WAFC (Wimps Awaiting Fairer Conditions?)

Start of league play last night for the Buzzards…or maybe not. There was a very late call yesterday afternoon by WAFC to cancel games but as Kevin noted about an hour before game time, “This is the strangest Ultimate experience I’ve ever had…everybody is out here early”.

Early or no…that of course is all in one’s perspective, I hope this isn’t an indication of WAFC’s organizational skills. And as it turns out the field was completely playable and so that’s exactly what we did. The Buzzards had a huge turnout…the whole team (who said they were coming) except Leroy did show up. Reagan & Rachel, two of our female contingent were there for their inaugural (I think?) Ultimate experiences and they both used their athleticism to their advantage and looked like seasoned veterans. Bridgette, our true seasoned veteran, was there anchoring our women. And she brought Jack who I got to sneak a cookie to like I was some goofy uncle enjoying the luxury of feeding his nephew sugar and sending him home with mom.

Our Capitan’ Kevin, with shirt clearly marked “C”, showed up with a truck full of picnic and disc supplies. After a few minutes of conversation that ended with Todd clearly inpatient and wanting to get things going, I decided to roll the grill over, fire it up and throw on some hot dogs while Bob, Kevin & Todd tried, with varying degrees of success to walk off 40X70 and 25.

The rest of our crew arrived in stages, Brian & Rachel with a cooler full of beer, a watermelon and the aforementioned cookies, Brad with a couple tubs of salads and the news of the late cancellation, and Karl, Paul, Devan, Conrad (and family), Jeff (who it was great to see again), and even a last minute appearance by Thunder, fresh off house-hunting/moving bedlam.

There were a few other Ultimate players out at the fields. A Navy contingent of a half dozen were there and so we gave them a few players and scrimmaged. And we all clearly aren’t aligned well with the DC Ultimate modus operandi for calling games for weather…nobody from our actual opponent, Sloths! Sloths! Sloths! showed up indicating that they actually knew not to come out until the very last minute before a game.

Of course the WAFC was shown up by some local volleyball pickup league who wasn’t afraid of a little rain that didn’t actually come down or standing water, of which there wasn’t any. They had all their matches going on down on one end of the field. Why we didn’t play last night is inexplicable to me. I’ve played in an Ultimate league where we played in 30 mph winds and 7 degree temperatures so an overcast sky, with barely a breeze, and 75 degrees sounded idyllic to me. Is Jeana secretly on the WAFC board?

Rain or no rain, the Buzzards will be playing at lunch today. I’m looking forward to my last game before two weeks at the beach.

Pull!

Unveiling the orange and blue

Finally the new pinnies were unveiled yesterday! And a good thing I decided to order a dozen of each color because we had a huge crowd of 19 out yesterday! We played substitutes for the first time in a while. Want to welcome out 3 new players – Pinsuda, Lilly, & Lizzy. It was great to have you all out and hope you’ll join us as often as you can.

It was a nice return to our June numbers too after struggling to get a game 3 days last week. Hope to see this continue. If those of you who only play 1-2 days a week could partner up with other similar scheduled players and arrange to have your off days alternate with somebody else that would be fantastic! : )

So what’s the verdict on the new pinnies? I heard several comments yesterday (some of which are repeatable). Great new CG colors, sexy, long, durable, more to hold the stink. It’s the shirt with a little something for everyone. In fact I heard Lilly & Lizzy deliberating before the game as to whether or not they had to wear their shirts underneath them. I’m not going to make any definitive rule about this one way or another. I’ll tell you it’s been done before (I seem to recall Leroy shedding his shirt one day last summer) and some of us look better than others in mesh. For you women who play in some sort of half shirt/sports bra looking top I don’t think it would cause too big a ruckus. I’m going to leave this up to common sense. The problem I see in that is that I heard something about that on the radio last week – the commentator mentioned that he thought “common sense wasn’t very common”.

I’ll tell you what’s nice about having 19. It’s almost impossible to make the teams too uneven when pairing them off to begin play. We seemed pretty well matched up yesterday. The other challenge though is when you have subs running on and off the field is figuring out which defense you’re playing. Particularly when you have teammates who respectively love and hate zone or man defense.

