Overruled!

You can quickly assess your status on the team by trying to overrule a call made by a teammate. It's obviously acceptable for captains to have the final word when someone on your team makes a questionable call. For those of us lower on the totem pole, it comes down to a combo of respect/reputation of rules knowledge if your teammate will accept your decision or stick with theirs (if the opinions are contrary to one another).

One of the more interesting unstated rules of Ultimate:
Player A and Player B disagree on a call. If one of Player A's teammates agrees with Team B, and makes their opinion known, Player A will change their call most of the time. There is a correlation with the respect/reputation of the teammate who disagrees with Player A (and the stubbornness of Player A).
"Even your own teammate says you weren't fouled/inbounds/stripped/humped!"

This definitely leads to a lot of players from Team A either not voicing their opinions on calls (if it's contrary to their teammate) or going the "I don't know, I didn't see the play" route. Especially those on the sideline.

Is this an effective way of deciding a call? Obviously not, as your teammates could be just as wrong as the other team.
But it does pose an interesting question going back to the essence of Spirit of the Game:
At Nationals in the championship game, in the last point, a teammate of yours is called for a strip in the endzone. You, standing on the sideline, get a 100% view of the play, and it was absolutely a strip, but a debate ensues. A "No Contest" from the defender (your teammate) will lose your team the game. Do you make your opinion known even if it will cost you the game and the title?

The Illusion

Seeing as I can't go more than two straight posts without breaking the Ultimate theme, ESPN Radio has proved my "You're better off not knowing Theory" aka "Ignorance is Bliss Theory".

The Sports Guy is guest-hosting the SportsBash radio show, and I should have stayed away. It's reminiscient of a very nasaly Matthew Broderick. The show proves that you shouldn't hear the voice of good authors. Rarely, if ever, does their actual voice compare to what you think it should sound like. Likewise, Radio DJ's almost never look like what their voices make you anticipate.


Here's the breakdown of my theory:
Authors should be read, can be seen, but not heard.
Dan Barreiro should be read and heard, but not seen.
Radio personalities should be heard, can be read, but not seen.
Singers should be heard, can be seen, but not read.
TV personalities should be seen, can be heard, but not read
Exception to the above rules can be classified under the Jon Stewart corollary.

If you violate the above rules, that picture/voice/opinion will reappear in your head everytime you see/hear/read that person's work. Hence, ignorance is bliss.

On-field Personae

In ultimate, as with most sports, your on-field persona (or personae for those schizo's out there) can be drastically different than off-field. Personally speaking, I am normally very intense on the field, but not to the point of being a dink about it. If you escalate things, I have no problem getting loud, though. My favorite example is senior year at regionals, I encouraged an opposing player to "go [make love with] himself" after he labeled one of my correct calls "[cow manure]". The best part: the same player became my teammate a year later, and things were fine.

In my (short) experience, it seems that most of open elite behave the same way. You get respect when you give it. Play like a hack, expect to be hacked back. It reeks of ego, but if it's too hot in the kitchen. Our relationship with BAT has been up and down but mostly is directly correlated with the few Type A personalities from both sides. Our quarters game with Furious was that way as well, but interestingly enough, no other Nationals game was that amped up for us. Game importance obviously played a role.

I have no problem with intense on-field personalities who are extremely nice and subdued off the field. It's the on-field colossal dickheads/cheaters that try to act like saints off the field that bother me. I realize there's a separation where competition is involved, but those extreme opposite players almost seem to be acting.

Then again, there's a large difference in perspective regarding teammates versus opponents.

Who am I? Why am I here?

You'd think that working from 7AM to 9PM a couple days this week would give me more time to blog, but apparently the insurance industry never received that memo. That's what year-end does to us working stiffs.

Side note: Simmons has produced one of his funniest columns of recent memory. You should read it. I know Timmy will, and then he'll send me an email with his favorite quote. That's what captains do for their underlings.

Recounting my origins with Zero:
I played college for the best college team in Northfield not named Carleton. I never played CUT or the Hodags once in my entire college career, which is remarkable in that:
1) CUT was in our section (we were the perennial 3 seed and always lost to St. Cloud thanks to Naz, Todd, Winey and Raker)
2) We qualified for Regionals every year
Senior year, I was the D-Line captain and a handler (by necessity). From what I remember, no one on SZ even had an inkling of who I was. Although, I did get mistaken for a freshman somehow. Tryouts came, got layout D's on a captain who shall remain unnamed (one D) and UofMN players (many more than one). Incidentally, none of the UofMN guys made the team...great comedy considering the ongoing feud between Olaf and them at the time. I made SZ as one of the last picks (it is bad when you get the "you may not play that much down the stretch" speeches when you first make the team?)

Three seasons later, I'm down one of my own ACL's and up a dead guy's ACL, a quarters appearance, and a Worlds berth. We'll just call it a wash.

PS. I have a new dining room table. Should I be worried about poker chips on a good veneer (ie high quality, not crappy/cheap/thin)?

I apologize

I apologize to my thousands and thousands (re: couple) of readers for being so busy at work that I don't have anything insightful or thought-provoking to post.

Wait, who am I kidding? I've never posted anything insightful or thought-provoking.

Instead, please visit one of my favorite Craigslist posts of all-time.

It always passes the "makes me laugh out loud at work, thereby making me temporarily embarrassed" test.

Amazing what a month can do

(Blogger ate this the first time. My healthy paranoia and copy/paste saved me.)

Close to 30 days out of Nationals, even with doing some running and lifting over the past month, 2+ hours of drilling and scrimmaging indoors this past weekend thrashed me pretty well. It could be because of the marathon points (by-product of playing with a 3rd tier college team) combined with those calling lines appointing me the primary cutter on most plays. Or I might just be soft.

To improve their team, my old college team has been recruiting track, basketball and football players. They actually had one guy (soph wide receiver) come out on Sunday towards the end of practice. He was as raw as you could get (following the flight path without reading, hovering deep without cutting), but damn was he fast. It basically became a "throw it deep to the new guy" competition. Will he catch a bit of the fever and stay on? Probably not, but it was good to see a little bit of progress made on the recruiting front. For a borderline team, even 1 good athlete can help quite a bit.

P.S. Apparently Ultvillage has a clip of Bravo and SZ today. No internet at home + filters at work=No Clip of the Day for me. Someone care to fill me in on the highlight?

Previous Team Sports

Are defensive or offensive (as in offensive, not offensive) mindsets a result of assigned roles in team sports or does your personality dictate areas of strength in athletics? It's like asking which came first...fat guys or the Monster Burger?

Most ultimate players are much more effective at one versus the other, which is obvious in other sports as well (ie the recent KFAN debate on Torii Hunter versus Paul Konerko). Those that really excel at both are few.

This ended up being more a question post than a statement post, but has previous sports experience influenced your role in ultimate? Does your existing skill set have a greater pull (no pun intended)?

(As for me, I play or have played sweeper in soccer, rebounding 4-man in basketball, 2nd base in baseball, and blocker in volleyball. I appear to be set in my ways.)