Scores: http://scores.usaultimate.org/scores/#mixed/tournament/9648
Our first game in our six-round pool play was against Odyssey. We were down the entire game (we let them get one break on us early on) and didn't end up tying it up until 10-10, and then came back to win 13-10. Our second game was against Rorschach which we won relatively easily with a final score of 13-5. The Slow White game was a lot of fun to watch, and we did pretty well and we probably could've made it more competitive if we tighten lines, but we didn't; final score 12-9 them. We played Detroit Lions last on Sat, and got burned deep one too many times, final score 13-10 them.
On Sunday, we played Apocalypse Meow first game, won 13-8. Then we won the last pool play game against Sucker Punch (which I just learned is a movie), coming back from 7-8 to win 10-8. That was a really fun game because everyone was super pumped up!!
Some highlights that we talked about afterwards:
- Bill's 85-yard huck to Doris for the score
- Pretty zone O
- Jenny cutting and catching aggressively
- Matty catching a D and then dropping it on purpose (no one really noticed, right? :P)
- Wu's double-D in one point (point-block) and then D'ed someone in the endzone, but they were both caught and they scored. But they were still nice Ds... haha :)
- Nolan's pretty flick huck to Wu in the endzone
- Kes and NG got a couple nice layout Ds, sometimes making up a looot of ground to get there.
- Dillon and Yang's awesome talk from the sidelines
- Sluts made some pretty key cuts/dishes this weekend. It was really awesome to watch :)
- Miriam open everywheerrree
- I laid out twice both for scores (both catching with my left hand, my uninjured side).
- While standing 5 yards from the endzone line, trapped on a sideline, pump up a huge high throw to someone in the endzone, and MattyB caught it above 3 people, one of them NG, to score the winning point against Apoc Meow.
I called lines for three games on Saturday. Calling lines is really hard! I've never done it before, let alone for games/tournaments that matter. I felt so mentally exhausted after every game, like I had just taken a final or something. Actually, I read an article a few days ago about "Decision Fatigue" which describes the phenomenon that making many decisions makes a person tired so that he/she are more likely to make the "default" or lazy decisions. They studied parole board's decisions depending on the time of day and found that prisoners were more likely to be given parole during the morning or the hour right after lunch, basically times when the parole board was more awake and had the mental energy to make difficult decisions. And towards the end of the day, they tended to make the default decision not to grant parole. "The more choices you make throughout the day, the harder each one becomes for your brain, and eventually it looks for shortcuts, usually in either of two very different ways."
I definitely felt mentally fatigued after line-calling. And I wonder if my line-calling got worse throughout the day because my mental energy level for putting together good/fair lines was depleting.
There are a lot of factors that I considered during lines calling. There's men/women, handlers/cutters, primary/secondary cutters, O/D, zone positions (although that didn't really come up on Saturday) and people who play well together, I call that the gel factor. And then there's the flow of the game: Are we down? Do we need to tighten lines? And then during the Slow White game I was told that I need to always put a tall person on (Matty/Entz/Nolan). And sometimes it makes sense to keep the same line on two points in a row because things have been working well for them.
And all these factors need to be taken into consideration the moment immediately after the previous point ends. Ideally the line is called within 5-10 seconds after the previous point ends. If I was too involved in a point, cheering from the sidelines, it took me more time to get a line together. And if I was thinking about the next line I was going to call (which is usually two lines, one O and one D because you don't know which one is needed yet), I felt myself not really paying attention to what was happening on the field. Or maybe I was taking all of this too seriously :/
One thing that I definitely struggled with (and I think a lot of other women who call lines too) is the "unfairness" of playing time. If we're down a lot, we're going to play our O line more and the D line won't be getting much playing time. Plus, during the Odyssey game, we played 4 women for a lot of the O points because our women were our strong point, and when our roster only has 8 women and 16 men, a lot of the men won't be getting much playing time. There were definitely some games when some people played only 0-3 points per game. I'm sorry :(
I think I started to get a hang of calling lines maybe after a game and a half. Many times it was, "Yay! We won the point! CRAP I need to call the next line NOW... um um um, crap." After a while it got easier, but it was still tiring and mentally exhausting. Anyway it was definitely an experience and I have a newfound appreciation for people who call lines (like Hatch Michelle and Jin!)
