Coming off a stellar performance against a loaded Teal team in week 1, Royal Pain was ready for whatever poo Brown could throw at us. We started off on O, and very similar to week 1, had trouble connecting on our passes, rushing a couple of throws and dropping some easy catches. We would eventually score after Brown seemed to have the same problems. It became apparent early that our man defense was going to have trouble stopping Cooper, Max, and Natalie from touching the disc whenever they wanted, and Brown was able to score and then rattle off a break after more bad huck connections from us. We’d settle down on offense and play much more reliably from there out.
Unlike week 1, the wind was a pretty consistent factor in this game, which let us play a lot more zone and really work out the kinks we showed in week 1. Maddie lost to Amelia in RPS and was forced to learn how to play up front in the zone. Her first point was a marathon of a point, with our front line generating turn after turn from the handling duo of Max and Cooper. Great positioning forced them to make risky throws and we were eventually able to capitalize to get our break back. Somewhere around the 3-3 mark, all of my former teammates on Brown thought that I was on their team. Cooper threw directly at me up front in the zone, Natalie hucked it to me when I was deep-deep, Max misfired an upwind huck that Nevin and I team D’d. By half-time I racked up a Jared-esque number of zone D’s, finishing with 7 in the game. Between all the zone D’s and shooter-Lyle coming in to run the offense (beautiful cross-field flick huck to wide-open Bhagya), we took half 8-4.
Brown settled in a bit better on offense in the second half, with some great catches in the second level of our zone by Paul. Both teams would go on break runs, but our first half lead was too much to make up for and we’d finish the game 15-10.
The win was a full on team effort. Every single person that showed up had a tick on the stat line, with 10 different players throwing goals and 10 different players catching goals, including the Diesel special of an Amelia to Maddie goal. Extra big shoutout to our ladies who very much limited the most dangerous player in league, Natalie, to only 2 scores.