Stop thinking
I miss my hour. I have a headache. My ankle hurts so much that it's overshadowing the rest of my pains. Today was a good day. I didn't mean to play Ultimate. I wore the going-out-spectacles. I didn't pack my cleats or my ankle brace or a red jersey. Yes, I wore shorts and a white jersey, but those other items are pretty essential, I thought.

P had some extra cleats. B taped my ankle. I raided my running shoes and made some in-soles. We went white. I tried to keep my glasses on my face. Somewhere deep inside I wanted to play, of course. I wouldn't have done it if today had been a strictly college tournament, but the snow melt had turned Huck into Muck and so 8 teams met to play and one of those 8 was a local club team. All bets were off and CUA only had 7 active players. I made 8. That's kind of how this whole thing began 6 years ago.

First, we faced SUNY-Buffalo. We were playing well out of the HO stack, the hucks were working thanks to some pretty big throws from AJ and we found a groove. J was scoring all over the place. Turnovers were fairly scarce and despite our lack of subs, we started to pull away and we never looked back taking the game 13-5. Personally, I was struggling on my ankle, feeling slow, and feeling the lack of subs, but I did get one big guy to bite on a couple of fakes so that I could pull in a deep one. My mind is pretty fuzzy on a lot of other details, but everybody was working well together and having a good time. We won 13-5.

Next, we faced the local club team WireTap. Even with numbers, we would have been overmatched. JA gave a great speech about getting points and we set a goal to get 5-10 on this team. Talk about a blur, the details really get fuzzy for me in this game. I think they scored first and then we scored. Everybody continued to work well together. AJ kept hucking. JA was working well in the middle. B and P were doing good handler work, J was slicing through the zone and everybody was running as much as they could. K got a cleat stepping on his hand which put us down to no subs, but we kept fighting. Turnovers for our team were few and far between. I seemed to be about the biggest mess on the field. AJ threw a huge hammer/blade that just missed the outstretched fingers of my defender and then came screaming down into my chest. I couldn't hold on. JA kept throwing one more fake than I thought he was going to and I ended up throwing it away. Then in a series that baffles me almost as much as my sticky fingers, I couldn't get P to make a move on the dump, so I turned to B. He got open and I lofted the disc away from him and into his defender. To top that off, I laid out into the feet of the guy who scored on the next throw. Not sweet. Still, despite some miscues on my part, we had the early lead. We were up about 6-3 before squeaking to half at 7-6. We kept fighting, a few points seemed to last forever. WireTap did a poor job of running us to death (age no doubt played a factor) and instead decided to play into our hands for the most part. Unfortunately, our hands couldn't quite grasp victory and we lost 10-11. I know that this was the beginning of their season and that they took us lightly, but this mattered to us.

We were supposed to play 3 more games, but cramps, hands, ankles, and more left us too spent to continue. The lessons to learn: we can get in there and battle with good teams. We can do the little things right, stay close on D, turn it over less, and we can mix it up with some good teams. That's a good lesson if we can cling to it.

What a pleasure to take the field with those guys, several who I've been around for 4 years now. Yeah, Habit, yeah.