Sunday: Gust of the Irish

As in wind, as in it was vicious. We were lucky to win all three flips on the day, but it turned out we didn't need to!

1st game against Air Force wasn't near the beating we took last year to this team. We had all the throws, made the big plays, and held Air Force to down-wind scores to manage a 10-5 win. I think we started on serve and broke upwind twice to cruise to our next game against Pitt-Johnstown. Big plays were Billy's huge layout 'd' to halt an upwind AFU scoring attempt and great work by our cup to keep them contained on defense.

Pitt-Johnstown just came off a big win against Rutgers (who beat us 11-10 on Universe at UDel's SHOWdown), so we weren't exactly sure what to expect here. They came out firing with hucks upwind while the wind was faltering, but didn't manage to connect on any. We were flawless downwind again and sprinted to an early lead in the first half 8-3. The second half was much of the same... The one point that really sticks out in my mind is when I finally took a chance to sit down. Jared started with the disc going upwind and P-J had gone to a man defense for some reason. We proved that we were ready to run with them and worked it quickly and methodically downfield through Jim, Jared, and Pete's handles and quick slashes by Still's and Lemon. I think the best part of that sequence was the give 'n' go tosses by those guys. They attacked on in cuts and flipped the disc back to a cutting handler just as quickly as they'd received it. Overall we had great disc movement in this game when the wind allowed. We settled for a 15-6 win.

After a bit of a break, Vermont strolled over to meet us in the final. This team was huge compared to ours. They had somewhere close to 30 guys which is just intimidating in itself. Our 14 played on unphased, although after the game we heard a few "wow, I really thought those guys were going to crush us" comments from some of the younger guys. Using the sidelines effectively was definitely one of their strong points. All day I heard "90, 45, 25, 90!" from the bench players, telling their mark where best to trap our handles. We still managed to break upwind a few times in this game and held them to just one. Their zone offense was led by a bunch of quick guys with decent throws and fast swings. That's obviously how to run a good zone 'o', but these guys did it much better than we did, I thought. After the cap was blown, we pulled to a 10-5 victory and they pulled out on their way to High Tide in Savannah, GA. An ok way to end our Spring Break, and a pretty good way to begin theirs.