Here was one conversation yesterday on the orange side – Todd running in from his rest on the sideline… “Okay, what are we playing?” as we readied to pull.

“Well” I offered “Paul just went out so we can go back to man if you want but he hates it so we were playing zone”.

And then whoever was pulling didn’t wait for the consensus before launching the disc and so we ran down in some bastardized combination of matchup zone which I, by the way, almost always prefer playing.

Blue wasn’t fairing much better figuring out what they were playing. As I was running off the field one play I heard Bob shout “Okay, let’s shift to zone!”

“I thought that’s what you were playing” I said half jokingly to which Erick replied,

“Well, that’s what we wanted you to think.”

Well, what I think was that there seemed to be somewhat of a lack of scoring going on yesterday on both sides so whatever the defense was must have been working or we just weren’t doing great getting the offensive schemes going.

Orange did have a stretch of a few plays where we got some short passing drives that seemed to work and on back to back plays Tim made really nice throws for scores after we worked the disc up field. On the blue side, I saw Brad, Kevin, Karl, & Erick seemed to put together a couple of weaves that worked well.

As is often the case we tried some deep throws that stayed up too long and Devan and or Bob would track down and break up.

Conrad, who would be the first to tell you that he sometimes drops throws he has not business dropping, caught a couple passes yesterday I thought he had no business catching. One was a juggling catch that he started batting around mid field and caught just before going out of bounds on the sideline. Lizzy in her first day out laid out a couple times on some great hustle plays.

Kelly! Isn’t it great that you aren’t the only female playing anymore? Yesterday’s turnout of 4 women was the best that I can remember in a long time. And when you add yesterday’s additions to yourself, Bridgette, Annette, & Jeana, and if Carolyn can ever stop hurting herself and get back on the pitch, we’d have quite a women’s team.

So Joe, your worries yesterday morning when you RSVPd to the game invite about it possibly being a 3rd game in a row that you could play and then didn’t get enough players for turned out to be for naught. Plenty of Buzzards in the nest yesterday.

Just a reminder for those of you playing Wednesday night in our corporate league to go onto Roster Manager and confirm if you haven’t already. I think at last check I saw that we only had 9 confirmed players 6 men and 3 women. If you aren’t playing but just to come out and watch, bring family and friends and come cheer us on! Game time is 1830 at the polo fields. See Washington Area’s Frisbee club’s page for directions. Folks that are playing, be there at 1745 for rehearsal.

"Wings" is leaving the Runway.

Farewell Matt – We’ll miss your Hello Kitty, Hannah Montana, and Lizzy McGuire towels, your calling yourself in by one cone but not the other (that’s a straight line between two points right?), your cries of “Ball up!” even though we continue to play this game with discs, and your politically incorrect sense of humor always welcome on this pitch. It’s been great having you with the Buzzards and we wish you Fair Winds as you travel to Texas.

Yesterday, and the last couple days really were fitting weather to send off somebody to Texas. Consider yourself acclimated as the humidity has been oppressively heavy. Or as another Texan Buzzard put it “You know what they call this weather in Houston? Spring!” Well, in fact Brian, it’s still technically just spring here also.

The first day of summer does not come until the 21st which coincidentally or not will also be my first full day of waking up for two weeks at the beach in Kitty Hawk, NC. Not that I’m counting the days or anything.

Prior to beach trip though we have time for some great Ultimate (and I’m sure there will be some great games when I’m gone as well). We’ve been playing in front of bleachers the last couple of days out on the parade field. Well, I guess more accurately, we’ve been behind the bleachers. Now we probably all have some interesting “behind the bleachers” stories to tell but this blogger doesn’t really want to head down those clouded and time embellished lanes right now.

What has actually happened behind the bleachers, which we assume are set up on the parade field for some pass and review ceremonies coming up on Ft. McNair, is that we’ve had two big games. The Buzzards are on a roll lately and it’s been a rare occurrence when we haven’t had at least a dozen players out recently.

