11th and 14th seeds. Not only did we lose but we lost by large margins, we were hardly even competitive.
At the end of my first day at Nationals, I had not played particularly well. My team was essentially knocked out of the competition, and we were all mentally devastated. Keep in mind that this season I had not experienced two consecutive losses with this team. In fact I had not even lost twice in the same day. Now we were in a situation where we lost 3 games in a row, we were eliminated from the championship round, and we were still playing the 9-16 best teams in the country. How do you turn that mentality around?
We didn't we lost the next two games.
Ont the third day I had enough, it was the two year anniversary of my Grandfathers death and I was not going to let his blood run through my veins as a quitter. I did not care how hard I had to run or work, I was going to win a game that day. So seeing as nothing else had worked for me the entire weekend, and there were 30 mph winds that were making Frisbee close to unplayable I decided that the only thing I could do was run harder than anyone else on the field. I didn't care if I was playing for 15th place. I was going to win 15th place and not lose to 15th place. My brutal strategy worked. We won, I scored four of our 10 points and assisted two others. Fuck my stats, it was the 15th place game, but we got a victory and that was better than going home with nothing.
We sucked. Now I wrote about it... My bad. No more Ultimate posts this year.
posted by IrishZag at 9:20 PM
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