Holy crap I'm so happy/excited/high-on-life-and-ultimate right now because we're in the NE Regionals Finals tomorrow!!!! Today was truly a great day for ultimate for sMITe...
We started off against Conn College. We were a little stagnant in the beginning of the game. It was difficult getting people to initiate cuts and continues. There would be a cut, and then no continuation so the dump would have to work to get it back. And then it would happen again and again. But a few points into the game we got into the flow of things and our offense started looking pretty good. There were a lot of great points this game. A few that I remember distinctly were Chenxia making some amazing cuts and grabs in the endzone for 3 points in a row. I remember putting it to Jenny in the endzone a few times. MIT came out 15-6.
Next game was against Wesleyan. We were so pumped up: this was the game we needed to win. We played a lot of trap zone and FM zone and clam and it worked pretty well for us. Our offense flow looked amazing. There were continuation cuts, both in and away, and lots of dump swing and scoring on the breakside. We also had a lot of fans (Shuang came, and some of Doris' and my friends came out - thanks guys!) and it was just a really exciting game. I couldn't stop smiling and jumping around. In the end MIT came out 15-5.
Semi-finals game was against #1 seed Dartmouth. We started off with zone defense but they just walked right through our zone, throwing many hammers and working it through and around the cup to score the first point. The next point Dartmouth put zone D on us as well and we answered their point with one of our own: we worked the disc up the field and scored without a turnover. After that neither of us played zone anymore. The rest of the game was man defense, which was awesome. They played a lot of horizontal stack but we did a pretty good job of covering their downfield, and Erica/Anne/Jenny/Smeri and many others covered their handlers pretty well. There was this one point where Smeri didn't have a dump, we were a few yards away from the endzone, and she threw a hammer, which was caught by Jenny. That was weird (in the sense that Smeri doesn't throw hammers). The whole first half we were either tied or sMITe was up by 1-2 points, and we took half at 8-7. From half, we took the next few points 10-7. We traded more points and we found ourselves at 14-13. Then it was the longest point ever. I think it was about 15 minutes long. There was one point in time, when we were on D and Jenny's girl threw it to someone in the endzone for the score. And then we found out it was an uncontested stall and it went back to Jenny's girl. Dartmouth and sMITe took turns working it up the field and then getting D-ed. Doris and Erika made a lot of awesome Ds in the endzone, and we would keep turning it at our endzone too. Daphne laid out for a disc and her head hit the ground and had to call and injury. I think she said it was probably a minor concussion... I hope she's okay. And then Smeri caught the disc and keeled over because her calf cramped. So she had to take an injury as well. After a few more passes, Jenny had the disc a few yards away from our endzone, and she called a time-out. When we re-set Catherine and I were the dumps but neither of us got open because we didn't give ourselves very much room to begin with, and Jenny threw a stall-8 floaty backhand to Erika who was in the middle of the field to score. All of us looked at the observer, who called it in and then we all rushed onto the field to hug/cry/jump up and down/scream at each other. It was the biggest rush ever. The greatest part was that everyone played in this game. Yes, we did sub competitively, but every teammate got to play in at least a few points and all contributed to our victories today.
Holy crap we're in the finals. I am so proud of this team and all the great plays that people accomplished today. I'm super excited for the finals tomorrow.... ahhhhhhhhhhhh!!! :) Good job everyone and get lots of rest :)
And thanks Shuang and Liver for coming out to watch and support us :) Yay yay yay...!!!!!
http://www.upa.org/scores/tourn.cgi?div=34&id=4424
