Looking forward to Free State

Free State is February 25-26th. That means we have 5 weeks to go. 5 weeks is quite misleading as it lends to the illusion of time. We only have 14 practices between now and our first game. 8 of these practices we don't even have the opportunity to touch a disc, we also have 4 more Irwin practices and 2 more skill sessions in the Armory.

Totaled up this amounts to about 30 hours of Ultimate. Here in lies the illusion, 5 weeks in reality crunches down to 30 hours. If this still doesn't mean anything to you then consider there are NBA players who spend 30 hours a week on their shots. We have 30 hours to work on everything, over 5 weeks.

It would be easy to fret, it would be easy to go to Free State not perform well and blame the lack of practice. It would be easy to lose to Kansas and Iowa again, and say "well we haven't been able to work on very much as a team," it would be easy to say, "everything will click later."

Or, we could ball as hard as we can possibly ball, we could stop being huge bitches, look our teammates in the eye and do everything we can to not let the guy next to us down. We could go out and throw for 2 hours a week, we could get ourselves to every group lifting time, we can put more weight on the bar, we can come to practice fatigued knowing that practicing hard while already being tired is improving our ability to play hard in the third and fourth games of a day. We could just go nuts and play like our hair is on fire, and when we get to our first tournament of the year we could have tons of fun showing the ultimate community how sick Illinois is going to be this year.

Don't trick yourself into believing that we don't want to "peak to early." Iowa won this tournament last year and made it to Semi-finals of Natties.

Mentally it is much easier to compartmentalize the season, if you focus in on the next tournament versus focusing in on Regionals then the season ends up feeling a lot shorter, and it ends up being a lot more enjoyable since the motivating factor is constantly changing and you aren't carrying one weight for the next 15 weeks.

This is a sweet time for us, our season is now and if we seize every moment we have together for the rest of the season then we are going to be in a position to overtake the 2008 legacy, and that is something I want more than anything else.