After the “cold front” last week, this past Sunday’s weather was glorious, albeit a little dry and lacking the summer humidity that I have grown accustomed to but GNV league players just weren’t feeling it today with a lot of teams playing understaffed, or forfeiting completely! The true extent of how dry it has been was when Brad ate it hard on the ground after an attempted cut, and created his own personal dust bowl on the fields of Citizens.
At 2:10, we manage to scramble a solid seven on the line, and Rhinos/Shanny/random word generator team still only had six so we decided to start play 6v6 until Schimmel showed up and made it evens! Fortunately, for Shaaron, Matt and Jared showed up unfashionably late (Matt was still putting his cleats on and swapping his shirt out on the line) but allowed us to have subs for the rest of the game. Despite being short staffed, this was one of the better games we have played with lots of quick passes, sharp cuts, and short throws into the end zone. Jules and Emory played the whole game despite our team having only one FMP. It was so good to see Emory back after her rib injury and still able to cut deep and out run me most of the game! She never stops moving and I want her cardio! After breaking the opposition twice in the first half, we came out of halftime on O and just stepped up again, creating space, making direct throws, with high completion rates! Great chemistry between KJ, Jared, Jacques and Aaron in the handler space, with Matt and Bailey with fast cuts in the middle, and Paul and Chip pistoning the wings really brought this team together this game! We finished the game with an up line throw to Josh who was unmarked in the end-zone bringing the final score 7-11 to us!
The second game for us was a different story. After losing Aaron to music and playing as hard as we did in the first game, coming up against Clyde and Brandon’s team was always going to be work, especially with less subs and fatigue setting in. We cut less, made mistakes, dropped easy discs, and forced hucks to empty spaces giving the Mud Dawgs a chance to pull away by 4 until we eventually got a completed play into the endzone. They scored and broke us to take half 6-1. After some words of wisdom from our very own Dr. Jones during half time, we decided to play the second half as if the score was 0-0. We scored 4 more points to only lose the second half 4-5, however the damage was already done in the first half and a final throw from Ben to Bonnie in the end zone, that I failed to read correctly for a D, closed the game 11-5 to the MudDogs! Two points that I want to make about team Shaaron is 1) that all of our 5 points in this game were assisted by 5 different players, and scored by 5 different players giving more players the opportunity to contribute to our stats sheet and 2) despite losing the first half, we came out and battled to the end to make sure our point difference isn’t as bad has it could be.