Game 1 – Shea and Jia’s Stoned Puppies
Shea might have eaten too many dog biscuits the night before and looked a bit rough coming into this game. Despite that, I was still a bit worried in how our old timer zone would work out against the lineup of the Nguys, Chuck, Clyde, and Jia. Fortunately, they had some chemistry issues while we looked like a team that just finished a club season together. My early season favorite for Steal of the Draft, Nic Bainter, had several big Ds as the deep in our zone. Even our brand spanking new player, Michael, got a goal saving D as a wing. Offensively, we moved the disc pretty easily, with the cutters quickly giving the disc back to the handlers. Most of our turns came on underthrown hucks, while a good number of Scoober’s turns came from Fleury-esque hucks out the back of the end zone. As Shea mentioned, we had several next level throws that few people ever expect. At a high stall count, Jared knew he had to dump the disc to Manny, but looking at him and throwing it directly to him would have cued the defense in to the plan. Instead, he analyzed the placement of Shea’s foot, did some quick trigonometry, and calculated that if he just flicked it as hard as he could, it would bounce so far off Shea’s foot that it would go the 10 yards directly to Manny. Unfortunately, Manny was also unaware of this next level throw and the disc bounced off his chest for a turn. Another next level throw let Liz show off that she should probably be playing a real sport like volleyball instead, but thankfully still graces us with her presence. She jumped up for a very overthrown underneath pass and straight up spiked it down, directly into Pat’s waiting arms. This was followed up a few throws later by what looked to be, to the untrained eye, another overthrow of Liz, but was actually just an opportunity for Emory to show off her diving skills. Pat got in on the freaky throws with a goal line elevator pass to me that I had to body Shea out to catch. The chaos left a wide open Emily for a goal. With no answer for our wizardry, we sent Scooby back to the Mystery Machine, 9-3.
Game 2 – Horrorbly Tired Flicks
The normally exuberant bunch of Billy, Ellie, and Joe seemed a bit off this game. Joe was probably stressing about the Jags inevitable loss while Ellie was coming off back to back weekends of 8+ hours of friz. The first few points, both teams were trying to figure out the weird field, wind, and each other. Slightly sloppy play from both put the game on serve with us down 3-4. At that point, we ramped up the energy while it seemed like Horror Flicks was running out of steam. We would go on an 8-2 run to finish out the game, 11-6.
The hucks from the sickly Joe just weren’t on today, which left Billy in a difficult situation several times that he wasn’t able to overcome, including a hospital pass that ended with Jared’s shoulder going full speed into Billy’s ear (both players were blind to each other trying to track the disc). Billy somehow popped up from that, thankfully. On the positive side for Horror, Kay has developed into an excellent thrower since we last played together. She took a page out of our book from game 1 and somehow snuck a cross-field throw through our sideline trap of KJ’s no dump, my no swing, Jared at short deep, and our offside wing.
Trey gave us a nice energy spark, showing up just before game 2, and found the end zone 4 times. I got some revenge on Billy, after being dominated by him several times in leagues past, with multiple floaty huck Ds. Jared hit his stride this game after a rough game 1 and gave us nearly half our assists.
Looking forward to seeing what this team can do in a couple weeks when we get up to full strength. Adding Bueno and Michelle to our lineup is going to be tough for a lot of teams to match up against!