Friday, August 28, 2015

Nationals Thoughts

With the fall season underway for Illinois, it's about time I wrote down some scattered thoughts about nationals.

Things unrelated to our team:

  • Food trucks = great. I was sad that they weren't there for all of the weekend. I had a great soup-thing on Friday and a fantastic pulled chicken sandwich on Saturday.
  • The Kansas women had some pretty cool dark jerseys. Oregon's women had a nice kit as well, as they usually do. I didn't like Stanford's whites. Too busy. I liked the Carleton darks and UBC whites. Didn't see too many other women's kits.
  • On the men's side: Texas A&M darks were too much, but the whites were fantastic. Florida State had the best universal kit (white and dark together). UNC was pretty meh. Oregon was just okay. Colorado Texas, Pitt, and UMass were classic, clean-cut. Yngve was talking to me the other day about how everything is shifting with jersey designs now given the front number requirement. UCF had some decent enough jerseys but I feel conflicted about the solid circle print with the number inside, seems a little odd.
  • The catered dinner for the players on Sunday was decent; it was nice to have warm free food after sitting in the rain.
  • Sitting in the cold rain to watch windy ultimate is kind of taxing. The things I do for love...
  • The men's final was hard to watch. UNC ran away with it from the beginning. The women's final was epic. Even with the wind, I was still hooked on what was going on every point.
  • Jesse Shofner is awesome and maybe even a bit scary and probably faster than me *Somewhere Jon McKoy says: "Of course she's faster than you, everyone is faster than you."* *I miss Jon.*
  • Watching Pitt lose Sunday morning was equal parts exciting and saddening. I love the machine that is the Pitt program. I love that the game is business for them. I also love that UCF just showed up with big hearts (after losing to teams like Illinois earlier in the year...) and cruised into semis. I love that UCF ran sprints after losing in semis.
Things kind of related to our team:
  • Earlier this year McKoy and I were having a discussion and he mentioned how I wasn't anything special, I just had "horses" (him, Pro, Jarred). The Maryland game definitely swayed this argument in McKoy's favor. I can recall at least four terrible decision hucks that I threw to one of these three, and goodness me, they dragged everything in. I'm not sure I even had a turn the whole game. Here's to the horses. I'll never forget being on the east sideline about 30 yards out from the south endzone putting up this awful blade backhand thing to a crowd of people and having Jarred jump perfectly and save me for a goal. It felt good to win a game. I remember thinking afterwards, "Okay, so, we do belong here. This is it. We can compete."
  • ...then we played UNC and even though we technically put up more points on them than anyone else they beat (obviously not Oregon on Saturday) over the long weekend, I'll be darned if it felt like they were just toying with us the entire game. It was like they had this "Okay, well, I guess we have to play this team, so, like, I guess we will," mentality. I think we tried to guard Nethercutt with at least four or five different individuals throughout the game, and he would still get the disc, and he would still throw pretty much whatever he wanted. It was fun to play in the stadium against a team we knew was good (although at this time I still thought Pitt would win it all).
  • Saturday morning, Oregon knew if they didn't get wins they'd be done, and gosh they sure played like it. We had a couple of miscues, but they were fired up and really, really quick. I enjoyed my matchup with #66, he was a good guy who definitely got the best of me a few times.
  • Florida State was a good game, maybe one of my favorites of the tournament. We were right with them going into halftime, and they pulled away at the beginning of the second half and that was all she wrote. Their top three (Larocque, Roney, Holcomb) were all that the hype said they were. Larocque and Roney could put the disc wherever they wanted and were athletic enough to be multidimensional threats. Holcomb was a total workhorse downfield. We lost this game and it was hard to swallow I had one more game of college ultimate left. I remember talking to Walden saying I wasn't ready to be done, and he said something along the lines of how it's a journey everyone must take.
  • The Cincinnati game was a lot of fun. Early on Marty threw a low pass downwind that I failed to scoop out of the dirt, and I remember being a little worried. Somewhere, Illinois picked up the pieces and put them together for one last ride. Pro was a monster; they knew he was going deep every point and they still couldn't stop him. I literally heard people yell "That's the play!" and then Pro would catch a goal.
  • It was tough to be done but it was nice to end on a win. RIP, college career.