Coed Revolution, August 2000

Someone posted this to rec.sport.disc:

> > Red Fish Blue Fish won the tourney. And RFBF played their little zone where the point man marks the thrower while

> >humping their leg and hacking them.

> > BOR-ING BOR-ING BOR-ING BOR-ING BOR-ING BOR-ING BOR-ING BOR-ING!

> >And the only reason RFBF won is because yerba buena's men had to goto a jam practice

I posted this in reply:

. One of the pleasures of playing on RFBF is getting to watch other people choke down their sour grapes. As our captain, Tom Kenny (recently tenured at Stanford--everyone congratulate him), noted recently, other teams just can't believe it when they get beat by a team of players who "aren't good enough" to play on _their_ team.

Anyway, the anonymous coward who posted the cogent analysis above is probably right: the only reason we won finals was such-and-such, and the only reason we won semis was blah-blah, and the only reason we won quarters was yada-yada-yada, and the only reason we went undefeated in pool play was...well, I forget, it might have been talk-to-the-hand, or perhaps it was hmmm-hmmm-hmmmm. This follows a tradition that goes back for years: the only reason we made it to Nationals finals last year was dipsy-doo, and the only reason we won Worlds was whoopsy-daisy, and the only reason we won Nationals in '98 was idunno-whaddyathink.

In truth, there are plenty of players out there who are much better than us. If you put a bunch of them on a team, they'll probably beat us. We lose plenty of games, including some big ones, especially (but not exclusively) when top Open players are involved. So it may be true that "the only reason we won" is that we weren't playing (at least for the whole game) against some of the best Ultimate players in the world. So what? I'd like to work up some righteous indignation about this kind of bad-mouthing---after all, we played hard and well, we should get some credit---but I can't, I just find it amusing. Nyahh, nyahh, we won and you didn't, Mister or Miss Coward.

As for the "boring" part, I have to disagree. In fact, it was damned exciting from my point of view, which I will now share in gory detail. I missed all of Sunday (previous commitment), but arrived just in time for the last few points of finals. Yerba Buena had been shredding our (RFBF) zone all game, apparently, and at one point scored six in a row against it, forcing us to switch to man. When I arrived, with the score around 10-10, there was a substantial crowd of spectators around the field. I don't know what guys YB had on the team earlier in the day, but they still had a bunch of strong ones, like Woody, Andy Petroff (Petrov?), and a bunch of others. If this was their team after they lost a lot of players, they must have started out with an enormous team to begin with.

I had planned on just spectating, but two of our guys (Chad Walters and Scott Sizemore, for those of you keeping notes) were out with injuries, and Mike Goodwin and Tim "Scruffy" Pfafman were fighting over which of them got to sit out the next point due to fatigue. I borrowed cleats (thanks Dan Miller), shorts, and a shirt, threw three warmup throws, jogged 40 yards, and went in with RFBF up 12-11 in a game to 13. Having played man the previous several points, we switched back to zone, perhaps anticipating that my fearsome presence at deep-deep would prevent the zone-beating throws that Yerba Buena had used earlier. Nope: they hit two upwind hammers, one of them a big one (by Andy Petroff, I think), for a pretty easy score. Tie game, 12-12, and they had the wind at their back.

We called a four-person set-play, but YB covered the pull well and we weren't able to make even the first of the called throws. After a couple of throws, Greg Wolff put up a rather unwise backhand huck---unwise because the D was well positioned and I (the intended receiver) frankly wasn't open. I cut off the angle, went to it as hard as I could, and made a good, reaching, fingertip catch just before the D got there; perhaps he was a bit complacent because I was so far out of position at the start. That left me with a (normally) routine throw to Kathrin Berkner for the score...but I had thrown only one warmup forehand, and this one was straight upwind and had to curl around the D just a bit, so I was a bit worried...needlessly, as it turns out: the throw is fine, we scored to make it 13-12, and YB starts congratulating us on the game. But we had thought it was win by two, and the (bored?) crowd was chanting "win by two, win by two", so we sent YB to the other end of the field to play it out. Our pull was at the back of their end zone, and it took them a couple of passes to work it out; then Mike Goodwin intercepted a pass up the line. I had been fronting Mike O'Dowd, and so was wide open when I caught up to the play, and received the pass right outside the end zone. An easy forehand to Jen Lee, and we won, 14-12.

My own role was kind of amusing: the rest of the team plays hard through quarters and semis and almost all of finals, and is totally exhausted when I show up at the last second and play for a total of three points, throwing two throws, both of them for goals. A star cameo.

So chalk up another win for the Fish, the team that leads the world in making other teams say "I can't believe we lost to _those_ players, none of them are that good." --Phil Price