Sectionals 04 and 05

Things I should be doing: Sleeping or working on an assignment for grad school
Things I am doing: Updating the blog

Actually, I might be in violation of the teams "lights out 11 hours before the first round" policy. Whoops. It is day one of sectionals afterall.

Sectionals 2004- Junior Year, State College PA.

Boy was West Penn weak this year. I had missed the entire spring season due to a fracture in my fifth metatarsal. We started the year with five players, so we recruited like crazy that year and have the following players still currently on the A team: J Sus, Bobby D, Willie, Joonks, Sip and Trent Owens*; as well as a whole mess of B teamers. We were building, to say the least. Fraggle was leading the D line, Mike Lo was the only real thrower on the O line, Brent was the only real cutter, TallE hadnt asserted himself in any way yet, and we had picked up Andrew that spring. We were young, and I was frustrated. Rather than realize what we were going through in rebuilding that year, and fueled by the frustration of my foot I became very bitter and yelled constantly, and was a drag and was an unsupportive leader. It was a great learning experience for me, but I was very hard on the players, and I am honestly surprised how many of them took so much from me. To this day my behavior as a leader that spring is certainly what I am most regretful for in my career. At the same time it taught me a great deal about being a leader, particularly helping me now as a teacher (although its a lot easier to just be supportive of a 12 year old than a 20 year old).

Anyway, back to the point: day one we opened with a win over PSU-B, then we lost to Bucknell 11-1. Eleven to One. 11 to one. They threw a four man cup, we didnt have handlers to play it, 11 to 1. That game hurt. Then we lost to Yuk by one or two upwind breaks. Then we beat someone bad...oh yeah, St. Francis, and I got to hobble around for a couple of points...yay. We opened Sunday in a must win with Boro. We played very strong D early and put a lot of pressure on them as they dinked around in the backfield, but eventually they worked it out and scored. As we went along we dropped and got broken to a big loss in the end. Losing to boro...oh man. There might have been a game inbetween, but all I remember is winning a tight game with Susquehanna to take 5th. This sectionals hurt. This season hurt. It took so much out of me not to be able to play. I was coming into that spring in great shape. I remember in early practices I was a cutter in our Ho-Stack and I was getting open on Brent regularly and I was really excited to play.

Sectionals 2005- Senior Year: Edinboro PA

I spent the fall semester of my senior year in London. I refractured my foot while I was there. They did a test on my foot to see if there was still blood going to the bone (meaning that it was healing) and I escaped needing surgery by the thinest of margins. The UPenn doctor also got some company to hook me up with a $3000 Ultrasound machine that I used in the morning and before bed that vibrated my bone very slightly to enhance blood flow, I also took calcium pills (I doubt they helped). Anyway, my foot healed in time for me to play a game at our first tournament and work my way back in from there.

The season started with a meeting at my house where we set a goal to make nationals. Driving this was a win the guys had in the fall over Deleware, who was coming off of a nationals bid. Little did we know Udel would go 1-2 at reggies that year. Anyway, we set the goal and we set off to work. We also had an A and B team for the first time. We made the cut at 15 players, where there seemed to be a natural cutoff in talent. That group of players was special. We became extremely tight, we had great chemistry on both lines, everyone knew what everyone else was going to do, we ran Stu into the ground playing him both ways. To this day, setting such an outlandish goal and simply putting our heads down and getting to work is one of the most special experiences I have been a part of. The improvement over the course of that spring was remarkable, and being a part of that group of guys has given me the belief in myself that if I truly dedicate myself to any purpose in my life, and if I am willing to make the sacrifices and put in the work to accomplish something- anything is possible.

We played almost our entire season out of region to play the best competition we could and to play in the best conditions we could. Because of this, I dont think we knew exactly how good we were going into sectionals. We found out pretty quickly that we were pretty good. We won every game at sectionals by 12 goals. My personal favorite was playing Bucknell. We were up 10-1 I believe and Weasel suggested that we play the couple players who didnt play all the time and chill it out. I gave him a death stare and said "we crush." Unfortunately we didnt get up 11-1, which is what I really really wanted. We did win 15-3. Sunday morning we had Yuk in the finals. I will never get tired of beating Yuk. Never. Ever. I got to matchup on Tommy, which is fun, Josh had Drews number, Rob had Dean, Andrew had K2...we just matched up really well on them on D, and then there was the O line, whose zone O was beautiful in the few points they got to play. We just stomped on them 15-3. This was also the origin on the SWC: Sectionals Wiffleball Championships (I just made that name up). This is one of the classic things that makes this team so special to me.

