Just got back from regionals and here are some random thoughts...I'm pretty tired so sorry if some/most of this is incoherent.
1) Sometimes your best just isn't good enough (and that's ok) - I gotta say my kids played about as well as they can play this weekend. We took care of the teams we should take care of in the early rounds on Saturday setting up a game with Virginia to see who would be the 1 seed overall going into Sunday. We took half 7-6, but they blanked us in the second half to win 11-7. That set us up to play NCST (who won the region) on Sunday morning. They got up by a few early but we went on a big run to make it a real barn burner. We ended up losing 15-13. In both games I thought we played really well. In the end, we just got beat by better teams with more experience. In crunch time they made more mature decisions with the disc and they definitely deserved to win. At the end of those games, I wasn't upset at all. In fact I was really pumped about how well we played. So yeah, we lost and that sucks, but I'm really happy with how well my young team played. Fun times.
2) The 13 team, 1 team advances format seems weird to me - Actually, the format makes sense to me, but the way it was implemented at AC regionals seemed a bit strange. If you're not a familiar with the format here's a quick rundown - A Pool has 5 teams (games to 13), B and C Pools have 4 teams (games to 15). Ok so far so good. That makes sense to me. My problem with the way it was implemented at AC regionals was this-All of the pools were on the same round schedule. In other words all rounds were 1 hour and 45 minutes long. Making all the rounds the same time length amounts to making all of the games to the same score and as games tend to get capped. At AC regionals the bottom line was this - the top 2 seeds from B and C pools last game started at 12:30, while the top 2 seeds from A pool had to play two more games after that round. When you factored in the rain delay, we didn't finish our game against UVA until 7:30ish. Seems like it would have made more sense to make the time caps longer in B and C pool.
3) Congrats and Good Luck to Our Readers/Contributers -First, congrats to Jojah. The dawgs looked very strong at times this weekend. I've only seen the top men's teams once this year and that was back in November at CCC, but if the Dawgs play like they did this weekend, they're going to be a tough out in Corvallis. Finally, good luck to Tarr and Purdue, and Miriam (if you're still reading this thing) and Michigan next weekend at Great Lakes Regionals. I'll be pulling for you guys.
1 comment:
1) Great perspective there. Ultimately, it's about the jurney, not the destination. You gave a great team their toughest game of the tournament because you had prepared yourselves right. You have a ton to be proud of.
2) Good point - we never specify that the rounds should be commensurately longer in the smaller pools. We should put something about round timing in the manual. On the "to-do" list.
The only hitch in this particular case is that teams that play the wild card game end up getting more ultimate than any other team. But you can avoid that game by finishing top two. And moreover, in a 1-team advance format I'm more interested in balancing playing time among the top teams.
3) Thanks. It's really been a dream season so far. Still some work to be done. And congrats to the Jojah for their first AC regional championship.
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