So yesterday, when there was a wicked thunderstorm going on about the time I was sending out the morning invite, I suspected the potential weather might scare away some players. And, in fact, the email RSVPs to the game were sparse. Only 9 confirmed players on the way out to the pitch for Matt’s final game. But, as has been the pattern lately, plan for at least an extra 25-30% to show up.

You know there is a saying in some other team sports that “speed kills”. Well I’m finding that “heat kills speed” and our sprinters like Leroy, and Devan were showing signs of that as I noticed them walking up the field several times yesterday. Kevin and I continue to do our best tortoise impersonations and Tom keeps wondering why I’m sticking all the “old and slow” guys on the same team.

May have dubbed Steve with a new nickname yesterday – “Gunn” not to be confused with his handling aptitude but his desire to walk off the “Runway” with his pinnie on. Many of you won’t get this reference and so I’ll refer you to Erick who did know the Project Runway host’s name which may have only been slightly less disturbing than the fact that I used it. He “at least had an excuse” he claimed by living in a house full of girls. I’m blaming mine on 123 Washington Ave. and Alexa, Kelsey, Margaret & Mary.

Speaking of pinnies! Today will mark the unveiling of the new pinnies for the Buzzards so come out and see the new colors as we retire the green and gold for something a little more organizationally inspiring (or if you prefer, they can be considered the colors of Virginia, Illinois, Florida, or some Scandinavian’s national soccer team which escapes me). At any rate, gone will be the plunging neckline and thong models of the gently worn pinnies we’ve used.

Looking forward to seeing you all in them. I’m not sure they make the Tim Gunn’s 10 Essential Elements list but I think we’ll look “mahhhhhhhrvelous”!

Redemption Songs...

Submitted by Bill

Old pirates, yes, they rob I;
Sold I to the merchant ships,
Minutes after they took I
From the bottomless pit.
But my hand was made strong
By the hand of the Almighty.
We forward in this generation
Triumphantly.
Won't you help to sing
These songs of freedom?
'Cause all I ever have:
Redemption songs,
Redemption songs.

And those of us who had such a brutally awful game on Wednesday, and who came out yesterday had a bit of redemption in a much better game.

As usual, the 15-player game had a much different dynamic than the 7-player game and short passing was the rewarded premium. Of course with 8-7 the short passing lanes are often clogged with hands, legs, and other assorted body parts. Rodney even spiked one pass into my forehead yesterday. To add to that crowd control challenge yesterday, the breeze had picked up pretty nicely by game time and even though we were playing north to south to try and mitigate its advantage going one way all the time, it was still a factor blowing across the field generally and making the long pass a scarce commodity yesterday.

I believe yesterday was Justin’s last day of BPUC and though he hasn’t been out much of late we managed a great turnout for his farewell game.

There were a few awesome catches yesterday. Devan had a classic sideways layout for a score that required a great last second grab. Phil & Swinny also had very nice grabs. Tired of chasing Bob & Hollan around the past couple weeks, I decided to put myself on their team yesterday. Hey! You guys can both throw too!

There was some pre-game discussion as to what SOTG does and does not involve and suffice it to say that any friendly touching of anatomical areas of another player, while not specifically outlawed should fall back to that “two consenting adults” rule. Thanks for that mental image Rodney & MattP.

Thanks also to Frank, Eli, Conrad, & Jorge for rounding out the big crowd.

Anybody think we can get permissive orders to travel to Texel Beach for a tournament in June. Ah, now the real question…does anybody, without using Google, actually know where Texel Beach is? You might be surprised…the hint…it’s in the land of my ancestors.

Hope everybody has a safe and happy holiday weekend. Hollan, let this substitute for the “safety speech” you’ll be missing today. In all seriousness folks, even if you are being safe, there is a good chance that if driving, long hours, or alcohol is going to be involved in your weekend that somebody may not practice the best safety practice. Please be careful, watch out for your family and friends, be the example of good judgment and come back to the field in one piece next week.

Thank you to all those who have paid the Ultimate price so that I can go out on a field during lunch break of my job to play a game.