Regionals 2005- Senior Year: Princeton, NJ

We opened with Columbia. Have I mentioned how bad we are in the mornings? Well, we almost screwed the pooch as the two seed going to Universe point with the 15 seed. They had Krishna (I think) and big John who is on Pike now, they were good and played the whole game. We also had an inexcusable drop that would have ended the game easy. Anyway, we won, and Weasel said to never speak of this game again, so...no more. Next Yuk came out and tried to play us for 5 points. We were up 4-1 or 5-0, so they packed it in. This let Josh score 9 goals in front of some cum-dumpster he wanted to impress, which made him happy. We then had a bye before playing Rutgers, who were upsetting bitches left and right. We rode the O line to a win in this game, as the D line got a few breaks, but the O really brought it home working the 4 handler zone O set beautifully. Raj, Mio and Billy really played well for Rutgers in this game, but were understandably tired.

Sunday we had Queens in the final. We knew this would be a tough game from our earlier mathcup at Spring Fling. We also knew we played 13 players. Weasel made the decision that if we werent looking to strong at half, to consider saving our top players for the game to go. We started out on a run, despite some sloppy early play from both sides. Mothership came back to take half 8-7. Queens got the first two out of half, Stu pulled his groin and TallE's back was in bad shape. We packed it in. GW was our opponent in the game to go. One of their captains had conveniently broken his arm horsing around after saturday, but we also lost Stu- arguably our most important player, so both teams were battling down. We started out taking a lead. I just watched some footage of this the other weekend thanks to the generosity of one "House" (thanks again house!) and was reminded that it was uglier than I recalled. I had three D's this game: sky on Spears, huck D on Naylor, point block on Link. I had some bad turnovers, but threw some decent breaks as well. We were up fairly big the whole game until letting them in at the end. According to Vatz's recollection we were up 12-7 before letting them back in to 13-12. We won with Brent throwing a hammer to empty space with the rationale (explained later) "I was sure SOMEONE would get there." Well, I did and then threw the winning goal to Andrew. Unfortunately we dont have any pics of this celebration. We do have pics of a false celebration caused by Naylor saying I called a foul prior to Brent throwing a goal to Josh, which was just ridiculous. No matter. We won. We reached our goal. An absurd goal based on the previous spring and fall. The whole process was incredible and unforgettable. The joy of reaching such high expectations is still one of the best feelings, if not the best, that I have ever had. I put so much of myself into the team that season, and I cared about it so deeply, and cared about each of those guys so much. I have a pic of that team on my desktop and on my wall. The picture is of us with our arms around one another in a circle, that is the way that I would like to remember that team. We only had ~15 guys, but everyone was at every practice, we trained together, we became a single unit and we worked out fucking asses off to make the jump. And it was worth every ounce of energy we put into it.

Nationals 2005- Senior Year: Corvallis, OR

This was the icing on our cake. We were happy to be there. We wanted to compete, we wanted to see what nationals was, and we wanted to prove that we belonged. We did some of those things. We played Georgia tough, but our D line just had no offense that game, only got one break. We had a decent second half against UCSD (of course, they won the first one 8-1). We took half against CUT, but lost it thanks to some retardo drops. J Goldstein also made a sick layout PB on one of my hucks.

As the tournament went on we realized that they teams were not super teams or some incredible thing that we couldnt fathom. Those teams were very good, they didnt make many unforced errors and all their players were skilled, and they had large teams. But as the weekend went on we realized more and more that we could play with them if we just didnt piss ourselves because they were "oh my god- UBC!!" or "oh my god- Carleton!!!" or whatever. Unfortunately, we didnt get what we wanted most- which was a rematch with Queens, as they forfeited the placement game to us.

Nats was a good learning experience. We got our feet wet. We got a taste for it, and I think we all walked away wanting some more. This years team has been different, but good...we'll see how badly we want it over the next few weeks.