April 2004

Ultimate

Well, I just finished getting back from my first National Championships Ultimate tournament, and a few observations.

Things that I learnt:

1. JD is a superstar of Australian Ultimate. Thank God for that, because I was beginning to think that I was crap at defending him. Well, OK, I am crap at defending him but he's just an exceptionally good player. I'm just lucky that I've been able to learn from him for the last few months. In fact, before this tournament, I would say that I would be the best person in the WORLD to be defending JD, seeing that I've had to defend him almost every point at every training session for the last 3 months. That definitely helped me out, as I don't think that any of the opposition handlers had an easy time against us.
2. Defence alone doesn't win you tournaments. Our defence rocked, which gave our Offence plenty of disc, but we just couldn't make the other teams hurt.
3. Layout D's and handblocks rule. I can't believe it's taken me a whole year to get a hand block, but I guess there's no better time to get one than at nationals. Also, once you learn to fly, it's an addiction and you want to do that all the time. Actually, I think in order to get layout D's regularly, you need to be superfit. You really need to be able to accelerate when you're already running flat out, which is probably why I couldn't layout until just a few weeks ago.
4. I'd like to play Fakulti B again, and catch that disc in the end-zone. I still can't believe I out ran 2 guys, only for one of them to catch the disc over my shoulder and score on me.
5. You need to be ready to play right from the first minute of every day. We dropped every game we played that started at 9am, and I would say we could have won all 3 of them too.
6. Clearing is an artform in itself. Watching the final, if the cuts were looked off, then the cutter would circle around to the back of the stack, and then make another cut but the timing would be so good, that the cutter never stopped running. Also, good clearing creates a massive hole in the middle of the field.
7. A penetrating break force throw is worth it's weight in gold. If you've got someone who can throw these, you can easily advance half the field in 2 throws.

So where to from here? Well, I'm going to work on my O, and in particular my break force throws and layout catches.

WA Ultimate